From the Archives: What do you do with an Idea?

Originally published: May 21, 2015

“In the light of the great value placed upon creativity, a stranger to our planet might infer that it is rare indeed. Yet nearly all of the characteristics of the creative mind are present in young children! The child explores the environment, coins words, synthesizes phrases. S/he relishes surprises and copes with a challenge. S/he daydreams, discovers, asks questions unceasingly. Her perceptions are fresh, strictly his own."

Marilyn Ferguson, The Brain Revolution, 1973

My son, Todd, gave me a precious Mother's Day gift.  What Do You Do With An Idea is a book written for the child within each of us.  Kobi Yamada, writer, and Mae Besom, illustrator have produced a wonderful book revealing how ideas come into your life, sometimes invited, sometimes not. 

Where did it come from? Why is it here? What do you do with an idea?

It is true, at least for me, that my best ideas come to me. They do not come from me. It is true that in the beginning, they seem to settle within my head as a tiny seed.  They demand attention. 

I can act like it doesn't belong to me, I can walk away from it.  But it follows me. 

The authors unfold the story as the idea grows and demands attention and stewardship. 

But there was something magical about my idea. I had to admit, I felt better and happier when it was around.

It wanted food. It wanted to play. Actually, it wanted a lot of attention!

It grew bigger and we became friends.

And finally, the idea gets accepted and a friendship evolves...

Then, one day something amazing happened. My idea changed right before my eyes. It spread its wings, took flight, and burst into the sky!

I don't know how to describe it, but it went from being here to being everywhere. It wasn't just a part of me anymore...it was now part of everything!

And then, I realized what you do with an idea... you change the world!

A colleague and I once set out to write a book about where ideas come from. We covered our white walls with potential content. Our thoughts were filled with inspiration and ideas that showed up in this book. But, they were far more complex and convoluted.  Now reading this book, I think we missed the mark by not asking the idea for the book to lead us, to write the story. Instead we tried to time box it, control it, influence it with complex ideas.  We let the idea slip away.  But it didn't die; it found a new home, a new way to grow into something wonderful and precious!

In Loving Memory of Gail Taylor, Tomorrow Makers Founder and pioneering change agent

With great sadness, we share the news here that Tomorrow Makers Founder Gail Taylor passed away in her home on Sunday, November 5, 2023. You may have already seen posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, or heard through friends and colleagues. Below is her full obituary.

Gail Goodman Taylor, July 15, 1939 - November 5, 2023
Born to Conrad E. Goodman and Marianna Goodman (Blucher), Gail grew up in a Kansas suburb of Kansas City along with an older and younger brother, Bill and Cary. She graduated from Shawnee Mission High School in 1957 before attending the University of Kansas where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Education in 1961. After college, Gail married Thomas Miller Johnston, a high school classmate, and they settled down in the Kansas City suburb of Fairway. Together they had two children, Jeffrey Conrad (b. 1966) and William Todd (b. 1967).

Gail began her career teaching first and second grade in area public schools, followed by a few years teaching in a Montessori school before deciding to take a different path. In 1972, she co-founded The Learning Exchange, a pioneering educational nonprofit that brought teachers, administrators, business leaders, and students together to collaboratively design and deliver project-based learning programs that were then offered to area school districts. Courses such as Economics in Action, The Unseen City, Art in Education, Cardboard Carpentry, and Exchange City were among the offerings that engaged twenty-two school districts, four private schools, three universities, and thousands of citizens over Gail’s seven-year tenure. The Exchange lived on for more than 25 years, with several offspring that continue different aspects of the work today.

Gail’s and Tom’s marriage ended amicably in 1975. In 1977, Gail married Richard Craig, a.k.a., Matt Taylor, a Kansas City area designer, builder, and founder of the Renaissance Project. In 1979, the Taylors moved to Boulder, Colorado, and co-founded Taylor Associates, which would subsequently become MG Taylor Corporation. The business combined Matt’s background and expertise in architecture and design with Gail’s expertise and passion for collaborative project-based learning, resulting in a professional consulting firm that offered organizations the ability to tap typically dormant individual and collective creativity and direct it toward solving complex organizational challenges in rapidly changing business environments. Here, Gail coined the term “Group Genius” to describe the state of creativity and productivity that emerged from groups she and Matt facilitated.

Over the 1980’s and 90’s, Gail and Matt grew the business throughout the US, serving clients in education, healthcare, insurance, high tech, media and government sectors, among others. In 1996, the Taylors licensed their methodology of collaborative design to an international management consultancy and, subsequently, the “MG Taylor Method” went global. 1997 saw the publication of “Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work”, a book detailing their methodology and including extensive interviews with the Taylors, as well as clients and facilitation team members. By the late 1990’s, they had been featured in publications such as Fast Company and Fortune, with institutions such as The World Economic Forum and the Stanford Design School coming to the Taylors for help in designing environments and processes to help their constituents and students engage with greater creativity and collaboration. 

In 2002, Gail founded Tomorrow Makers, Inc., a nonprofit focused on teaching and facilitating place-based communities to learn better, more collaborative ways of working together. Around this time, she and Matt bought a home in the Northern California coastal town of Gualala, which they named “Elsewhere.” When not at Elsewhere, Gail’s work took her to such places as Switzerland, Italy, Canada and Australia, where she facilitated, taught and shared her body of knowledge with a variety of organizations and communities looking to emulate the methodology and ways of working she and Matt had pioneered.

In 2020, Gail and Matt returned to Kansas City, settling in the Commerce Tower in downtown. Though she greatly missed living nestled among mighty redwood trees and within sight of the gorgeous California coastline, she was very happy to be back in the town where she grew up and got her start in her career as teacher, entrepreneur, and community organizer. After getting involved in several new projects reminiscent of her Learning Exchange days, it felt to her, she said, that her life was coming full cycle.

Gail is survived by her husband, Matt, brother William (Bill) Goodman, her children Jeff and Todd Johnston, and two grandchildren, Owen and Connor Johnston. The family is planning a Remembrance and Celebration of Life for Gail in Kansas City in the Spring of 2024.

Tomorrow Making with Lilly Pads and Tipping Points

For several years when you visited this site, you would find our feature project: The Tomorrow Makers Game: Creating a New Operating System for Humanity. You may wonder what happened to this project.  While off to a quick and successful start, we found we did not have the energy to carry it forward. Other priorities of family and health took the upper hand. We were a bit early with the idea and funding for such outrageous proposals was not available. We do not consider it a failure, however.

First, we learned many things and met many wonderful change-makers and doers. We learned more about gaming and our research took us into many previously unknown places proving both historical context, adjacent possibilities, and future potentials and possibilities. As Tomorrow Makers, we discovered others with the same goal, to co-create a new operating system that works for all life with abundance and stewardship. Indeed, these others have been growing, and maturing and are now cohering and engaging thousands of people. We feel privileged to connect, knowing that thousands upon thousands—and increasing exponentially—are now in some way or another working, playing, and living into a new operating system. One that, as it matures, will enable us humans to human well with all of life on Gaia, this place we call home. 

Alas, you might say, a few, even thousands working to create a healthy world is not enough! We are still doomed. Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t think so. Consider the lily pad metaphor. Take a pond and give it one lily pad with the plan to double the number of pads every day. From one to two to four to eight to sixteen and so on… Guess what! The day before the pond is full it is half full! We live in a world of exponential change without taking time to realize the phenomena. So while it looks hopeless, these little initiatives, this gathering of energy and action, we are in fact quickly reaching a tipping point, where the game changes and we move swiftly forward into a new world, a new world that we, tomorrow makers around the world are making initiative by initiative, lily pad, by lily pad.

Here are a few, but certainly not all groups and individuals activating initiatives bringing them alive beyond the page. They are mostly comprised of “We the people,” ordinary people, learning to reach beyond ourselves for mutual benefit of Earth and all life into a new and far-reaching paradigm.  As readers and followers of Tomorrow Makers, I am sure you will recognize many and, in fact, see yourselves here.  

SINE (Synergized Impact Network Exchange) is a global alliance of social innovators committed to large scale behavior change through collaborative learning, innovation, and unprecedented unified action.

Living Cities Earth is an interdisciplinary action research network, connecting 10,000 cities and a web of integral experts serving Gaia’s well-being.

EarthWISE Centre collaborates as wholeness coders, future creatives, evolutionary catalysts, pattern weavers, and new paradigm storytellers for a thriving planetary civilization. Together we serve as a global Collaboratory for enabling human thriving in harmony with our planet and in support of future generations. 

The Alternative is a place to re-orienate, pull the strands together and build. Feet on the ground; mind, body and spirit in the emerging possible. Here you can experience futures organising, future economies and future flourishing in the present moment, ready to converge in a town or city near you.

The Leciel Foundation offers a set of foundational values and principles beyond cultures or traditions, in service of life, that aggregate into what we call Primordial Wisdom, a sense of knowing more than a “knowledge”, that puts universal values, principles and resulting ways into action.

The Buckminster Fuller Institute honors the legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) and continue his effort to make the world work for all of life, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation.

https://www.youthxyouth.com is one of the most exciting websites that I discovered. These are very young people working together to heal our world, step up and work together across all boundaries to recreate our wondrous, collective understanding for we as humanity have to offer, should we choose to do so.

These groups have a lot of diversity of nations, cultures, ideas, and philosophies. They are learning and practicing co-creation as ordinary citizens scattered liberally around planet Earth.  It is an honor to participate in any of them. Your ideas and skills will be welcomed. Your unique difference matters to them. 

Additionally, there are individual initiatives like ecocities, organic farms, doughnut economics, city restorations, prison reforms, world peace making and keeping, changing goals in education … all to become places for humans to human well.  While scattered, they are coming together, finding each other, not to compete or swallow each other up, but to join each offering their difference. This is the greatest magic … where emergence steps through a door offering next steps, ways of togethering for a greater purpose.  

We believe, that while dollar resources are in short supply, this will not be the case much longer. Slowly, we are shifting from earning a living any way we can, making money any way we can, playing individual against community, rich against everyone else. We are all learning the art of stewardship and what it takes to restore the earth as a work of art for all life. We are working together, finding new economics, ways of helping, taking care of, and having each other’s backs. 

All this is happening while the news rolls out and over us with bad news, news of corruption, pettiness, fake news, and fears and disasters. We can’t afford to let this overwhelm us or seem like all there is. It’s not, certainly not the majority!

Tomorrow Makers is investing in you and me, we the people, on a journey creating a different operating system for and with Planet Earth. We are stewards of Gaia. -Gail