Here’s the third in a nine part series looking at the Manifesto Manifesto principles with a view to creating your own manifesto.
Manifestos are bold intentions. They don’t describe things, they declare them into existence. Take a stand, sharpen your purpose and incite the future.
Four questions to ask yourself when you sit down to start writing your manifesto relative to creating the future…
1 What’s your future look like?
One way to create the future is to start with defining what it will look like. This could be a clear sensual picture that includes what you see, feel, touch, hear, taste and smell.
2 How would you like the world to be?
Alternatively, your feel for the future may be based upon an idea. For example, take a moment and imagine a world that works…. Mmm… I bet your view of the future was different to mine. We can also create the future by defining an ideal we want to live and letting others define how that looks for them.
3 What problem do you want to solve?
A third way to create the future is to whack the nail that’s sticking out. In other words, fix the obvious problem. And, as Albert Einstein once said, ‘We can’t solve problems at the same level at which they were created.’ For example, research and practical experience shows that building more roads does not solve traffic jams. Instead, we could promote online meetings to avoid the need to travel. Think about the problem at hand and what you’d like to create as its replacement.
4 What do you want to create?
Sometimes we don’t want to solve something – we just want to create something because we can. For instance, Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest said he did it because ‘it was there’. Sometimes we don’t need a reason, we just need to do it. So what’s your ‘it’?
Work through these questions to start writing your manifesto. Share your results and/or ask questions in the comments below.
