well good morning everybody and I hope you're feeling sooo to be energized by that music and I hope you had a great evening last night and have a chance to reflect on some of the discussions yesterday and already ready for what promises to be a fantastically interesting day now the conference organizers went around and listened to the sessions yesterday heard the conversation you were having looked at the key topics that cropped up in those four panels and they spotted something very interesting which is this year one word above all else is generating a lot of
buzz I don't know if you know what that word is but the phrase that's come up over and over again which hasn't been heard in the last two years very much is disruption disruption in a technological sense disruption in a business sense and so what you're going to be doing today is picking up on that D word disruption and looking at 15 specific questions that take the conversations you had yesterday about some of the challenges and opportunities facing the shipping sector turning it into practical questions and looking for solutions and then coming back together and
talking about what the next steps are in practical terms that means that we're going to start this morning session with a keynote which I'll talk about in a minute then go into 14 15 little breakout groups that I think most of you have already signed up for looking at specific questions that you're going to get answers to spend a couple of hours brainstorming and coming up with a plan have a bit of lunch you probably need it by then and then go back and start trying to share your ideas and a collaborative forum and then
eventually work up towards a presentation towards the end of the day so the key goal of today is to move from simply discussing the challenges into putting some tangible solutions action points for collaboration on the table and very much trying to work with the idea that the wider ecosystem of the maritime industry needs to be involved in talking about these issues but before you do that we're going to have a talk to inspire you and challenge you and to focus your minds from somebody who is not involved in the world of shipping at all but
comes from much cooler trendier sunnier climate of the west coast from Palo Alto who is Jane McGonigal she is a fascinating person she originally studied as an English major she however got into gaming fairly early on and is currently based at the Institute for the future which sounds wonderfully inspiring and where she is director of game research and development which sounds as if you didn't know like some kind of justification for spending your life looking at apps and video games and doing all the things that our teenage kids do and we keep telling them to
stop doing but what she does is essentially look at how gaming which is so endemic to our world helps us to not only develop our cognitive skills and not just become more innovative but also become more collaborative it's really about taking gaming and looking at the neuroscience of gaming or if you're a teenage kid finding a way to justify spending hours on your phone but there is a point to it and Janes going to tell us why and how so Jane thank you good morning i am delighted to have been invited here today to help
warm up your creativity and imagination so that when you go off to invent the future together that you're inspired to be more creative and more innovative and i thought i would start today by sharing with you a mystery that has fascinated me for more than a decade now and I'm actually been trying to help solve this mystery and I think you will find it interesting as I do but also you will find it informative to how you try to approach your collaboration today so are you ready to hear about a mystery yes okay here we
go this is the mystery right here this is a quotation from the Nobel prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein and he famously said the most games are the most elevated form of Investigation now this is where the mystery begins it seems quite unusual that a scientist such as Einstein would say that games are the most elevated form of Investigation I think we might all expect him to have said physics is the most elevated form of Investigation but this quote appears many places is attributed to him often and it seems like it's something that friends and colleagues often
heard him say but there's no source for this quotation no one can find an elaboration or explanation of what he meant when he supposedly used to say this so that's the mystery why would a physicist a scientists say that games of all things something that we considered so trivial is the most elevated form of Investigation now as a game designer I've been particularly fascinated by this puzzle and let me walk you through my process of trying to help solve it here's our first clue and really the most important clue one thing we know about Albert
Einstein is that he was an avid chess player he used to play it all the time and in fact he played it so often that he would write letters to his friends and colleagues in which he would worry to them that he might be addicted to chess this is kind of interesting he would write his friends as I I've been spending so many hours playing this game and even when I'm not playing my mind is trying to solve the problems of this game I worry that I might be addicted to it and as somebody who
works in the field of contemporary gaming it's quite interesting to see that even 100 years ago someone like Einstein worried about being addicted to games I guess although many things change from the past to the future some things remain consistent what is it about chess if Einstein were such an avid player that would lead him to say something like games are the most elevated form of Investigation well let's think about chess chess is fundamentally a problem that you try to solve it's a resource management problem it's a spatial problem it's a social problem as you
try to anticipate what someone else might do is they try to manage their resources and every time you sit down to play this game you're investigating the problem you're investigating different strategies that might lead to effective solutions you are responding to someone else's strategies and so you're learning a little bit more about the game as you see their moves and their interpretation of the game and every time to different people sit down to play the game they are in a sense performing one out of many possible investigations of this problem and in fact if your
chess fan you may have heard the statistic before this is mathematically true this is not an exaggeration that there are actually more different possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe that's how complex a problem chess is if you consider every possible move first I move this pond then you move that pond that I move this pond then you move that pond there are more possible variations at how this game can be played out then there are even atoms in the universe and perhaps to a physicist such as Einstein that would have been
very interesting that the universe of games this is vast and expansive as a universe itself but what is it that makes games a particularly elevated form of Investigation may be closer to science than we would initially think well imagine hundreds of years ago when the game of chess was first invented the early players probably weren't very good at it and as more people learn the game and started to try different strategies and build a community around it they discovered new ways to play and now hundreds of years later millions of players have brought their own
point of view their own strategies their own imagination to this game as a society we have definitely leveled up our ability and understanding of this game this is actually a phenomenon that repeats itself in contemporary game culture anytime a new game is invented as the players form a community around that game and they all bring their different ideas and their different strategies and approaches and they play together they learn rapidly as a community all of the ways a game can work now this is a visual from an online game called EVE Online and this is
a map of what players are doing in this universe when the game first started this map was dark and then they started to form constellations of Investigation trying different strategies within this universe inventing different activities for themselves forming these hubs these bright sparks where lots of players were getting interested in the same type of problem and it's very intriguing I think to look at a map like this of a game space because you can see the hubs of activity the really bright stars are where a lot of players find the action to be interesting and
they're all bringing their collaboration to that problem but you also get these outliers people who are involved in maybe the problems that haven't attracted a lot of interest yet but there they are you can kind of see how they're connected to the rest of the game community when I look at this type of collective intelligence and this rapid formation of understanding deep understanding of all of the possibilities within a given universe it makes me wonder if we couldn't have gamers do this elevated investigation of something more important than a game right because if games are
d the most elevated form of investigation as Einstein suggested what are they investigating I mean games typically investigate fictional problems or imaginary worlds and while it might be interesting intellectual exercise for stimulating our creativity at the end of the day we haven't necessarily solved any real problems so I've been interested over the last decade and figuring out how to empower people who like to perform the elevated form of investigation that is gameplay whether it's chess or a video game and how to help them bring that collaboration and collective intelligence and wisdom to real problems the
problem that I've been most interested in having people solve through this form of elevate investigation is the problem of the future which is of course a problem that you have also come to this forum to help investigate now not talking about predicting the future I'm not talking about using gainful psychology and game design to help people figure out what will happen right predicting the future is not something that we encourage at the Institute for the future for two reasons one is it's practically impossible to do at any real level of granularity beyond a few weeks
or a few months the other reason is not only is it practically impossible it's also not that helpful if you are trying to accurately predict the future that means you're basically stuck with whatever you think is right now the most likely future too occur right if you want to be right about the future you have to figure out today what you think is most likely to happen and then that's it and you just wait for it to happen but what is the future you think is most likely today is not a future that you want
right what if you would prefer an alternative future in that case it's not helpful to predict the future it's preferable to do your own creation of the future this is the sign that you would see if you visited our offices at the Institute for the future in palo alto california this is our interpretation of thinking about the future instead of trying to show people what the future will be we try to give them the tools to explore all of the possibilities and then decide which future they want to help actively create and in this way
the future really is like a game just as there are more variations of the game of chess depending on what move each person makes and then what move someone else makes next more variations and their atoms in the universe there are more possible futures than there are atoms in the universe and probably more possible features and there are variations of the game of chess because every move that somebody makes in the present changes the way the game of the future will unfold so I've actually set out to make games that try to explore many different
visions of the future and allow players to see the future from massively multiple points of view so they can figure out the future that they want to make one of these games was called world without oil and I'll tell you a little bit about it so that you can imagine how this might work and perhaps how you might use this philosophy to explore the future of the global maritime industry role that oil was a collaborative simulation of a peak oil scenario so what would happen if global supply of oil exceeded global demand and we first
ran this game in the year two thousand seven when this was considered a plausible future I think today we're less worried about it than we were then we set up a social now work for this game and we asked individuals if they would volunteer six weeks of their lives to live as if this peak oil scenario were real they volunteered they signed up on the site they told us where they lived and we would give them daily updates on this future scenario how much does oil cost where you are how much gas is available how
is it affecting things like shipping and transportation and then they would use social media to tell us how this peak oil scenario might affect things that they knew a lot about how it might affect their family how it might affect their neighborhood how it might affect the company they worked for or the industry that they worked within how it might affect the church they belong to they would look at every aspect of their lives and try to relay their own sense of what was possible in that particular spot of the future and then we would
relay back to them some changing game statistics things on quality of life and social impact so they could have a sense of how their moves that they were making in the future might lead to other changes at the end of the game we had collected thousands of ideas the first time we ran the game we had 2,000 people play this over a six-week period we've had more than a million people play it in the earth sense but that first game play they had examined the future from many angles that if you had brought experts into
a room to ask them what the future of peak oil would look like they exported from angles that experts one has thought about they were thinking about dating for example romantic relationships in a peak oil environment because that was something that matters to them they were thinking about health care in a peak oil environment they were thinking about immigration policy in a peak oil environment they were thinking about real estate they were thinking about parenting we had race car enthusiasts form a cluster called Zoom Zoom without oil wondering about the future of auto racing in
a world without oil and what was really wonderful about this project is that it allowed us to see the future from angles that really no expert would ever think to look something strange happened after the first time we ran this game even though we don't try to predict the future as he Institute for the future a year later gas prices in the United States actually hit the prices we had forecast in our game so what represented a crisis in our game became a crisis in reality this is 2008 and you may remember there were they
were dramatic rise in oil prices globally in the United States was very hard hit during this time we were able to follow up with our players to see well one did they actually do in real life the things that they had predicted that they would do and to look at trends of what was happening in the world and see if the way the future was playing out if we had seen any clues of that in their own gameplay and we found indeed that people who played our game did seem to be adopting the strategies that
they had imagined in this fictional world and I would say that's not necessarily because they had accurately predicted the future but rather that by thinking about the future before it happened and by playing out the different possibilities they had actually crafted for themselves a new set of tools and a new set of strategies that they were able to think of immediately and be more respect flexible and responsive during this crisis they also predicted accurately even though we don't try to predict they had accurately predicted trends that the experts had missed so there was a wonderful
new york times article that came out and the sort of peak of this 2008 oil crisis in the US where experts were quoted as saying no one could have possibly predicted or believed that people living in cities like Atlanta or Denver would stop driving and try to use public transportation and they were having shortages and outages and riding around public transportation which seemed ludicrous to experts to imagine that people would be rioting to get on a bus in a city where public transportation was not widely used but if you go back and look at what
the players of our game in those areas had predicted that was the first thing that they discovered they started predicting exactly what happened so this is this is intriguing to me as as a game designer and as a futurist and it's led me to believe that the best simulations of the future aren't based on mathematical models or powered by supercomputers I mean there are good reasons to use those forms you're trying to predict the effects of climate change for example of course you want to use mathematical models and supercomputers but if you want to figure
out what will people do if this feature comes to pass if the climate change that our super computers are predicting happens how will individuals respond at a family level at a community level at a national level asking ordinary people what they would do is extremely effective it's just like a giant chess game where everyone can come to the game board and tell you here's the move that I would make and then here's the next move I would make and you can follow this out to really imagine a future in a much broader context so I
want to encourage you when you break out into your collaborative sessions today to not just think of solutions but to really think about what is right if somebody has a solution how would you your company your community respond to that solution and then allow the first person to have a response to that and really try to play these ideas out so that you can get the long view the long game of what this feature might look like now as somebody who makes games that require people to think about the future I've been really interested in
figuring out how do we help people be better at imagining the future because it can be very difficult to imagine a world that's different from today and so my area of research over the past few years has really focused on the neuroscience of futures thinking what regions of the brain have to be warmed up for you to be able to effectively imagine features that don't exist today and there's actually more research in this area then you might have realized there are a lot of research labs around the world this was taken at Stanford University near
the institute for the future and where I teach and there was a lot of research looking at which regions of the brain can be strengthened so that people become more effective at imagining things that have never existed and so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to have you do three things that will warm up the regions of your brain that we know are absolutely fundamentally required to be able to imagine a feature that's different than today the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to teach you how to do two
things I'm going to teach you how to predict the past and how to imagine how to remember the future now this is not how we ordinarily do things right normally people try to predict the future and they try to remember the past but you can actually do it in the opposite order it turns out to be very practical tool to kind of give you an idea of what i mean by predicting the past and remembering the future you can think of this line from Lewis Carroll's story through the looking glass the White Queen was lamenting
to Alice it's a poor sort of memory that only works backward so White Queen wanted a memory that could work backwards and forwards and Lewis Carroll was not a neuroscientist but it turns out that there is a form of memory that works backwards and forwards and let me tell you about it it's called counterfactual memory and here's how it works you think about the past the past that actually happened and you imagine that if instead of doing X you had done why you think about some decision you made or some action you took very specific
and concrete action or decision and then you imagine that you would made a different decision or taken a different action and then you allow your brain to wonder how would things have turned out differently this is a way of predicting the past you're predicting how the past would have been different if you take a different action and scientists have put people in fMRI machines to study the pattern of blood flow in their brains when they do this activity and they found that there are three regions of the brain that light up when you try to
imagine how the past could have been different the first is a region of the brain associated with memory and simulation you can think of this as like the movie in your mind or the GPS navigation in your mind this is a part of your brain that tries to visualize the world and give you a 3d simulation of what's happening around you okay so when you try to predict the past you're forming this 3d rendering of that pass in your mind the second part of the brain that activates is the mentalizing region this is the part
of the brain that allows you to try to get inside someone else's mind this is a part of the brain we use when we play games frequently because we're trying to predict what the other player will do next so we can outthink them when this part of the brain is activated it allows you to put yourself in someone else shoes and try to effectively understand what they're thinking and feeling so that you can anticipate the actions that they might take the third part of the brain that activates when we try to predict the past is
performance monitoring when your brain is engaged in performance monitoring it's looking for opportunities for action that align with your goals they're kind of constantly scanning the environment for moments when you can do something that will help you achieve one of your goals we do this all the time but sometimes we find it easier to spot these and others and when this part of the brain is activated that's the case when we're trying to predict the past it's helpful to have these regions activated in terms of mentalizing we're trying to figure out if I took this
action what would other people do right so we have to mentalize how the world might have played out differently based on other people's reactions to our actions and in terms of performance monitoring we're trying to figure out if I done things differently how would I have aligned with my goals in that case you're probably wondering why do we have fMRI images of people imagining how the past might have played out differently there's a reason why researchers and psychologists are interested in this it turns out that it's a fairly effective treatment for depression that when people
think about actions they took in the past decisions I made in the past and imagine how things might have turned out differently they feel more empowered today because they realize that the actions that they take and the decisions that they make actually make a difference in how their lives or the lives of others turns out researchers and creativity are also interested in this habit of imagining how the past might have played out differently because immediately after you predict the past you experience a boost creativity and it's easy to understand why this might be if you
think about what's happening when you're trying to predict the past your brain is reaching for reality that never happened you're required to invent it and these regions of the brain that allow you to invent something that never happened in the past are the same regions of the brain that allow you to invent something that never happened for the future so I'd like to try this together and here are some examples of counterfactual questions that can be practiced habitually to activate these regions of the brain if I hadn't moved what if I hadn't moved and I
were still living someplace or you once lived what if I take in that job that I turned down what if I've been allowed to choose my own first name that's kind of interesting one and here's the 1 i'd like to try now together and we're going to do three of these mental thought experiments together you don't have to say anything out loud you don't have to reveal what you're thinking but I'm going to ask you to stand up when you have a thought in your mind that addresses each of these thought experiments so the thought
experiment going to do right now and literally this may take you only a few seconds or longer to imagine what if you had gone to the airport this morning instead of coming to my session and you would decided to get on a plane and go somewhere anywhere you might have gone other than come here I want you to imagine yourself having done that this morning as soon as you are able to visualize yourself doing that and you know what plane you got on and where you were going I'd like you to stand anybody want to
shout out where you went Oh Hawaii guess okay excellent let's go okay no okay great so you can sit back down if you are stumped this throughout the rest of the day in your sessions and you would like to re-spark some of this underlying neural chemistry just go back to this question and reimagine yourself going to the airport and going somewhere different all right now I told you that this is a form of memory that works both backwards and forwards so you're wondering wait that still seems like the backwards part what about the forwards part
well there's actually a flip side to this cognitive skill and it's called counterfactual foresight and here's how it works counterfactual foresight is the process of imagining a future that you have no first-hand experience with a future that as far as you know has never happened before so if I ask you to imagine yourself eating breakfast tomorrow the same breakfast that you always eat that's not a counterfactual future right because you do that you know what that might be like a counterfactual feature is trying to imagine something that you have no concrete experience with it is
counter to the facts of your life and so you imagine yourself in this future doing something you've never done before and you try to describe it as vividly as you can and when this is practiced or taught as a cognitive habit it often follows the XYZ format so actions you previously taken our X so anything you've done run a marathon picked up your kids from school does anything you've ever done becomes an X people that you actually know and who are living so you could have a future interaction with them represent why it could be
a spouse could be a neighbor could be a colleague and places you've already been so you have some first-hand experience with them are Z and what you do is you pick an X a Y and Izzy and you imagine them in a combination that you've never done before so if you have run a marathon and you have a neighbor and you have been to Copenhagen you try to imagine a situation Shin in which you were running a marathon in Copenhagen with this neighbor and as long as it's a combination of things you've never actually done
this qualifies as counterfactual imagination a counterfactual foresight now what's interesting is when you practice counterfactual foresight to things happen the first is that you rate that future is more likely this is pretty interesting every time you imagine a future that's never happened no matter how absurd it is you start to believe maybe their future is not that absurd if maybe this could really happen and that's because your brain now has a memory of this future you vividly imagined it your brain treats it like a memory and that memory is evidence that this could happen does
something I want you to think about today is you come up with intriguing visions of the future for the global maritime industry helping others imagine and remember these futures will help them believe that they're more likely it's a very powerful persuasive tool immediately after remembering a counterfactual future you also experience a burst of creativity just like trying to predict the past when you remember the future your brain is reaching for something it has no direct experience of it has to call into existence these creative details and that activates that same underlying neural chemistry so let's
do this together we're going to remember something that hasn't happened yet I'm going to we're going to do the same thing i'm going to give you an XY and z and as soon as you have in your mind a visual image of this thing happening i want you to stand up okay so x is a strenuous physical activity it could be doing jumping jacks it could be lifting someone off the ground in a bear hug it could be dancing so everybody pick a physical activity that you have done okay so you have that in your
mind why is a person that you care about who's still alive so you could have some interaction with them in the future just pick a person that you know so everybody have a person you know and Z is a favorite faraway place someplace you have actually been and we do think of place far away place that you've been and you enjoy okay now I want you to imagine yourself doing that physical activity with that person in that location if you have ever done that combination of things before you should change one and by the way
for an added impact if you can explain logically why you happen to be doing this thing with this person in that location sort of logical story of how this happened that improves the strength of the underlying neural chemistry so when you have a visual picture yourself doing these things would you just stand up this is great you guys are very good at this you're going to have a very productive day I can tell okay great sit down so we want more to try together but before we do that I just want to show you what
the fMRI imagery looks like you can see that this top row is what your brain looks like when you're trying to predict the past when you're doing a counterfactual pass the topper looks like and the counterfactual future trying to remember a feature that hasn't happened yet is what the bottom line looks like and you can see that the same regions of the brain these same three regions the mentalizing the performance monitoring and the sort of movie in my mind GPS that allows you to visualize it they all activate there's more blood flow in the top
region because it's a little bit easier for us to predict the past than it is to remember the future because we have more first-hand experience with the past but it's the same regions of the brain now one thing that's really interesting to futurists when this research started to come out at first futurists were a little bit panicked they saw this research and they thought wait a minute if we use the same regions of the brain to predict their to think about the future as we do to think about the past how will we ever be
creative or innovative because we'll be totally constrained by our experiences of the past but it turns out that that's not true it turns out that trying to remember a pass that ever happened and imagine a future that hasn't happened yet that's the neuro chemistry that is really interesting and that's the neurochemistry it's a team that is the same between both activities so in fact thinking about the past the generation of these counterfactuals it gives us a kind of flexibility in thinking about possible futures because without considering alternatives to reality without considering how the past could
have been different we must accept the past as having been inevitable and therefore the future will be inevitable it too can only turn out one way now it turns out there's one other way of thinking one other cognitive habit that you can practice that I've reached the end of my 30 minutes but I'd like to teach you this one more skill quickly to make sure your brains are adequately fired up and this anyone have a you should think you're what's one other way of thinking that might activate these same regions many of any ideas dreaming
would be a good mom no it turns out it's empathy trying to imagine what someone else is feeling if you've never felt that way yourself it turns out that empathy is actually less emotional than we thought and it's actually more creative we have to construct in our mind a feeling that we've never had occasion to feel ourselves and this is not all forms of empathy it's a particular type of empathy what's called hard empathy and let me illustrate the difference between the two easy empathy is what you feel when you notice somebody having an experience
that you can relate to and it's almost a intuitive visceral reaction you see them experience something and you start to feel the same way yourself so i'm going to show you an image that probably we would have easy apathy in relationship to a birthday boy so I think you can look at this face and probably relate to what this young person is experiencing having a wonderful birthday experience so that's easy empathy and that does not increase creativity or innovation this is this is the kind of thing in the United States where we're practicing hard empathy
some of us are on a daily basis trying to put ourselves in the minds and perspective of people who feel very differently about the extremely difficult and tumultuous presidential election that we're going through now and so these are individuals that we might have a hard time relating to hard empathy when you are able to vividly imagine feeling something that you don't actually feel and I've never felt this is the only kind of empathy that's actually related to taking future action so if you want to make a change or you want to encourage other people to
take action it has to be the hard kind of empathy to engage them and as with predicting the past and remembering the future we see that immediately after practicing hard empathy you experience a burst of creativity and that's for the same reason your brain is having to call up an experience it's never actually and so it activates the same three uh neurocircuitry so how would you practice it in daily life well this is how experts encourage you to practice it go to any news site look for a story about someone experiencing something you've never directly
experienced and then imagine yourself experiencing it this is the last exercise that will do together today I went online and I looked for a new story that I thought most of us in this room would not have had direct experience with this is a story about young women in rural India moving to big cities to chase their dreams and this is what this is part of their story two of these young girls two sisters they've come from a village so conservative that when they go out in public in their village their male cousins and uncles
create a human chain around them their big hands linked to protect them from any contact with outside men so physically they form this bubble for these young girls so what I want you to imagine is if you're a woman I want you to imagine that whenever you go out in public not in India you're still yourself but that you have to be surrounded by men men who know you who can protect your finger odd i want you to visually picture yourself moving throughout your daily life in public settings surrounded by your cousins and brothers and
men that you know and trust and if you were man i would like you to think about a woman in your life and to imagine yourself having to be part of a human chain whenever she wants to leave the house and go out in public when you have a visual imagery of you doing this in a real space and it's a real person you know you try to get a sense of what that would feel like would you please stand up this one's a little harder it is okay thank you what all three of these
activities are getting at is the underlying neuro chemistry of innovation in order to be able to create something new or make a change in the world you have to be a mad you have to be able to imagine how things could be different right and the future is a place where everything can be different but as we also see from these habits the past is a place where everything could have been different and other people's lives is a place where everything can be different I call this the triangle of what if and all three of
these skills reinforce each other every time you remember the future you get better at predicting the past every time you predict the pass you get better at empathy every time you practice hard empathy you get better at imagining the future they reinforce each other and all three of these habits have been linked in scientific studies to increase creativity invention innovation optimism social intelligence and capacity for change all of which will be wonderful things for you to bring to your collaboration today so I thank you very much for practicing those habits with me I'll leave you
with one more counterfactual that I hope will inspire you in your creativity today this is taken from Lewis Carroll as well one day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree which road do i take she asked the cat and the cat asked her where do you want to go I don't know Alice answered then the cat said it doesn't matter now this is may be slightly depressing story when you bring it to the future but it helps us understand why it's so important to treat the future
like a game space a game that can be played out in massively multiple ways in more ways than there are atoms in the universe we have to think about every possible future to imagine where the actions we take today might lead us so I like to imagine as my own counterfactual what if Lewis Carroll had been a futurist but if I had met him and been able to teach him some future thinking skills here's how I think he would have rewritten that story Alice met the cat and said which road do i take where do
you want to go with his reply to the best possible future Alice answered well that's simple to the cat you should follow the what ifs follow as many as you can it's the only way to find out what's at the end of each road so I wish you much luck in creativity today as you follow the wettest for the global maritime industry thank you very much well thank you Jane for that fabulously inspiring and challenging talk if any of your kids ask you what you've been doing in funny Copenhagen for two days when you get
back home you can tell them you've been given a justification to go forth and play games wherever you find them but seriously I mean what we've just heard suggests that if we're going to have a good debate later on today we don't just need lots of coffee we also need to get the blood flowing into the right parts of the brain and have the courage to think about the what ifs and to both reimagine the past and try and reconsider future and that's exactly what they're going to break you up into sessions now and do
and you're going to be given each or you've chosen each a tangible question to look at and try and not just debate the question but look for solutions as well to try and reimagine both the past and the future so the format is that you're going to now go into your small groups very small groups which will hopefully allow you plenty of chance to talk properly with each other and really brainstorm on specific solutions identify solutions you've all got workspaces assigned to your selected topic if you're unsure for any reason about which group you're in
go and have a look at the board the workspace is over that way I should all the workspaces over that way I should remind you once again that although these sessions are on the record in that other room in your workspaces you are in Chatham House Rules so don't feel scared about saying whatever you think go ahead and do the what ifs with complete freedom without worrying about anyone taking down notes etc etc and after discussing these issues for a couple of hours you're then going to be given some lunch and a chance to share
your ideas and groups if you don't quite know what's going to happen next don't worry because they'll be plenty of people from the conference organizers who will be there to tell you what to do but the key thing right now is to go and find your particular group get your brain working in raised some what-ifs and have fun and go and play some of your own games so thank you
