fireside.rs : unlocking creative productivity by gathering humans effectively, check out my new endeavour.
Yesterday I launched into existence the brand through which a multi-year research project has been taking shape. Am not being too prescriptive with the service offerings at the moment apart to say, I’ve been curating / analysing / categorisating over a hundred ways to bring people together to be creative, share ideas freely and be productive:
“As experts in AI (analogue interaction™) we work with organisations & companies who are focused on forging a winning culture of collaboration”
After twenty years of starting in this medium, it’s a joy to accompany the launch with a podcast featuring a friend and founder of Unchatter, who exist to create deep connections through their unique events (based on PhD research in organisational belonging):
Share the newsletter on to other like-minded souls (after you subscribe yourself *emoji wink*);
Host a fireside.rs workshop (see place / dates for a no-fee chance to experience and participate in the evolving nature of this work).
So if you bring people together for any type of learning / collaborative experience, head on over to fireside.rs for a click around, and please do let me know how we can unite in unlocking creative productivity by gathering humans effectively.
“This year my family moved. The kind of move that doesn’t feel dramatic until you notice how often your body reaches for things that aren’t there anymore. Different grocery stores. Different roads. The quiet disorientation of standing in a room that hasn’t learned your style yet. Moves do that, I guess. They show you how much of your life is habit pretending to be home.” bye bye 2025 – by John Roedel – Around the Campfire
“In the decades to come, creativity will be key to doing most jobs well. In this article the authors offer a new typology that breaks creative thinking into four types: – integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same; – splitting, or seeing how things that look the same are more usefully divided into parts; – figure-ground reversal, or realizing that what is crucial is not in the foreground but in the background; and – distal thinking, which involves imagining things that are very different from the here and now. Most of us tend to think in just one of those four ways. But we can hone our ability to be creative in other dimensions. Managers need to understand both their own strengths and how to balance the types of thinking across their teams to successfully execute creative projects. And organizations can use this typology to optimize innovation across the workforce.” Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity
“Men are not so much confused as they are conflicted. They know what is required of them, but are held back by unexamined beliefs—about responsibility, misplaced loyalties, masculinity, failure, and the cost of choosing themselves. Anger often masks sadness. Guilt disguises fear. Shame convinces them that movement itself is dangerous. And anything that even hints at shame is usually on their do-not-examine list. So they distract, minimize, work harder, drink more, stay busy, mislead themselves, or just go silent. What appears as endurance is often just disconnection over time.” Why Men Know What to Do but Still Don’t Do It | Psychology Today
“He likens Solid “pods” to backpacks of data that are securely held by each individual, allowing them to choose what to share with certain people, businesses and organisations. Department of Education data could be shared with an AI tutor; medical data with a cousin, doctor and nutritionist. The Flanders government in Belgium treats data as a national utility and is already using Solid pods for its citizens. The Facebooks and Xs of the world need not join in – the new systems will be so empowering, collaborative and compassionate, he believes, that parts of today’s web will become obsolescent.” ‘It’s not too late to fix it’: internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul of the web’ | Internet | The Guardian
“The same Google search can now yield a neatly packaged “AI Overview,” a synthesized recipe stripped of voice, memory and community, delivered without a single user visit to the creator’s website. Behind the scenes, their years of work, including their page’s text, photos and storytelling, may have already been used to help train or refine the AI model. You get your lasagna, Google gets monetizable web traffic and for the most part, the person who created the recipe gets nothing. The living web shrinks further into an interface of disembodied answers, convenient but ultimately sterile.” The AI-Powered Web Is Eating Itself – NOEMA
“Relabeling the digital economy as the “metaverse” was a simple, elegant move—as well as a deeply cynical effort to rebrand already existing digital markets as the next internet—that allowed forecasts to assume an air of inevitability. Until it wasn’t. Perhaps more urgently now, the metaverse should also be understood as a dress rehearsal for today’s AI boom: The former was to succeed the mobile internet, while the latter now promises to be “more profound” than electricity or fire. Perpetually inflating definitions. A single-minded focus on profit that identifies but fails to address egregious harms. Manufactured narratives about inevitability and technological progress. Burning eyewatering sums on infrastructure for a product nobody wants. Any of this sound familiar?” The rise and fall of the metaverse: What went wrong?
“I remember the night shoot when Hagrid’s hut was set on fire. It was about 4am and freezing cold. We stood together on a grassy bank, Helena Bonham Carter and Robbie Coltrane battling behind us. Alan didn’t utter a word. I finally mustered the courage to ask him: “You all right, Alan? How you feeling?” About 10 seconds after I’d spoken he turned his head to me and replied slowly: “I’ve peaked.” He then turned his head back with the tiniest hint of a smile and a twinkle in his eye.” ‘I fell in love with him on the spot’: Alan Rickman remembered, 10 years after his death | Film | The Guardian
“Fortunately, there is plenty of scientific research that offers different ways to help you improve your mood. From making use of your anger to putting your phone to work for you, here are nine tips that we have discovered during our reporting: 1. Stop striving for perfection 2. Forge better friendships 3. Take up some social hobbies 4. Put your anger to good use 5. Count your blessings 6. Make your phone work for you 7. Embrace the dark days of winter 8. Sing to feel better 9. Find time for a nap.” Nine science-backed ways to help you feel better in 2026
Noting the adventures and insights gained in 2025 plus highlighting the intended pathway(s) for the next 365 days.
As shared previously, this past year was about valuing the reality which my ingrained principles has created.
It was also about…
RECOVERY
Without sounding dramatic, my body / spirit needed to ‘land’ and heal from the previous eighteen months which was a mess of challenges—after all, you bleed more when the knife is withdrawn.
Stasis was forced into my being after a couple bouts of ear infections and flu, then acute bronchitis (a new experience for me, and it only gets a half a star as it’s truly rubbish), with the latter laying me low for over three months.
With nearly a third of the year wiped out I took the opportunity to journal more (prompted in part by The Artists Way), and reading through the notes it was a lot to do with viewing those aforementioned negative experiences through a learning lens. In doing so they have faded in their potency and formed into unintended gifts, integrated into a more rounded world-view and a result of being (proudly) bold, because at the end of the day who wants to be mundane‽
ONE MILLION VIEWS
This astounding numerical threshold was reached early February and if you missed it, check out the How To Get One Million Views On Your TEDx Talk blog piece which might help you or someone you know who’s in the same position.
Deep gratitude to those who were generous enough to explore a collaborative relationship this year—I truly tried hard to add positive value in all my interactions and delivery for every single one of you:
It was a healthy mix of creative producing and speaker coaching via my masterclasses / workshops / consulting plus there were over a half a dozen one-to-one humans (not featured in the list above) who trusted me to aid crafting their stories with them.
Avatar Fire & Ash Wellington Dec 2025 premiere – red carpet view
Much like other hopeful things happening / I’ve noticed / participated in since my return:
WellyForge: founded by Ralph Higham with the aim to bring the tech community together in this monthly showcase evening gathering;
Goodlife Collective: a soul-filling initiative led by Freda Wells with the goal to build connection, agency, and our collective potential;
Creative Mornings, Wellington: attended a couple of these and apart from the timing it’s always good to be surrounded by curious-minded humans;
TEDxWellington: my ‘alma mater’ have plans to kick off with some studio talks next year after a quiet 2025.
So if opportunity allows I’d like to stay and contribute to the growing need for creative action in this fair city and beyond.
Which leads to my…
ATTENTION
The impressive group of HATCH 2024 humans.
Inspired by last years HATCH 20th anniversary experience, the question “what are you attending to?” has been like a thought-refrain, and has aided my understanding of where distractions have taken root.
I can’t stop my hunger for digital wonderment and it continues to feed my monthly digital breadcrumbs posts (on which I’ve had some positive feedback recently from several sources), although I find myself purposefully seeking out more creative fuel instead of the current dire news cycle.
Moving on from bothersome past conversations / experiences is more of a challenge, however, I’ve had some success by formulating competing and more compelling positive discourses / visions.
Once distractions are out of the way a juicier question reveals itself: what is your…
Personally, my spirit delights in intentionality—deliberate actions and causal intent are becoming drivers for my own imagination as I reorient the souls audaciousness into inviting new chapters.
My purpose still remains fixed:
I’m driven to enable people find and have voice.
This obviously manifests in my speaker / story coaching and all the activities around that (hoping to get a few more ‘impact courses’ sold in the coming year and do a lot more masterclasses / talks / coaching), although the creative producing side of things is morphing into daring new business plans.
The aim is to bring this spirit into my discussions (both internally and externally) and use it as fuel to drive action (in myself and others).
I’ll soon be sharing a multi-year research / thinking / iteration project around human creativity and productivity for organisations / companies and in doing so, quiet my inner disparager and tease out the wilting confidence which has been damaged from the previous years experience.
A personal example of this is my dedication to:
ASEMIC WRITING
This year I (re)discovered an artistic practice.
I have been creating calligraphic expressions of my mood for decades as throwaway doodles and scribbles.
I then discovered not only is it a artistic form but also a enchanting use of my time.
These offerings bypass expected semantic reasoning and align to the emotive range of my / your inner state(s). There is still structure although only used as a constraint in which to liberate my imagination.
For me, this practice of mark-making is intentionally post-literate and gestural in its composition, defined by a rhythmic cascade utilising the following classification:
“Asemic writing is closer to art than to writing. The word “asemic” comes from the same root as the word “semantic”, i.e., that which is a-semic has no semantic meaning. Artists who engage in asemic writing attempt to create forms that look like letters, pictographs, or other meaning-marks without themselves carrying any significance. The results can look at first glance like anything, from a foreign script to an alien crop circle to a geometric diagram to an illegible set of scribbled notes.” Via On Asemic Writing: The Art of Meaning Beyond Syntax
I have created many hundred of pieces since giving myself the permission to shake off classical communication expectations and instead trust in the process of sitting, being, creating.
What is created is an invitation to explore and allow any understanding on my / your own terms, or if not, in the attempt the success has occurred anyway.
…the aim is to cultivate a bias towards creative abundance, be deeply intentional about the conversations I have, the energy I devote to things and to whom.
So what about you my lovelies, what’s been the highlights / lowlights / lessons / intentions…?
“That Reason, Passion, answer one great aim; That true Self-love and Social are the same; That Virtue only makes our bliss below; And all our knowledge is, Ourselves to know.” An Essay On Man: Epistle IV, Alexander Pope
I was there to deliver a full days ‘purposeful storytelling’ workshop with the first year cohort of the Andrew N. Liveris Academy for Innovation and Leadership, providing the students with a learning adventure exploring the different approaches in the narrative form, with the aim of igniting a passion in the oratory plus leaving them with a bunch of approaches / experiences for future application:
“This is one of those cases where the “relationship” category here catastrophically breaks down. DK and I have done work together in many different contexts since we met in 2012 when we were both giving keynotes at the same conference. Since then, he’s brought me in to give workshops at BizDojo and a keynote and workshop at the Creative Leadership New Zealand 2018 Conference, I’ve been a participant in a couple of the TEDxWellington satellite events that he organised, and recently, we flew him over from Wellington to run a workshop for the Liveris Academy Scholars on presenting authentically.
The thing that jumps out at you about DK in all of these different settings is that he is a wonderful human being. Connection and collaboration are at the heart of everything that he does, and this animates all of his activities. The second thing is that he is a SUPERB assembler of talent. I am still friends with several of the awesome people that he pulled together for CLNZ18 – both because they’re awesome people, and also highly skilled. Finally, DK is an outstanding speaker himself. He has clearly thought through the issues around speaking at a very deep level.
The workshop that he gave for us in the Liveris Academy for Innovation & Leadership last month illustrated many of his skills. While working with a younger cohort than he normally does, DK was still able to work out how to meet them where they are at, and he designed and delivered a fantastic day for the students.
If you ever have a chance to collaborate with DK, I highly recommend taking advantage of it!” Tim Kastelle, Professor and Director, Andrew N. Liveris Academy for Innovation and Leadership, Co-Founder The Intangible Labs, Innovation Guy
Huge thanks to Tim and Kate from the program in making this happen and for the opportunity plus the students for their attention, trust and wonderful participation.
Apparently, many generative AI text spitting platforms produce content with em dashes “—“ versus just a en dash or hyphen “-“, but I’ve been using them for 20 years…
I’ve been using em dashes in my online work due to knowing the difference between punctuation and showing the difference between a range of figures or connecting two words together. It also has a better aesthetic and I’ve pre-programmed the text replacement on my Mac / iPhone so that when I double type “-“ it replaces it with “—“ (in those linked instructions even Apple uses it as a suggestion in the ‘Use smart quotes and dashes’ section):
“Automatically convert straight quotation marks to typographical (“curly”) ones, and double hyphens to em dashes (—).”
As someone who is not yet convinced of the positive impact of generative AI and don’t use it in my writings, I thought it quite ironic my online offerings (both historic and current) might be identified as such.
A deconstruction of one of the best songs on the planet (check out the Alchemy live version—you’re very welcome). Illustrated with demonstrative talent, intersecting performance and historical / lyrical context, with no jump-cut and all done in one-take. Masterful.
The Idiosyncratic Nightmare Podcast discusses and explores painting with a guest artist whilst the two interviewers paint a portrait of said guest. The five camera set up offers a unique and multi-layered evolving experience and is damn impressive. Would be wonderful to have seen the response from the guest to their portraits.
It’s taken me months to individually contact the majority my 3,100+ connections in my LinkedIn network via the direct messaging option.
After a personal opening paragraph saying hello and looking at what they are currently up to, I mention their work and / or how long it’s been and / or reminder of where we met plus ask of how I can support their endeavours. I then continue with the following reason for the message:
“Am reaching out to let you know I don’t know how long I’ll be actively using LinkedIn going forward, so if you’re not already please subscribe to my site / blog to ensure you get all the important updates from me: https://justadandak.com/blog/ -> there’s a box on the right hand side to pop your preferred email into or there’s the RSS feed to snag and add to your reader. It’s never more than a handful of posts a month plus you can unsubscribe at anytime, your data is never shared on ;-)”
Out of the folks contacted I’d say 10%, maybe 15% responded. A third of those shared support / understanding with the issues of the platform (whether it be direct experience of lack of utility / reach / use). Got about 100 new subscribers to my blog via email (no way of telling who snagged the RSS feed) and had three direct speaker coaching clients which was a nice unintended outcome.
I joined LinkedIn during 2009.
I had 15 years online under my belt by that time and that year marked 3 years into MediaSnackers, where we were championing the astonishing creativity and collaborative force social media offers through training courses / talks delivered across several continents and for / to an impressive group of clients.
I still truly believe in the magnificent power of connecting humans / ideas through online mediums plus the incredible ways it enables others to have voice. However, as exemplified by Facebook and Twitter, the corrosive strategy to hollow out of any kind of human-first approach and replace that with everything run by algorithms / data-sucking-bots illustrates the aim of commodifying attention to the degradation of it’s own usefulness (see ‘enshittification’)
For what its worth, LinkedIn has an opportunity to differentiate with the following:
remove the alorithmic or at least allow an opt-out version of the main feed, serving content only from 1st connections (they could even go further and introduce private groups where you can curate humans into topic areas which only you can see)
remove or label or have an opt-out to any AI text / image in someones feed (although being owned by Microsoft can imagine it’s a sales funnel play for Co-pilot LLM plus all of the content on the platform has already been sucked up into the database)
allow a block feature on certain words or phrases to again cut through the trend-aligned posts and content
Until then and for the time being, I’ll log in every now and again to see if anyone has left me a message or tagged me in something of interest. For the reasons shared above, LinkedIn has now been relegated to an amazingly useful modern-day-Rolodex for when I travel and need to find folks in a particular place (within my network) until such time they remove that feature also.
The first was a ‘purposeful storytelling’ presentation and Q&A with the whole third year student body of about 100 souls. After which, a self-selected group attended a two hour masterclass experience in which students presented. During the latter, we explored different critiquing and feedback techniques so they could continue to aid other peers in this arena, whilst also seeing how they can apply some of the lessons from the initial presentation in their future presentations.
DK gave a brilliant presentation to 3rd year architecture and interior design students at the School of Architecture, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington in May 2025. Following the presentation, DK gave a masterclass in public speaking/presenting to a smaller group of the students. The students got personal feedback and coaching. DK was very engaging, entertaining, and informative. He demonstrated some aspects of presenting that can’t be unseen afterwards! The students loved it and gave very positive feedback. They learned valuable techniques to bring grace, credibility, and emotional resonance to their presentations. As an experienced public speaker myself, I also got excellent value from organising and attending DK’s presentation. I will certainly be reshaping my future presentations based on what I took away from it. And I will be looking for future opportunities to bring DK back again to work with our students.”
Elrond Burrell, Program Director for Building Science, Faculty of Architecture and Design Innovation, Victoria University of Wellington
It’s a delicate balance creating presentations for an audience versus finding your own voice and expressiveness—especially if you’re early in your career—although, if one can absorb tried and tested approaches which hold attention whilst also allowing room to explore you’re own way of sharing story, then it sets one on a path of confidence and effectiveness.
As way of an example, this could simply mean unburdening slides with so much data and allowing more of a conversational tone to the work being shown—and with more space the most impactful elements such as the graphics can take center stage).
Lots of gratitude to the students for their time, attention plus to those who were brave enough to stand and speak in the masterclass.
Thanks also to Elrond and the rest of the staff for the opportunity to collaborate.
How to be impressive at public speaking by exploring the intersecting disciplines of storytelling and oratory (they are two different things).
What a wonderful experience to participate in this podcast and have such a curious human steer the conversation with superb questions, provocations and personal insights—Daniel described the episode in the following way via this LinkedIn post:
“You’re not weak. You’re not broken. You’re just wired to survive, and standing in front of people feels like a threat to that. But what if you could rewire that fear into confidence? What if your voice became your superpower, not your source of anxiety?”
A brilliant summary and invitation to watch.
Here are the show notes if you want to jump to certain topics:
0:00 The Power of Storytelling and Public Speaking
2:20 Storytelling vs. Public Speaking: Which Is More Impactful?
6:46 How to Capture and Hold Audience Attention
12:50 Avoiding Overwhelming Audiences with Data
15:12 Designing a Presentation From the Audience Perspective
17:50 Breaking Self-Imposed Limitations in Public Speaking
20:55 The Lizard Brain: Why We Fear Public Speaking
24:10 Reframing Fear as Excitement
26:26 Adapting to Different Speaking Styles
29:04 Shifting Focus from Validation to Giving Value
33:08 Grace, Credibility, and Resonance: The 3 Pillars of Great Presentations
41:28 Mastering Grace in Virtual Presentations
43:40 Tools for Engaging Online Audiences
48:20 Humanizing Data for Impactful Storytelling
50:01 Navigating Speech Creation: Scripts vs. Bullet Points
Thank you again Daniel for the opportunity to share my voice, to be part of your offering to the world and to simply spend time with you (looking forward to part two)—pure honour!
Along with my personal / professional history, am sharing here direct lived-experience strategies of how I work with others when it comes to their own oratory practice—making the case for not using scripts and how to manage nerves as well as analysing the impact of the success of my recent TEDx talk with a nice little social media rant at the end.
Thank you again Noa (and Ash from the tech side) for the opportunity to participate and for what you’re doing by creating this platform / space for others to share their stories along with your wonderful curiosity which drives the conversation in all the episodes.
