I was at the TED Global conference in Oxford last week. Now, I’d love to be able to summarise the experience in a short post but I’m not sure that I can achieve that. Four days of virtually back-to-back talks, each limited to 18 minutes, on subjects as diverse as nuclear physics, arctic swimming, bio-mimicry, organised crime, neuroscience and human evolution would be difficult, perhaps even trite, to try to reconcile into just a few words. So I’ll just say this: it was astounding.
TED’s wonderfully generous stated purpose is to spread ideas. And it does this with such abundance that even the most closed of minds must leave feeling enriched. Whilst TED, in itself, doesn’t attempt to solve problems or draw conclusions, it’s difficult to ignore the inner calling to do so that it inspires. For sure, I will be attempting to answer that call in the weeks and months that come. I hope, indeed I commit, that it will influence my work profoundly. Please feel free to check up on me to make sure I keep that promise.
If you’re not familiar with the concept, or if you want to see some of the talks that I saw, then go to www.ted.com because it’s a phenomenon that you can share in online. I strongly recommend that you do.
