--- title: "Creativity Loves Difference" episode: 206 date: 2026-04-23 guest: "Fredrik Härén" canonical: https://inclusionbites.co.uk/podcast/206-creativity-loves-difference audio: https://cdn.seech.uk/podcast/episodes/ibs-206/audio.mp3 --- # Creativity Loves Difference In this episode of The Inclusion Bites Podcast, Joanne Lockwood speaks with Fredrik Härén about how difference fuels creativity, innovation and better problem-solving. The conversation ranges from cross-cultural travel and multicultural parenting to the value of questioning inherited assumptions and making up your own rules. Fredrik shares stories from living across Asia, returning to Sweden, and noticing how being outside his own cultural defaults helped him see more possibilities. He argues that curiosity comes before knowledge, that openness to other ways of doing things expands thinking, and that creativity is often less about self-expression in the abstract and more about understanding who you are at a deeper level. The discussion also explores how communities of interest connect people across borders, why administrative systems can stifle creativity, and how technology and AI can remove low-value work. The episode closes with a call to look beyond local habits, learn from other cultures and remain open to better ideas wherever they come from. ## Chapters - 00:00 — Introductions and Welcome - 01:30 — Inclusion Bites: Spark Change - 05:58 — Creativity as Diversity Reflection - 07:14 — Alone and Adapting in China - 09:49 — Parenting Across Cultures - 14:34 — Understanding Non-Verbal Communication - 17:03 — Heimskir: Viking Moron Origins - 19:37 — Tasting Delicacies Worldwide - 25:36 — Encouraging Open-Minded Creativity - 27:17 — Discovering Your Inner Theme - 30:04 — Child-Led Learning Through Interests - 33:40 — AI-Generated Podcast Songs - 37:18 — Seeing the Forest Differently - 41:58 — Global Connection Through Speaking - 43:32 — Technology Expands Our Worldview - 46:57 — Human Struggle to Adopt Innovations - 50:34 — Sweden Airport Immigration Queue Complaints - 52:24 — Streamlining Airport Staffing Inefficiencies - 55:49 — Join the Inclusion Journey ## Key takeaways - The vital link between diversity of thought and creativity as a driver for problem solving and innovation. - How curiosity acts as the prelude to knowledge and a catalyst for expanding one’s creative boundaries. - The importance of questioning assumptions and making deliberate choices outside cultural norms to foster genuine self-understanding. - Parenting and leadership lessons drawn from cross-cultural families and unexpected life encounters, reframing the value of perspective. - The role of global connectivity in building professional affinity communities and evolving human identity beyond national or tribal boundaries. - Actionable examples of learning from other cultures and industries, highlighting why proactive idea adoption is key to growth and relevance. - How the reluctance to change and entrenched administration stifles creativity—and practical ways to sidestep these barriers for greater inclusion. ## FAQs ### What is the main theme of this episode? The central topic explored is the relationship between creativity and diversity. Fredrik Haren and Joanne Lockwood discuss how creativity thrives in environments where difference is welcomed and how diverse perspectives are essential for innovation. --- ### Why is diversity considered fundamental to creativity? According to Fredrik Haren, creativity inherently means doing things differently and better. When everyone thinks alike, creativity stagnates; diversity introduces multiple ways of solving problems, thus enriching creative outcomes. --- ### How did Fredrik Haren come to appreciate the link between creativity and diversity? During his move to China, Fredrik Haren experienced a moment of liberation—ordering food without cultural cues—which made him realise the value of approaching life free from prescribed methods. This catalysed his appreciation for diverse perspectives as a driver of creativity. --- ### Can cultural differences shape personal beliefs and practices? Absolutely. The episode highlights how parenting approaches differ greatly between cultures—such as attitudes towards discipline and respect for elders—and how questioning these norms can lead to better outcomes. The key, as Fredrik Haren notes, is embracing curiosity and being open to new methods from different cultures. --- ### What is curiosity’s role in creative problem-solving? Curiosity is described as the precursor to knowledge and innovation. Both speakers agree that being curious opens minds to learning from others, shifting from entrenched thinking to a more flexible, creative mindset. --- ### How can people overcome the reluctance to explore differences? The solution lies in self-understanding. When individuals deeply understand their own values and motivations, they become more open to innovation and less defensive of pre-existing beliefs, as discussed by Fredrik Haren. --- ## Transcript Joanne Lockwood: Welcome to Inclusion Bites, your sanctuary for bold conversations that spark change. I'm Joanne Lockwood, your guide on this journey of exploration into the heart of inclusion, belonging and societal transformation. Ever wondered what it truly takes to create a world? Remember, everyone not only belongs, but thrives. You're not alone. Join me as we uncover the unseen, challenge the status quo and share storeys that resonate deep within. Ready to dive in. Whether you're sipping your morning coffee or winding down after a long day, let's connect, reflect and inspire action together. Don't forget, you can be part of the conversation too. Reach out to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk to share your insights or to join me on the show. So adjust your earbuds and settle in. It's time to ignite the spark of inclusion with Inclusion Bites. And today is episode 206 with the title Creativity Loves Difference. And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Fredrick Harron. Fredrick is a global creativity explorer and author who has spent two decades uncovering how diverse cultures unlock human potential and fuel innovation. When I asked Frederick to describe his superpower, he said that it is seeing creativity as a global language that thrives, where every perspective is genuinely included. Hello, Frederic. Welcome to the show. Well, Fredrik Haren: hello. I'm super excited for this conversation. Yes, Joanne Lockwood: we met six, seven years ago at a Professional Speaking association conference in the uk in Coventry or somewhere. Somewhere obscure like that? Fredrik Haren: No, in Nottingham Forest. Nottingham. Nottingham Forest, that was it, Joanne Lockwood: yes. I remember your keynote. It was absolutely inspiring. And you did a deconstruction of a keynote you'd given to a, I think a 2,000 seater audience. It was a awe inspiring. No, no, Fredrik Haren: no, it was 400,000 people watching because it was cast, video cast around the world for 400,000 people. It was 10,000 people in the audience, but it was 400,000 people watching. Joanne Lockwood: Wow, that's almost like broadcast TV, isn't it? That's more than most news channels get. That's incredible. So when we first met, you were based out in the Far east, in Singapore, and you repatriated back to your home country of Sweden, is that right? Yeah, I spent. Fredrik Haren: I moved to Asia in 2005 and I moved back during the pandemic. So I had about 20 years in Asia and now we're based in the archipelago of Sweden. Joanne Lockwood: Beautiful. It's beautiful. I mean, the skies, the sun, the atmosphere. It's a better experience, isn't it? It's a special. Archipelagos Fredrik Haren: are not that common in the world, actually. So yes, it's a very special place. I love it. Yeah. And you actually own an island and that Joanne Lockwood: must be even more special. I actually own two islands to be business. Two islands, okay. Yes. I used to own three islands, but now I only own Fredrik Haren: two. But it sounds very excessive for anyone except if you live in Sweden. It's a fun fact. Sweden has 25% of all the islands in the world. We have 265,000 islands in Sweden. So if you ever dream of owning an island, it's actually quite easy to get. While in Sweden it's not easy to get the ones I have because it's extremely close to this capital. It's actually part of the capital. If you dream of an island, you buy one in a far in lake somewhere in Sweden. Only 8% of the islands in Sweden are inhibited. So 92% have no one living on them. So please come and, you know, join me as an island owner. Joanne Lockwood: So I'm guessing that creates its own problem around utilities, waste, water, electric, Internet, those kind of things. We are off grid. I've been off grid Fredrik Haren: since 1999. All our panels. I have my own fully, how do you say, confined. I like. Basically I turn my waste into compost. I make my own water. It's. It's super cool. Wow. So Joanne Lockwood: you are planning for a future, a dystopian future where you need to cut yourself off. I am very. If. Fredrik Haren: If the shit hits the fan. We are more prepared than most. Definitely. Unfortunately, island is very small, so we can't grow all our food. Otherwise we're quite self resilient. Water and energy self producing. That makes you very like independent. I like to compare it to. Joanne Lockwood: What. Do you call that? Organic, like organic milk. To make your own Fredrik Haren: energy and make your own water, it's like drinking organic milk. It's like, it's organic energy. It's very fulfilling to make your own water and energy. It just makes me feel good and happy. Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, I mean, I would imagine. And this is just me thinking off the top of my head here in this dystopian future where being off grid and being in island living is important, food is probably the easiest thing to come by. Whereas power, water, lighting, safety is probably the hardest thing to guarantee. And you're on an island, you could defend it. Fredrik Haren: Definitely. We actually moved back during the pandemic. So if you live on an island, per definition you're in quarantine from the rest of the world. So Frederic, as you said, you're a Joanne Lockwood: worked across. I don't know, you Said this bit says in the notes you worked across 75 countries. I know you are a global professional speaker and you've worked in the HR space for most of your career. So when did you put that two and two together where you realised that diversity is important, creativity, in fact, it's the essential building block of it. Yeah, I was reflecting about that a bit when I Fredrik Haren: know he's going to have this. I haven't really thought so much about the connection with diversity and creativity before. So I hope this will be a good conversation. Like you're going to get me to think out loud about things I normally haven't reflected on. So I kind of like that. I mean, from a broad philosophical point of view, creativity in itself is diversity. Right. If you think about it, because it's about doing things differently and differently in the meaning. Differently, meaning better. Right. There is this saying, when all think alike, no one thinks very much. Which I had as a quote in my first book and I just love that quote. It was one of my favourite quotes. So this idea that there are many, many different ways of doing things is. And then that is. And that is an advantage is to me what diversity is all about. That there's different ways of doing things. But you asked me what was the point? I have this one moment. Maybe one of the most decisive moments in my Life is In 2005, I left Sweden. I have a very successful career in Sweden. I was speaker of the Year in Sweden. Everything was going fine, but I guess it was a midlife crisis. I said, you know, there must be more to world to life than this. So I dropped everything I had in Sweden and I moved to China without knowing Chinese, without knowing the Chinese culture. And I became a speaker in China. But the moment happened a couple of weeks in because I didn't know a single person in Beijing. I was totally alone and I would go to. And I couldn't speak the language. I would go into a restaurant and I would order food and because I couldn't read the menu, I would just point at three things, hoping knowing that one of them I couldn't eat, but the other two I could eat and then I'll eat that. But when they served me the food they gave me because also they couldn't talk to me. They served me. They served the food and gave me a fork, a knife, a spoon, chopsticks and a Chinese spoon. And they gave me all of that because they didn't know how I wanted to eat it. And because I didn't know the dishes, I didn't know how to eat it. So for the first time in my life, I had no culture around me telling me how I was supposed to do something. So I decided how I wanted to eat this dish, no one else. And it's hard to describe. It was such a liberating feeling to not have this. This is how you do it, thing around it. And I felt so pure. I felt so myself. And I said, okay, so, Frederik, how do you think you want to eat this dish? And that's when I felt, I'm gonna be me. And I felt, if ever I hope everyone could have a moment like that and say, I just want to be me, and then you can go back into the culture again with that feeling. I had a very similar Joanne Lockwood: experience. I worked in Zurich for a while, and my German is minimalistic. And like you, I was eating out. Okay. I was with a group of friends. I wasn't on my own. And we were probably quite lucky that in Switzerland, most people speak a bit of English anyway. But I was ordering off the menu and I had this, you know, you could think about pork, chicken, beef, you know, the main food animals, if you like. I remember ordering pork and what I thought was pork, and in came this pig trotter, complete with the trotter and the whole bottom of the leg. I looked at it and thought, yeah, it's pork pick, not as we know it. So I know exactly what I mean. You're ordering stuff by what you think and guessing and pointing and think, now what do I do with this? So I learned pretty quickly that chicken was probably safest. Or veal. Yeah, yeah. I ate a lot of veal and Zurich. But, yeah, no, that's fascinating. It's almost like we hear this Storey about, how do you explain something to a Martian who has no concept of anything to do with the Earth? How do you explain something to somebody? And that must be a real novelty, not having any connection to what you're ordering or what you're doing. Yeah. But the other part Fredrik Haren: is also that the fact that maybe the way you think things should be done is wrong. So the other aspect of this was because I married a Filipina, so I'm from Sweden and she's from the Philippines, and we lived in Singapore and then we had kids. And then the question became, so how are we going to raise the kids? Because if I married a Swedish person and lived in Sweden, we would raise them Swedish. I mean, no discussion. But now we had to talk about it. Are we doing Swedish way or Filipino way? Because they are very different ways of raising children. For example, in Sweden, we do not hit our kids. I was never hit, not once by my parents. And we were the first country in the world to make it illegal to hit children. And in the Philippines it's technically illegal to hit kids, but almost everyone does it and my wife was beaten as a kid. So now we have children. Are we going to hit them or are we not going to hit them? Right. And now we have. We can't just say, let's do like we normally do. We have to argue for our point of view and we have to decide one of them. And in this case, we decided not to hit them. She was the first person in her family ever to not hit her children. On the other hand, in the Philippines they have respect for old people. In Sweden, we don't really have that. We've lost that. So we took the best from the Philippines. Now, the. The point here is that every little aspect of parenting, we had to question it and say, is this really the best way to do it or is there, apparently there's another way of doing it, or there's a third way of doing it, which is a Singaporean way. And when you start to think like that, you realise, wait a minute, there are hundreds and hundreds of different ways to raise a child and I should take the best of them. So it's another way of getting you to realise that what you think is the way to do it is not the one. It's such a liberating feeling when you get rid of that weight on your shoulder, saying, this is how things are supposed to be. Yeah, you see it in our modern connected Joanne Lockwood: Facebook, social media world. Everyone has an opinion. So it's very easy to crowdsource different views, isn't it? It's trying to make sense of some of those views and also being open to listening to those perspectives is the hard bit. Because we all want to be right. We all want to have our own opinions, don't we? Fredrik Haren: Yeah, exactly. No, it's very hard. To be able to change your opinion, I think is a sign of intelligence, actually. Or not Joanne Lockwood: be wedded to it in the first place is the hard thing, isn't it? It's being able to change it must mean you're open to it not being right in the first place. But we get invested in being right a lot of the time. Fredrik Haren: Yes. And that is, to me, that's curiosity. To be curious about other people, other ways there might be a curiosity is the one thing that gives you the open mindedness and then open mindedness give you the ability to change. So the key is actually curiosity. Yeah. We got a new Joanne Lockwood: dog, a puppy, about three, four months ago. And it's taught me a whole new perspective on parenting, leadership, everything. Because you have to start with a rule. The puppy doesn't know any different. The puppy is just a puppy. Yeah. So if it's doing something you don't want it to do, it's because you haven't set the environment to prevent the puppy doing something you didn't want it to do. It's an excellent lesson in personal accountability and patience and understanding that you go, yep, my fault. Yep, my fault. You bit me. That was my fault. And the puppy is never vindictive. So it's really taught me a new dynamic on humans and how we interact with each other. That, okay, I've now got to take personal accountability. What could I do differently to influence this in a different way? Yeah. And I love that because Fredrik Haren: you're not blaming the dog for biting. I mean, you're not blaming, but it's not. Blaming is not the right word. But you're taking accountability for. Yeah, what did I do? Because so that the dog bit me. I think that's a, a lot of times people should, should use that approach when they get annoyed at stuff. Yeah. And I, I can, I Joanne Lockwood: know now that our puppy will become very wired, that you can tell their brain is in that sort of reactive hyper mode. So I know at that point there, she's going to bite, going to be jumpy, she's going to be all over the place. So how do I de escalate her? And again, it's about moving from the prefrontal cortex back here to the logical thinking. So you calm her down. Don't try and interact with emotion until she's in the right place. And it's typical human lessons. We talk about all the time about our brains and how we have to connect with people. She is definitely teaching me in a different plane. And I recommend anybody who's listened to get a puppy if you want to understand human interactions better. And also because they do not speak and we also have a Fredrik Haren: dog. The whole idea of being able to read is a body language. It's all, it all. It's so much body language and energy. You have to learn how to sense energy. Yeah. And just be Joanne Lockwood: aware. Please don't talk about, talk about my puppy for the whole episode. But when she needs to do things, she wants feeding, she wants water, she wants to go outside. She has a way now of just sitting there looking at you and you go, and you've got to pick up on that body language because if you wait for it to say, tap you on the shoulder and say, oh, yeah, I need to go outside. She's never, it's never going to happen. But she will, she now, she's now learned. So it's, it's a fascinating lesson in just connecting with a culture that you've got no common language on. Fredrik Haren: Yeah, exactly. Which is the same kind of way when you travel to a country where you don't speak the language. You do the same thing, you need to observe the cues. But yeah, as I said earlier, the struggle here Joanne Lockwood: is trying to get people to be open to that opportunity to learn more and not want to bring their. We see this, tourists go to a country and want to eat their local food wherever they travel and it's. They're not willing to explore something, oh, I couldn't eat octopus or I couldn't eat this or I couldn't eat that. Oh, and people get really fixated on. They want to, they actually just want to, they want to be somewhere else but with a micro part of home with them, don't they? Fredrik Haren: Yeah, I mean, yeah, there are a lot of Chinese restaurants right next to the Eiffel Tower. Yes, yeah, yeah. And Joanne Lockwood: I remember travelling with my parents in law and they're very much a traditional English roast beef, Yorkshire pudding type family and that's what they were looking for. So you miss out on all the culture and the diverse foods and the opportunity to explore things. Yeah, Fredrik Haren: some people are just like that. I have a friend who has a friend who, he hasn't tried any new food since he was 15. He said, When I was 15 I knew what food I liked and what I didn't like. And since then that's. He only eats the food that he had tried and liked before at the age of 15. So there you go missing out. Joanne Lockwood: How does this really intersect then with the. We think about problem solving, creativity. Where is this the foundation of those. Fredrik Haren: That's why, I mean the curiosity is the antidote to, to this. Because then that's what you will say, oh, I wonder what this is. I wonder what it tastes like. Right. So if I. In Icelandic the word for curious is for witten, for means before. Witten means knowledge. So basically what they're saying is that the word curious means that which comes before knowledge. Right. So you need to be curious. If you want to expand your knowledge about the world, you first need to be curious. I think it's a very beautiful way of looking at curiosity. Yeah. But also they have. In Iceland, they have this beautiful word which I love. It's called heimskir. And heimskjr literally means moron or stupid person. And it's an old, old Viking word from like a thousand years ago. And if you were a Viking, you're supposed to sail south and steal as much as you could, you know, gold and silver and whatever. But more importantly, you're supposed to steal ideas. And you see, how do they farm in Denmark, how do they make weapons in Turkey and so on. And you take those ide and you bring it back to Iceland to your own farm. If you didn't do that, you were a heimscher. You were a moron. You're a stupid person. So this idea of leaving your home, and haim means home, it's the word for home. So basically the word etymology of the word is that the person who always stays at home becomes stupid. You need to leave. I think it's beautiful. I think it's great. I visited Iceland for Joanne Lockwood: about a week back in the 90s, and I don't know if you've obviously been there. We had this delicacy, this putrefied shark. Fredrik Haren: Yes, I have that too. Isn't that the one that's ranked one of the most disgusting foods in the world? It is, yeah. You have to drink. You have to Joanne Lockwood: drink, Brennan. When you're. When you're eating the shark, obviously the antidote, it's Brennovan. But I remember them telling the storey. Cause we were. We were there with some. Look, with some friends and they were telling the storey about this shark. Apparently they catch these sharks by mistake, I thought. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. And then you have to. You strip the fat off and you bury the shark for like six months or something. And then you hang it up for six months before it's. Before it's edible. If you. If you don't bury it and you don't hang it up, it's poisonous. There's too much urea or something in the fat. I thought, how do you discover that? How do you know that six months is the right amount of time to hang it and to bury it without killing you? Fredrik Haren: Yeah. So you talk about the curiosity from an Icelandic point of view. And they Joanne Lockwood: must. They must have done a lot of curious foresight thinking. Fredrik Haren: Yeah. Or. Or just a chance someone, you know, someone buried it because. And then suddenly forgot about it. Say, hey, wait, we found this and you had nothing else to eat. And Then you had to eat that and you didn't. There is a. There's a beautiful. Because a lot of. I've also tried it. It's disgusting, I think. But there is a museum in Malm in the south of Sweden. It's called the Museum of Disgusting Foods, something like that. And you go in there and they have an exhibition of disgusting foods from all around the world. In Sweden, we have a fermented herring, which actually tastes even worse than the Iceland one. But I went there and the funny thing with this museum is they showed you can actually taste it. So they have a tasting menu so you can taste disgusting foods from around the world. Like tiny bits of it. You have like 20 different things. You get to try just a tiny bit of each. But when before, and I tried all of it before you start tasting, they tell you that we have chosen food that in some in the culture it comes from, it is considered a delicacy. They haven't chosen food that someone has created just to be disgusting. Somewhere in the world someone finds this yummy. And it was such a big change for me to try it because when I tried all of this different things, suddenly I could enjoy it because I said someone finds this yummy. So let's assume it is. And then it became much easier to eat versus, oh, you have to try this disgusting thing from the Philippines. No, it's not. It's. This is a delicacy in the Philippines. But we find it weird. I once saw a map of eating horse and in which countries eating horse is a delicacy, in which countries eating horse is considered, you know, weird. And it's just. It's just some humans have decided it's delicacy. Some people have decided it's weird. It's. It's strange how we decide these things. I guess it depends on how Joanne Lockwood: hungry you are and how you feel natural. If someone says Fredrik Haren: horse is a delicacy and you grow up with that, you're going to think it's a delicacy. Yeah, I've seen that. I've seen a chart where you Joanne Lockwood: have all these animals in a row. And where do you draw the line? Where what is food? What is. Peter? Yeah. Different cultures will draw that line in different places. You know, a rabbit. Yeah. A mouse, A rat. A horse, a cow. So what's the difference between a horse and a cow? They're both large animals and they're both edible. We decided the horse isn't. Cow is. Fredrik Haren: But then you have all the other. You have vegetarian, pescatarian and all these other versions also within the country of or you have religious reasons for why you can't eat something or not eat something. And it's all good. Like I have, I have. My version of this is there's only two people in the world who do. Who is what I am. I'm an eatarian only me and my daughter. So what does an eatarian mean? It means I only eat meat. I eat meat, but I only eat meat from animals who kill. I don't eat vegetarian, non violent animals. So, for example, I can eat the lion because the lion eats the zebra, but I cannot eat the zebra because the zebra doesn't kill anyone, it just eats grass. So why. The moral logic here is why should I kill something that doesn't kill anything? But if something kills, I can also kill it. So I can eat most fishes and most seafood and I can basically cannot eat horse, cow, lamb, goat, a few of those. So dog, cat, absolutely fine. Joanne Lockwood: Because they kill and eat. I can eat dog and cat. I don't. I tried Fredrik Haren: dog once in North Korea, but I don't eat cat. I mean, it means I can't. I could eat someone. Some people usually say, oh, so you can eat human? I say I could eat human. I don't want. For other reasons. I don't eat humans, but I can't technically eat a vegetarian or vegan. Yeah, that's right. So I've got to become vegetarian. So Joanne Lockwood: I'm safe in Frederick's company. It's not about I have to eat animals who kill. Fredrik Haren: I'm saying I'm not going to eat animals who doesn't kill. That's the rule. Yeah, Joanne Lockwood: yeah, I've had, I've had crocodile in. I think it's in Australia. I had crocodile over there. Yeah, I've, I've had that too. It's. And the Fredrik Haren: crocodile definitely kills. Yeah, that's. That's Joanne Lockwood: really interesting. Yeah, I suppose I like the fact. That I'm the only one, but Fredrik Haren: then my daughter copied me, so now we're two. I like because it means I made up the rule for what I can and cannot eat. No, I didn't follow a book or a scripture or, or a cultural rule or something. I made up my very, very own. So most of the time you're, Joanne Lockwood: you would call yourself vegetarian. That, that has meat from a ethically sourced source in your book. Sorry, sorry, I Fredrik Haren: didn't hear you. Generally, you're generally a vegetarian, but you also Joanne Lockwood: eat fish? No, I eat chicken and I eat pork and I eat Fredrik Haren: fish and I, I Meet most animals, actually. I mean, the whole idea is that most animals kill. If you look at nature. Chickens are Joanne Lockwood: carnivorous, Are they? Or they. They kill other things, don't they? They eat worms. Okay, all right, so worm. Okay, that's good point. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Pickling worms. Yeah. Any kind of as. As long as Fredrik Haren: the animal eats another animal, it kills. And if that animal kills it should be fine with me killing it. That's the logic. Okay, yeah. Joanne Lockwood: Pigs will eat anything as well, won't they? They'll. They will. They will. They will. Fredrik Haren: Yeah. They will definitely kill to eat, but they often. They also eat. They eat all kind. They basically eat everything. Yeah, yeah, Joanne Lockwood: yeah. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. There's a logic. Whereas a horse and a cow. Horse and a cow are generally only killed by mistake. Eating a worm while they're eating the grass. Yeah. I can also eat. I could eat a non. I can Fredrik Haren: eat a vegetarian animal by mistake, which happens sometimes. Someone gives me a soup and I say, is this. This cow or pork? And they say, it's pork. And then later I find out it's beef. I don't feel bad about it. I ate it by mistake. I can eat anything by mistake. Anyone can eat something by mistake. That's the difference. But to properly say I'm going to kill to eat you, that's a very different mentality. And I like to have the peaceful mentality of not eating those peaceful animals. It gives me a lot of karma. Yeah. I think it's a great. Joanne Lockwood: It's a great rule set. I think it's brilliant. But I like it mostly Fredrik Haren: because it's a rule set I made up. No one told me that this is how you're supposed to eat. I made up my rules and then I follow that. Joanne Lockwood: Yeah. You see, my natural thinking would be that vegetarian side of animals, the meat is healthier. But that's my belief. I have no fact to prove that, right or wrong. But I guess with so much factory farming these days, what is. What is a health. What is a healthy animal these days? It's so many chemicals. Yeah. But I come back to this topic here. How do we persuade people, though, to open their minds up? Because, you know, we've had this conversation, this has been some fascinating sort of insights as to thinking differently and coming in their own rule sets. How do we get people to step back out of their beliefs into this world where they can start to be creative or in the Icelandic way, thinking about things in advance? Because we think about cultural intelligence. One of the first steps of cultural Intelligence is having the drive to want to find out more. If you don't care, you don't want to find out more, then you're never going to step forward and move into that learning space. I think it's a good Fredrik Haren: question, but I think the answer is to better understand yourself. Because the more you understand yourself, the more you then make up your own ways of looking at the world. And if you do that, per definition, you will be different. Right? You will be unique and you will do things your own way. I once, I was in Bhutan recently and I interviewed a guy in Bhutan, actually a former Minister of tourism, and he has. Because I wanted to understand how does. Let me move back because the sun is coming out. So half of my face is in. The sun is better, right? Yeah. So I was interviewing this minister of tourism in Bhutan because he's Buddhist. I wanted to understand how does he look at creativity. And he said, you people in the west, you think creativity is about expressing yourself. Like you want to understand, how can I express myself? That's the. How do you get people to express who they really are? And he said, it's the wrong. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, but creativity is not about that. Creativity is primarily about understanding who you are. And I think this is really. Joanne Lockwood: A. Very profound way of looking at creativity. Because if Fredrik Haren: creativity is, I want to understand who I really am, and if people really did that and went deeper to understand who they really are at the core, then what they do express, what they do create, will be uniquely them. Right? And I actually help people find what I call their inner theme. I've helped over 400 people do this. Like the inner theme is like your core message that is in, within you. And I like to explain to people that an inner theme is a universal message that everyone needs to hear. So everyone in the world needs to hear this message, but only you can deliver it, which means it's a unique message only you can deliver. And if everyone found their inner theme, the message that only they can deliver, but it's important that everyone needs to hear, then, then that's what we should aim for. That's true of a lot Joanne Lockwood: of things where it starts with yourself. You can't truly understand others until you truly understand who you are, what your own person, what your values are, what matters to you. And that allows us to step out of judgement sometimes. Because if I understand who I am, I'd be less willing to judge you for who you are, because I want people to respect me for who I am. We Too often don't actually analyse what our core values are, do we? Most people have no clue who they really are. Fredrik Haren: Most people have not done the work. That's my experience. And the funny thing is, even speakers and authors who do this for a living, most of them don't really fully understand who they are. And I think a lot of this is actually because we never been taught. Like when we are children and we are going to learn, that's when we are developing our sense of who we really are. At that age we are put into school and everyone is more or less being taught the same thing. So we become more similar and we become less ourselves. I love to tell the storey of my mother because my mother used to be a normal regular teacher for, I don't know, 20 years, but then she reschooled herself and became a Montessori teacher and it totally changed the way she teaches. And I love a Montessori as a concept because it gets people, the children, to develop who they really are. So do you know how Montessori works? No, I've not heard that before. No, it's like this. Like a normal teacher says, today I want the children to learn to read. So now we're going to read. So it says to the class, okay, children, we are now going to read. And then everyone reads, right? Regardless if you want to read or not. That's fun. Today we are going to read Montessori teacher is like this, goes up to the child in the morning and says, what would you like to learn today and what would you like to do today? And the child says, I want to learn about dinosaur. I want to learn about dinosaurs. The teacher says, great, here's a book about dinosaurs. So now the kid is still learning to read, but now doing that from his internal drive. I want to learn about dinosaurs. If the teacher wants to learn, teach drawing, ask the kid, what do you want to do today? The teacher says, kid says, I want to learn about dinosaurs. The teacher says, well, here's a piece of paper, why don't you draw a dinosaur? So you're still teaching what you want to teach, but now you're doing it from the driver and then you go to the next and you do that with every child in the class. And one child is drawing dinosaur, one child is reading a book about dinosaurs. One person is making a, you know, origami version of a dinosaur. All are reading about dinosaurs, but they're doing it from their perspective of what they want to learn at the moment. And you see, you do that for nine years for the child. And out comes a thinking person who has learned a lot of things and more importantly, has learned a drive about who they really are and what they want to do. And now. So the class is full of people doing different things. That's diversity. If you ever, you know, that's the real meaning of diversity. But all learning about Joanne Lockwood: dinosaurs? Well, no. All. Fredrik Haren: If the teachers, let's say, want to have an art class, then everyone will be drawing, maybe, but they will be drawing whatever they're interested in if that's what the teacher wants to do. But many times they will have one person drawing, one person reading. They will do different things in class. And the teacher just goes, now the children are super happy. You don't need to force them to read a book. They wanted to read a book. So the teacher is much less relaxed and doesn't have to focus on making sure everyone reads. Everyone is doing exactly what they want, but the teacher is just making sure that whatever they want is also aligned with what they need to learn. That also plays into the Joanne Lockwood: old adage that you haven't got time to do things. You always find time to do things you want to do or a priority in your life. Yes. If you're. If you're trying to eat that frog, you're trying to do things you don't want to do, you've got to reframe it and do it in a way that you. You enjoy doing it. So if you don't want to clean the toilet, put some music on and dance while you're cleaning the toilet. That will make it. Yeah, if you want to dance, you can do that same time. So. Yeah, I get that completely. That's. Yeah, that feeds into that. Yeah, I have a version of that. I hate to do invoicing. Fredrik Haren: That's the one thing that I really hate. And nothing can make me make invoicing fun. Not even music or something. So the only thing I hate more than that is laundry. So I would go into the laundry, laundry room, and I sit in the laundry room and do laundry. Because now my body says, it could be worse. You could be doing laundry. But now you're just doing invoicing. So it's all about tricking your mind. I have a different way of looking at invoicing. I don't call Joanne Lockwood: it invoicing. I call it printing money. That's a great approach for you. It wouldn't Fredrik Haren: work for me because I don't care about money. Money doesn't drive me. Okay. Not that I don't need it. I mean, I like to make money, but it's not the driver for me. So I could postpone it forever, but I can see how that definitely is a better way of calling it than calling it invoicing. I don't think it was admin for me. It's Joanne Lockwood: what's the objective. What you're trying to achieve with it is trying to. I like Fredrik Haren: it. Paying for my shopping Joanne Lockwood: or buying clothes. I have to do invoicing. It's a necessary frustration. But you're right, I'm not a big invoicer either. That kind of admin is tiresome. All kind of admin is tiresome. There should be as Fredrik Haren: little admin as possible in the world. If you ask me what kills creativity most, I say administration. All kind of admin rules that kills creativity more than anything else because the creative soul doesn't like to do admin. But that's why I love AI, because I could be creative. And Joanne Lockwood: the AI does a lot of the admin. It's wonderful. Fredrik Haren: That's what we should use AI to. Not to make music and paintings. No, Joanne Lockwood: I've started. In fact, what I do as a result of this podcast is I feed the transcript into AI and get it to write a song lyrics from the, from the, from the podcast. And then I take the song lyrics and I put them into a platform called SUNO and I generate, I generate a song from the podcast, which I've now got. I've started building up a library now of podcast songs generated for the lyrics. And some of them I listened to and they go, that's really good. And the lyrics are really powerful. Yeah. And it was my father, father in law's funeral last week and I, I took his eulogy, which I wrote. Well, I say I wrote ChatGPT and I co created the eulogy and I fed that into AI and said, like, write me a song. And it wrote a song and I put that into SUNO and generated a legacy sort of piece from the eulogy which I shared with the family. And everyone's, oh, that's beautiful. And it's kind of another way of taking one thing and using your creativity or my ideation and a tool to generate something else. But it's, it was my, I owned the thought process, the creativity to do that, but not the admin of actually doing the work. Fredrik Haren: Exactly. I. That's it. But that's. You could call it different from the admin. I think this is. A lot of people say, why no. Oh, it's so sad when People are not writing their own speeches at funerals, or why didn't you write your own song? But I am with you because the alternative would have been maybe a less powerful, strong or speech, or a much more stress writing the speech. At that time. No one says, no one says, when you take a camera, oh, all you did. People say, all you did was enter a prompt. No one says, all you did was press a button. When you took a picture on a photograph, that's all you do. Like, before a camera, you had to paint that picture by hand if you wanted to keep the memory. Now you just press a button. But that doesn't mean photography is not a creative art form. Of course it is. And you give a camera to a professional photographer, it gets a much more beautiful photo than if you give it to an amateur. But more importantly, both of us are not taking much more pictures, which is great. So, yeah, use AI for AI is an amazing creativity tool. If used right, it will kill your creativity. If used wrong. Joanne Lockwood: Oh, yeah. A professional photographer will be looking at light. They'll be studying the landscape, thinking, where do I stand? Where's the light falling? What time of day do I need to take this? How do I crop that? How do I frame it? What action, what expression do I want? When. So you're thinking about the entire shot and then, as you say, click. And then AI in the camera these days is doing a lot of the work for you to tidy it up. But, yeah, I mean, photography more than anything Fredrik Haren: is observing. Right. It's observing the world and seeing the picture that needs to be taken. Yeah. Like the infamous Joanne Lockwood: Tiananmen Square picture from all those times ago for the tanks. It was just that one person captured the entire mood of that event with that one picture. Just become iconic. Yeah, yeah. Fredrik Haren: I like to tell the storey I was interviewed, and he's not a photographer, he's an illustrator. But he says, I don't see myself as a painter, I see myself as an observer. I observe the world and then I paint what I see. The key here is observer. This key is not painting. The key is observing. And he asked me, he said, frederick, do you ever walk in the forest? I said, yes, of course I do. And then he said, okay. How often do you turn around? Do you walk in the forest? In nature? Joanne Lockwood: Yeah. I take my dog, we walk through. It's not going to a forest, it's a wood, a thick wood. How often do you turn around? Often, because my puppy is sometimes behind me. But not generally. No. Yeah, Fredrik Haren: good. So he's. I Said, what do you mean, how often do you turn around? And I said, I think I turn around if I hear a sound or something, like there's a reason. I said, how often do you turn around? He said, every 50 metres. Because when you walk through a forest or a wood and you turn around every 50 metres, you will see twice as much forest because every tree, every stone will look. You will see it from both sides, so you'll see twice as much. But more importantly, the animals can sense you way before you can sense them. Like a deer will sense you when you're like, I don't know, a bear can sense you two kilometres away. Right. But so they will hide when before you come, but after you pass, they know you have now passed, so they will come out. So you'll see much more animals if you turn around, which I think is a beautiful observation. So, but that, that is the work of an observer, that's you than a person who has made it a mission to observe the world. And after him, after he taught me that I'm trying to be a better observer. Joanne Lockwood: I like that. I see far more of nature with a dog because the dog flushes a lot of the wildlife out. You see more squirrels and more things leaping around and darting for cover and the dog reacts in advance. Okay, what's up there? What can you smell? What can you see? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with you. I mean, walk in the Fredrik Haren: forest without a dog and you see zero squirrels. Walk in a dog with a. Walk in the forest with a dog and you see 50 squirrels. Yeah, Joanne Lockwood: exactly. And the dog wants all of them. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, our puppy's only six months old and it remembers on our walk exactly where the squirrels are like to appear. It's almost like with excitement going, right, there's a squirrel going to be anywhere right now. Yeah. The next bit, not interested. But this one little stretch, it knows exactly that squirrels are going to be there. Fredrik Haren: We can learn from the animals to observe. Observe. Because the whole funny thing also when you observe, the ego goes away. Yeah. Joanne Lockwood: So our world we live in today is, I believe it's becoming a bit more divided. You know, we're fracture, fracturing on and polarising on issues and we're in a world where you have to be right, so you have to be wrong, you have to be left, you have to be right, you have to be this, you have to be that. It's. We're getting more and more polarised, rather more educated about the, this diversity of thought. What's Been going wrong. I don't Fredrik Haren: necessarily think that is wrong, actually. I think if. Yes, if you get polarised, it's wrong. But to have a diverse. Have a diverse. Have more diverse opinions being heard is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that people are. It's probably. It's not that people have different opinions or that more opinions are being heard or even that the opinions being heard are more extreme. The problem is that people are so stuck on not changing them that they are digging trenches and say, I don't want to hear what you're saying. I have made up my mind already. That's a bigger problem. Are we only hearing Joanne Lockwood: from the loudest voices or the voices with money? Is that also what's going on? That's a different problem. That is definitely Fredrik Haren: a problem. I think that's a bigger problem that we. Then that's not getting enough attention. Definitely. That is a big. That is a big, big problem. And I don't know how that's going to be solved. And it's polarising us Joanne Lockwood: into tribes, I think as well. Also, selling clicks, advertising revenue, selling pain is easier to sell than happiness, isn't it? Yeah. But I also think we are like. Fredrik Haren: I was recently in Mongolia. Not recently. That was right before the pandemic. I was in Mongolia and I went and lived with the nomadic tribes of. Very exotic. But on the way back, I went to a tech startup and I met with like some web designers in Mongolia, I swear to God. And I also did that in Bhutan out of coincidence. And both in Bhutan and in Mongolia, I went in, you know, it's very exotic. And I open the door, I go inside and boom, I'm. I'm not in Bhutan anymore. I'm not in Mongolia. I'm in a web design bureau. And they look. They look just like they do in Stockholm or Berlin or New San Francisco. There's a little Star wars figure on top of the computer. It's a pool table, there's a Nike cap turned upside down. They're wearing. All wearing black. It's just the same. And then I go out and boom, I'm in Shangri La again. And I realised that These guys are 100% Bhutanese, but they're also 100% web designers. And they are surf. They are. When they have some free time, they join a Facebook group, which is web design. Facebook group. And now they sit and they talk with web designers, which makes them more similar to their profession than they are to their nation. Right. So. And I love that. I don't think this is a problem. I think it's amazing that we, as a humanity, I, like you and I, we are connecting because we are both doing similar things. We're trainers or coaches or speakers. So I have a lot of my speaker friends, I have hundreds of speaker friends all over the world. My Facebook feed, I think I have like 15, 20 different languages in my Facebook feed. Thank God they introduced translation. Yes. Now I'm. So I have a level of identity that is on a global level and I follow, like, if there's. Now there's fighting in Bangladesh and I see all my Bangladesh friends posting what's happening in Bangladesh from a Bangladeshi perspective. I love that. Does that make me a little bit less Swedish? Yes, it does, but it also makes me a little bit more human. Yeah, you're right. We're becoming Joanne Lockwood: almost like special interest communities, so it doesn't matter physically where you are. We talk about affinity bias, affinity groups. It's connecting people around the world who have a similar interest in a game, in a technique, in a profession. Yeah. And I like, if you Fredrik Haren: want to be really philosophical, this is very big thought. But you think about this because people say tribes, right? Oh, we need. It's a tribal community. You can't have a global mindset because the Tribe is just 150 people strong, or whatever they're saying. And we're now seeing the antidote, like the world is closing up, becoming more local, less global. And people think this is where we're going to end up. Think so. Because what defines our worldview? This is going to be a little bit of a philosophical outlying here, but I think this is interesting. What defines our world? Like, if you're living in a tribe in Amazonas, one of those hidden tribes that never met anyone from outside their whole worldview is five kilometres outside of that village. That's all they know. They don't know about the Internet, they don't know about the moon landing, they don't know anything of that. Their whole worldview is five kilometres around the village. And because they don't have technology, then we invented technology. Like we tamed the horse and suddenly we could go 50 kilometres. And then we built the train and the telegraph and our technology made it possible for us to have a wider understanding of the world. And this technology that we're using now makes it possible for you and I to talk anywhere in the world and we can read newspapers and we can communicate and say, so now our community, for the first time in human history, it's possible to have a technology that connects Anyone, anywhere. Of course that is going to change how we look at ourselves. So from village, from tribe to village to city, to kingdom to nation to post. Nations would be like United States or the eu. And the next step is the human mindset. Of course that's going to take maybe 50 years or 100 years, and right now we're a bit confused. But in a hundred years from. Most people are going to have. Their main identity is going to be human, not nation or religion. And when that happens, that's. That's going to change so many things. Yeah. As you're talking, I was thinking that if I Joanne Lockwood: think about the community, the people I engage with, most of them are not localised and I don't. I don't feel that I need to have a local community because I've got a community of people around, as you say, around the world, different first languages, different cultures, and I feel as connected with them now as I would if they lived next door. I probably see them more often. Yeah, I interact them on LinkedIn, on Facebook and other platforms. Fredrik Haren: Yeah, exactly. But it doesn't mean you don't have to have a local community. I'm sure you have neighbours and stuff. Like, the village didn't disappear because we invented the kingdom and the kingdom or the nation, we just added a layer. I'm still Frederick, I still have my family, I still have my neighbours, I still live in Liding it, which I'm still part of Stockholm, I'm also Swede, I'm part of the eu. And then now add one layer on top of that, which is I'm also a human being and I communicate with friends all over the world. So all the other layers are still there, we just layer. But while the person in Amazonas only has 12 layers, which is family or me, family and tribe. And that's it. It stops there. Joanne Lockwood: I've met people in real life, irl, as we. As we like to say these days, irl. And the first part of the conversation is we try and work out if we've ever met in person before. And we go, I don't know. But we seem to know so much about each other, we know everything. I know we both follow each other on Facebook, so we know a lot about each other's lives and what we've been up to the last couple of years, and we probably haven't met in person for at least two or three, maybe even four years, but it doesn't matter because we're building that human connection across the world. As you say, this disparate connected technology. Yeah. Which I think is beautiful. Yeah, it is, it is. I agree with the premise of. I think when we started this is those perspectives from different cultures. Because, yes, we are globally connected, we still are heavily influenced by our own local cultures. Yes. When we bring that together, we bring different perspectives, don't we? But I think it's a bug Fredrik Haren: in the human DNA that we are not better at picking up good ideas from other people. Somewhere, someone in the world has invented a better way of doing what you're doing. And. And why are we not better at picking that up? It blows my mind that we are not better. I mean, we have Internet for 25 years, so it's not that we don't have the technology anymore. We have the technology to look what other people are doing and sometimes we even see, oh, my God, look, they're doing it better than us. And then we're still not doing it. My favourite pet peeve example right now, because I moved back to Sweden, in Singapore, they have these automatic passport reading machines at the airport, so when you arrive, you just put your passport in. Actually, in Singapore they have face recognition now, so you don't even have to do that, you just walk straight through. But in, they have all these machines, you just put your passport in, Boom, down through, no queues at all. You have it in the UK too, Right. But we don't have it in Sweden. Like, how can you be in charge of passport control in Sweden when Singapore's had that for 15 years? UK has it for 10 years or something, I don't know. And Sweden doesn't still have a single airport with a single even test machine. And I go and think, it's working. It's everywhere, it's working. It's not like a dangerous new technique. It's working everywhere. And once I, when I fly, I go, I like to ask the Swedish passport control people who are still sitting there manually looking at passports, and I say to them, you know, they have automated this in Singapore, right? Why don't we have that in Sweden? And their reply is, oh, that's cute. And then I went home and I googled it. I said, what kind of countries have automate automated patch machine reading machines? Is it just like Singapore? Highly developed countries? No. Mongolia. Mongolia has it. How can Mongolia have a, a technology that we still haven't implemented, even as a trial in Sweden? It blows my mind. Is it down to the fact that when Joanne Lockwood: technology emerges, it's easy to adopt it in a, in a culture that doesn't have a Legacy of that. Of that thing. Mobile phone. Mobile phone growth grew more quickly in countries that didn't have a decent phone network. I remember going to Hungary and some. Of the eastern countries leapfrogging, and it's definitely a thing, but Fredrik Haren: that doesn't mean, I mean, uk, you had. Every country has had manual ban, more passport controls. Every country has that. So in this case it's not the reason. The reason is that Sweden is, I don't know, so sure that what we're doing is the right way. We are not even curious to look what others are doing. I can list thing after thing after thing that someone is somewhere, usually China, but somewhere or Singapore, somewhere a country is doing something better than you are. Why don't we have also your. I mean, it's also true for your industry. Someone somewhere is doing something way more effectively than what you are doing. Why are you looking at. And just copy it, steal it. Does Sweden have a huge Joanne Lockwood: influx of people away? I mean, is it just down to the fact that Heathrow, Gatwick, for example, have tens and tens of thousands of people arriving at each hour And Singapore may be the same. Yeah, Fredrik Haren: but now you're doing the very human thing of trying to find a reason for why Sweden shouldn't have these. I'm curious. No, no, no. Do you think Sweden has less people arriving than Mongolia? I don't know. I don't know. Joanne Lockwood: Sweden probably doesn't not compare with Bulgaria. That's one logical reason for why we Fredrik Haren: haven't done it. Except this idea that, no, we know how to do things and we are not curious enough to look at. They are aware that this technology is out there, but they have said, nah, it's not for us. But is it a Joanne Lockwood: pain curiosity ratio? There's not enough pain to spark a need. No, no, no, there is pain. Don't get. No, here is Fredrik Haren: pain. There is pain because when you arrive in Sweden, especially if It's a non EU country aeroplane, there is 40 minutes or 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes queue, because they only have four people sitting there and there's like 400 people landing. And if you're not from Sweden, you have to wait for like. There's a lot. Actually, there's a lot of complaining in that queue because people are annoyed that they have to wait for so long. And of course, the Swedish passport police could do much more meaningful work than manually looking at. Manually taking a passport and then putting that they're still putting into the machine. They're just manually doing what the machine does actually not even what the machine does. They're doing what people are doing. In England, they're doing the job of putting it into machine because you're looking. In Joanne Lockwood: the camera anyway. They're doing like this. Yes, it's the same thing. They're not doing Fredrik Haren: any meaningful work. There is no reason for why it is like this, except in people's inabilities to change. That's all it is. But imagine if they did. I'm a big fan of the author Joanne Lockwood: Rutger Bregman and he would term that as a bullshit job. It's a job that has no value. Yeah, exactly. And it's also. Yeah, exactly. But it's also Fredrik Haren: a bullshit service, as in that job is actually. It's not only a bullshit job, the job itself is slowing people down. That doesn't need to be slowed down. In Singapore you wait for two minutes. In Sweden you wait for 30 or four minutes. So it's less than a bullshit job. It is meaningless and it ruins other people's lives. Probably. Joanne Lockwood: The automation is probably less prone to error. You're going to be able to spot patterns easier. You're going to. And also you can then resource the problem solving to less trained or different trained people. So you'd have an IT person or a machine support person rather than a border guard. So it's a different skill set as well, isn't it? Exactly. Or you can still have those four people, but now they Fredrik Haren: can look at. At people arriving and look for suspicious people, which they can't do now because they're looking down on passports. And in Sweden it's even more annoying because they have four people working checking airport, but then they have three people managing the queue. So you're paying the salary of seven people. These three seven people managing the queue are only here because you're so inefficient. You could save seven jobs, not four jobs. People who could do other things. I Joanne Lockwood: would have thought the EU would have insisted that these machines are coming in, aren't they? As is that not the case? I don't think EU is known for speed. No, no, it's not. But you'd like to think with all these new border restrictions and this, these new processes coming in. But you'd like to think that. But the lesson is not passport machines in Sweden, the lesson is Fredrik Haren: what thing are you doing that you shouldn't be doing? Because someone else somewhere has invented a better way of doing it and all you have to do is go and look for it. And you would save time, energy, money, whatever you would save. It's really interesting. What you're talking about here is in the Joanne Lockwood: UK we often cite Scandinavian countries as having your shit together because you do things much better than we do much this. And we should be taking more examples from Sweden. And now you're saying actually Swedish systems are stuck in the dark ages. They're not moving forward. And we're seeing those ideals. Some things we do Fredrik Haren: is great and some things that the UK does is great. Something Mongolia does and great. Something that Singapore has done is great. So the whole idea, that's the Heimsker again. The idea of going out and looking what other people are doing and feeling that is a very, very, very valuable thing. And if you don't do that, you're stupid to say it properly. Joanne Lockwood: That's a great way to end the, the conversation. If you, if you're not out there expanding your mindset using the Icelandic definition, you're stupid. You're. You're not taking advantage of, you're living in your, your one degree of separation. You're not, you're not moving out. Or if you want to be nicer, a nice Fredrik Haren: way of saying it is you're not as smart as you could be. Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, yeah. You're not, you're not crowdsourcing opportunities and ideas and then bringing them back and going. This could work for us as well. Yeah, I agree completely. Frederick. It's been fascinating. How can people get hold of you? I usually say just Google the Creativity Explorer. Fredrik Haren: Hopefully I come up or my name. That's the best way. Joanne Lockwood: LinkedIn is a good place. Sorry? LinkedIn is a very good place. Fredrik Haren: I'm quite active on LinkedIn. So just Google my name there. And then I share insights around the world about what I've learned about creativity which if it's okay, I'll also share that I just. Because we've been talking a lot about being open minded to new ideas. Right. So the book that just came out is called the World of Creativity. The subtitle is a journey across 37 countries to discover the secrets of creative minds. And the whole idea of this book is to show how people around the world approach creativity differently. So it's the same thing. Now imagine if you were open minded and curious about how other people approach creativity and now you have more tools to approach your own creativity. So that's the main lesson of that book. Excellent. So Joanne Lockwood: Frederic is F R E D R I K and Haren H A R E N. So if people are googling you looking that up and it's the World of creativity with Frederick Haron. They can find you on Facebook as well. Fantastic. Frederick, it's been amazing. Thank you so much. Hey, wonderful. Thank you. As we bring this conversation to a close, I want to express my deepest gratitude to you, our listener, for lending your ear and heart to the cause of inclusion. Today's discussion struck a chord. Consider subscribing to Inclusion Bites and become part of our ever growing community driving real change. Share this journey with friends, family and colleagues. Let's amplify the voices that matter. Got thoughts, storeys or a vision to share? I'm all ears. Reach out to joe.lockwood@cchangehappen.co.uk and let's make your voice heard. Until next time, this is Joanne Lockwood signing off with a promise to return with more enriching narratives that challenge, inspire and unite us all. Here's to fostering a more inclusive world one episode at a time. Catch you on the next bite.