Angus Jenkinson MA (Oxon) FCIM FIDM FRSA MCybSoc mASD ARPS chairs a creative agency, is a design elder of a leading CX community platform, director of the independent research centre at Thinking.institute and lead Thinking Partner. With experience as entrepreneur, adviser, designer, professor of integrated marketing, and company chair, his deep transdisciplinary skills and shared toolsets have made a significant and ongoing difference to countless companies and people. This experience helps leaders take a grip, solve problems and run healthy organisations. Key areas include strategy, brand & culture, CX, digital business, and light touch change & problem solving. He is author or co-author of 3 books: Valuing Your Customers, Liquidity: Flowing Forms in Water and Money, and From Stress to Serenity, as well as many papers, chapters and cases. He is writing, or co-writing The Little Book of Big Identity, Identity: The life of organisations, Ecologic, and Designing Change: Organisational futures.
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– 4 free hours anywhere. What would you do?
Head off with my camera into nature or society. Spent hours seeing curious lovely spaces at Sissinghurst in the rain yesterday.
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– What is your most important project for the world?
Clarity about organisations and their uniqueness and living identity. This offers a way for organisations to be more alive and more in tune with their people, customers and the planetary ecology.
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– Who is your most inspirational human thinker?
Would like Plato and Aristotle but that’s cheating. So Aristotle. It is not (just) that he gripped the European mind for two millennia across many fields. It is that his thinking is alive. He took hold of the universe and tugged. And today, he is if anything becoming more relevant.
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– What is your favourite scientific concept?
Metamorphosis. Egg to butterfly. Different species of dog or mammal. Living forms transform in creative ways that have wholeness, integrity and coherence. Brilliantly useful. Think of innovations, organisation strategy and change. It informs our service approach.
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– Which symbol in the world is most significant to you?
⊙ is the symbol for gold, for the sun, for fractal recursion (repeating patterns inside a whole), and for ‘the individual’, who is always situated in her own centre and social circle.
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– Who is your favourite artist?
There are so many. Picasso was radically creative. He could sketch brilliantly, turn bicycle parts into a bull, change how we saw, and conveyed beauty and pain intensely.
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– What is your most memorable childhood experience?
In Africa, where I grew up, I was explaining camouflage to my little sister and pointed into the bush and said, “There might be a buck there.” And one magically appeared along the line of my pointing finger.
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– What is your most treasured possession?
A trillion dollar note from Zimbabwe. Seriously, my pen. I still like writing.
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– What single idea could most benefit the world future if taken up?
Love. I don’t mean just sentimentally or ethically, but practically. Companies and societies could run on love. Maturana is very good on love’s centrality to life, evolutionary biology and intelligence. Loved brands and cultures thrive.