Recently, we did an exercise within our team at TED … everyone had to write their own TED Talk. Why? To ensure we understand what we’re putting speakers through, and see if we couldn’t use this as a way to improve our own processes.

It was a pretty humbling experience. Put simply, I learned a *lot*, not least that TED Talks are incredibly hard to write. But I also learned a lot about the amazing group of people I work with.

Anyhow, I worked really hard on my talk, so I’m saving a version of it here.

I love order and structure. I really, really appreciate efficiency and clarity, while I never met a process I didn’t either love or secretly wish to redesign. When I was a kid, I taught myself to sew so I could sew my name into all of my clothes so that everyone would be clear that this was my ratty Donald Duck T-shirt. I find parties difficult because I am apparently congenitally incapable of being late so I end up having to walk around the block a few times before I go in so I’m not that person, who turns up when a host is still getting dressed or trying to find ice. I merrily, happily arrive hours early at the airport, while my secret dream is to find the time to write a book about musical notation systems, because I’m utterly obsessed with their beautiful order.

And then a few years ago, something happened that shattered my well appointed world and made me realize that, while order has its uses, it’s even more powerful when combined with a philosophy of openness. I learned, just as designers often learn, that a grid and a plan and a structure can provide an excellent, critically important, even beautiful foundation, but that creativity, color and richness come when you figure out what and how to layer on top of them.

So what was that thing? Well, his name is Jack. And first, I need to give you a little back story, to explain the grand plan that ended up spectacularly not coming off. Because the plan was that my gay friend Aaron would be my sperm donor and then he’d go his way and I would merrily single Mum my way. Only, that wasn’t how it worked out at all. And I promise you this isn’t that annoying story where I say with wide eyes that meeting my child caused me to instantly experience a love unlike any other blah blah. (To be clear, that’s totally true, but that’s not what this is about.)

When Jack was one day old, he died. His little tiny lungs failed, and after he was resuscitated he ended up hooked up to a machine the size of half this room, which pumped the blood out of his body, oxygenated it and then pumped it right back in again. This went on for nine excruciating days. But while he made a full recovery, I didn’t. This experience broke me open and into tiny pieces as my foundation and the basis for everything just … crumbled. When I went into the hospital, I’d had a plan. When I left it I had no plan at all … but the thing that held me together in some imperfect form was the realization that the only way to survive when everything crashes around you is to stay calm, keep breathing, and remain open to possibility.

And in my case, possibility had two names, that of Aaron and his husband Blake. Because, while their plan had been to be loving uncle type figures to this small baby, that didn’t become their reality either. Instead, the three of us bonded over fear, we broke open over the tiny body of our not-breathing child, and, when we finally left the hospital, we left as something none of us had planned for but were somehow all open to, a family.

Now we share the responsibilities of parenting. They moved a short walk away from us, and now our lives are just as intertwined and complicated as any more traditional family’s might be. We have family dinners, family outings, family vacations, sometimes even heated family discussions as we navigate our way through this unplanned new world. We have a shared calendar and a regular routine that forms the basis for what we’re building on top of it, which is the good bit, the family we never quite intended, but remained open to.

As I watch Jack grow, supported by the love of not one, not two, but three parents, I marvel at what we’re creating together and for him, with no plan, no road map, no real clue. I’m sure all new parents feel like no one else has ever experienced anything similar, but with our family, led by two gay married dads and one straight single mum, I feel like we’re pioneers, and it feels like it’s the combination of the deeply efficient and the searingly open that brings the magic.

Because, as you all know, I haven’t given up on my inner control freak. But this newfound conviction that the blend of the structured and the flexible are the way to go has helped me in other ways too, like learning to roll with the unexpected things that happen at live events — like, say, that time I got ambushed on the TED stage by a hologram. Arguably, swearing onstage wasn’t my finest professional moment, but I’m still somewhat proud that I rolled with this experience without completely freaking out. And actually, the fact that it happened freed me up to just go ahead and ask the tough questions of the hologram in the moment, questions that people afterwards told me they’d been wondering too.

It’s also what’s convinced me to give this talk today, rather than give the other, far less personal and arguably far easier talk about musical notation systems that I will still happily bore you about if you give me half a chance. But In being open with you, in sharing my story and even, yes, my vulnerabilities, I believe that I can be a better leader of this team, while still continuing to grow and learn myself.

Life is weird, and it’s complicated, and it’s messy, and therein lies its beauty. Now, I guess I understand that the combination of order and openness provides me with the best chance to experience it all. The other good news? Now, I am sometimes even genuinely late to parties. You’re welcome.

NICU nurses aren’t angels. I told them that they were, of course. I told them as if my life depended on it, even though it was my boy who really needed them. But even then, even when all I could do was to repeat how grateful I was, how I thought they were incredible, as if somehow if I were the politest person on the planet then that would make everything different and better, I noticed their reaction, the slightly awkward shuffle and deeply sincere “thank you” as they glanced among each other and tried not to roll their eyes. They weren’t being unkind, of course, more just slightly jaded, waiting for this next set of dazed and bemused parents to catch up and settle in.

As I spent more time there, I saw the same scene unfurl over and again. The terrified parents, the shuffling, pain-racked, hormone-crazed mothers and the gray-faced, stooped but still slightly defiant dads, blinking into a new reality that hadn’t been possible only days before. A new, neon-lit terrordome, filled with tiny bodies and enormous equipment, where the line between life and death wasn’t even the breadth of a hair.

We had the sickest baby in the NICU. I’m all for awards, but this was one accolade I could have done without. And it seemed impossible when we saw the other tiny creatures lying, catatonic in their hot boxes. Ours wasn’t so tiny. He was twice the size of most of them. Yet there we were, learning a whole new language and meeting new people for whom this little life was an excellent challenge. And that’s when you realize that NICU nurses and doctors aren’t angels. They’re just people. Highly trained, incredibly skilled, often wonderful, infinitely patient people. Yet science is an art, and only some doctors are da Vinci.

And how funny and curious that this alien environment turns out to be more familiar than we laypeople could ever have imagined. Group dynamics still apply, and some professionals play better than others. The NICU’s a stage like any other, and not everyone remembers that they’re on parent cam at all times. Those who ran, giddy, when a code was sounded, a siren call beckoning them to come revive a poor baby who’d forgotten how to breathe, didn’t know that this terrified parent was watching them laugh as they sprinted down the corridor. But I was. The resident chewing gum during rounds didn’t know that I wanted to cause her bodily harm to make her shut her goddamned mouth. But I did. The nurse who scrounged a rocking chair when I could finally hold my tiny son didn’t do it for gratitude but because she thought it would be more comfortable. And it was. The doctor who spent hours answering the same questions again and again, never faltering as I continued to fail to understand how the answer could be “we just don’t know” herself didn’t know how helpful this repetition treatment was.

And none of them had any idea that the best thing of all was when they stopped showing up. When the crowds who’d throng during rounds to pore over X-rays or argue about medicines slowly thinned out as the boy got better and less interesting, leaving only the residents who had to be there and the nurses who were always there. That was the best of all. I love those nurses for being there then, and while they might not be angels, they’ll always be my heroes.

[[Note: I just found this file on my desktop. It’s dated November 7th, 2014, when we were happily home from the NICU and my son was nearly three months old. I have absolutely no recollection of writing it, but it feels right so I thought I’d put it up here.]]

Someone pointed out that it’s super ominous to have the last post on a website be “Design-related musings on a hospital stay” … dated back some years ago. Design-related or not, this apparently leads people to think you might not have made it to the here and now … So I’m happy to report that I am very much live and absolutely fine, thanks for worrying. Find me over at ideas.ted.com, where I’m working with wonderful writers and generally focusing on them — and, tbh, my beautiful baby son. Updates here few and far between but please do reach out to say hi etc. xoxo

“I’m all for NYT making gobs ‘o moola off its content. I just don’t think pay wall will accomplish this. I think it’ll do more harm than good,” wrote the journalist and author Adam L Penenberg on Twitter yesterday. At which I breathed a sigh of relief and stopped feeling quite so treacherous about my own doubts and concerns.

Once again, critics have been boxed into taking the “either/or”, “you’re either with or against us” position so beloved by cable TV news. The reality is, of course, rather more nuanced. Of course good journalism is expensive. Much reporting is dangerous and expensive. Of course journalists deserve to be paid for their labor. That doesn’t prevent the NYT proposal from being a superficial solution that doesn’t solve the problem, which is a broken business model that doesn’t work in the digital age. When the powers-that-be finally accept that the basis of their business has dissolved, and that poorly thought-through half-measures don’t come close to forging a new path of sustainable profit, well, then things might actually get interesting. Might. Instead it seems we’re in for another round of tail-chasing.

One of the interesting pieces of fallout from AOL’s acquisition of Huffington Post was the hoohah from bloggers who’d contributed for free and who now wanted a piece of the $315 million pie. Nice try. For many publications, actual writing is an afterthought. When I was an editor at BusinessWeek, all the online columnists on innovation were unpaid—and none of them were journalists. They were consultants or executives who could write off their efforts as a marketing expense. I tried very hard to ensure that their pieces weren’t obscenely self-promotional, but I can vouch for the fact that the editor/writer relationship is a lot trickier when the editor is essentially beholden to the writer’s largesse.

Now the Times is one paper that can point to its original reporting and make the case that it’s attempting not to indulge in such questionable practices. And heaven only knows we need to support smart, on-the-ground reporting and analysis of events such as, this week, Fukushima in Japan or the bombings in Libya. And sure, readers probably should be prepared to pay for this. But as NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen commented on Twitter, “ever worry about that word “should?”.” You can’t make a business on should.

Instead, executives are floundering around with rules for Twitter, rules for links in from Google (now from all search engines) and doing a good impression of people who’ve never been online before. Journalists deserve supportive protectors. Readers deserve quality content. This all seems a little tragic.

For a crazy long but totally hilarious insight into the Times’ decisions over the years, read this wonderful post by former newspaper reporter and Search Engine Land editor-in-chief, Danny Sullivan. As he writes of the leaders of the Times, “Begin weeping for them at any time.” My concern is we’ll be weeping for us all before too long.

Obviously I’m not the only person who had a shitty year in 2010. But I must say that in terms of it being both a personal and a professional humdinger, I found it pretty spectacular.

I must also confess that much of the turmoil was entirely my own fault. So perhaps I should call 2010 my Year of the Square Melon (mainly because of the photo above, shot in a Tokyo supermarket).

In July of this year, I quit Bloomberg Businessweek. I’d made it through the buyout, the layoffs, the turmoil. I think the new leadership has created a truly impressive editorial proposition. Hell, they let me write a long feature piece about design at Google. But I was also the last person left standing from a well-established team that had built an important franchise covering innovation and design. As far as I was concerned, it was only a matter of time before they realized I couldn’t do it alone.

After all, I’m not interested in design coverage that’s simply about the shiny product. For me, innovation is much more than one-dimensional. I understand a magazine’s need to have beat reporters cover everything from a company’s quarterly reports to its innovation developments. I just don’t agree that they can necessarily do both that well. Bloomberg’s priorities, reasonably, lie on the former.

And so I decided it was time for me to go, and I trotted into the sunset, wishing my former colleagues all the best as I did so. Now, I am observing innovation from a whole new angle, watching those trying to teach it to those trying to execute it. It’s hard. It’s fascinating.

Then a friend in London, Steve Price, asked me to write a short piece for an irregular magazine he produces. “So this is Christmas. What have you done?” was the theme, he said. “Well,” I replied. “If ever there were a year for me to answer that question in a vaguely interesting way, it’d be this one.”

And so I sat down to write. I imagined I’d be flippant, glib, etc. Instead, I was alarmingly super-genuine. And here’s what I wrote; my homage to 2010 and my commitment to entrepreneurship in 2011:

It was, let’s be honest, quite a year. Recession roiled, unemployment rose, currencies stuttered and the west continued its steep, inexorable decline into a mire of its own making. In the U.S., politicians bickered, turned a blind eye to the ravages of a warming world and continued to wage unwinnable war in distant lands even as the nation’s own infrastructure crumbled.

On a personal level, I found myself ensnared in a beleaguered industry filled with bewildered professionals who’d lost their passion and understanding of what they were doing, how they should do it or even why they should try. Journalists struggled, the mainstream media stumbled. Shoulders slumped, brows furrowed and all too often yet more would pack their things and go.

And yet, thank god for 2010.

It is said that there are three common responses to fear. There’s fight or flight, of course. And then there’s freeze. And that was me. For too long, I’d been in a state of suspended animation. Perhaps by keeping perfectly still I would avoid the gaze of the hatchet man making the rounds with the P45s. If I didn’t move a muscle then surely that would guarantee that I’d escape the indignity of screwing up in the worst business environment of a generation.

And yet the situation got so ludicrously intense in 2010 that the ice began to crack. That such deliberate inaction was leading directly to atrophy of the mind finally became undeniable. My fervent unwillingness to do something, anything about a working condition that was clearly untenable finally became a problem I had to deal with. And as we all know, acknowledging you’ve got a problem means you’re on the way to solving it. Accepting that this situation wasn’t going to get any better any time soon finally became an opportunity rather than a terrifying challenge of monumental proportions.

So I quit. I decided enough was enough. Enough of the nonsense. Enough of the pretense. Enough of the madness. It was time to become an active participant in my own life once more. And in July I handed in my notice, packed up my stuff and left the building with my head held high.

So that’s why I now get to tell stories of traveling around Japan, where I headed to clear my mind and where I failed to understand even a fraction of that nation’s bewitching, confusing culture. That’s why I now get to tell stories of being daubed in clown makeup in order to take on a bit part in a Badly Drawn Boy music video. That’s why I now find myself working on books, making my own deadlines and forging my own path. And that, I’m sure, is why I find myself feeling closer than ever before to those who really matter to me.

And that’s why 2010 gets to be thanked. It marked an important moment of no return. No more floundering. No more waiting for someone else to show the way. No more imagining that surely everything will be alright eventually. It will be, of course, but because I will make it so. I fear it sounds like I swallowed a self-help book, but I’m grateful for being able to recognize that we have one life, so best start living it sharpish. Yes, bills need to be paid and responsibilities have to be faced. But no more of the hamster wheel. The viable economy of all our futures will be built on the passion and talent of individuals. Time to put up and shut up. Bring it, 2011.

Thanks for visiting. Check out my home page.