After university I dreamt of becoming a journalist. Why? Because I wanted to know how people got things done. How they made it happen. As a desk researcher of the classical radio station at our national broadcast I got the chance to interview marvelous people and I heard wonderful stories about how they made their way in life.

I didn’t get the chance to bring these stories to the audience the way I wanted. So I started looking for something different.

I took some master classes in art criticism. Soon enough I found out that just being critical wouldn’t do the job. It was hard work, the discussions were great, but still it felt like it wasn’t my cup of tea.

Being critical took away a lot of energy. It made me cynical. If you want, you can criticize almost anything.

I wanted to try coming up with an alternative answer instead, try inspiring people.

Seeing what is going wrong in the world and talking about it and simply analyzing it doesn’t get you very far. It’s necessary, yet it doesn’t make the world a better place.

I began working as a copywriter in the advertising industry, a place where applied creativity is (or should be) common sense.

I discovered the blogosphere, started reading a lot about creativity, design thinking, marketing, branding and advertising.

That’s also when I became aware of my information addiction. I just had to know.

Simply because I thought that when I knew, then I would be able to see, I would be able to analyze perfectly and come up with the answers.

This addiction kept me from coming up with great ideas, from writing great stuff.

I failed to see that it was not the information that was going to give me the answers. It was me who had to challenge the information that I had, play around with the things I knew, with what came along and with that which was in front of me. I failed to see that I was still analyzing and criticizing rather than creating and designing.

Instead of being a critic and an analyst I needed to become a coach and a player. So over the last two years I have been talking and reading a lot about what creativity means, about how people make it happen (wherever they are, whatever they are doing), about how we deal with what we know and what we can do, and how we make the best of it (or not). And I have started to practice what I preach. Tossing up new ideas, challenging people and so on.

I have also given lectures about literature and madness to art students, challenging them about the way they view their world, the way they view unjustified, irrational and nonsensical behavior and thoughts. I’ve challenged them to make the most of it, to take these stories about madness as a start, as a trigger to go out and explore.

Last year I started working as a copywriter and concept developer for Big Bazart, a small agency that creates sustainable promotional campaigns for ngo’s, governmental organizations and non-profits. As a creative, my job is to help inspire people who do great things, my job is to listen to them and to help them make their plans happen, to make the valuable contributions they intend to make to society count.

It’s been two years since I’ve started to think, write and talk about the idea that our society needs to learn how to play again, that our society needs to take a different approach to design thinking.

We are still children of the Enlightenment.

We still value knowledge, analysis and criticism as the keys to wellbeing and evolution. Our education system focuses mainly on avoiding mistakes and on making you critical enough not to be fooled in this world, portraying that world as a dangerous place rather than as a place of opportunity. It’s all about getting a grip and getting in control but then again we see we cannot get control, at least not in the way the Enlightenment has promised us we would. Look at how politics, media and education – three systems basically based on criticism rather than on coaching and playing – are struggling with reality.

Being in control is not about knowing everything, not about making no mistakes. It’s about daring to make your own (or other people’s) way, to make the best out of what you have. It’s about being curious about what’s happening to you, about what’s out there. We are here to wander around. Criticism, knowledge and analysis are not bad things, but we need more to handle this world.

What I believe in is already around for ages. But we have failed to take it seriously. We have institutionalized rationalism in our politics, our beliefs, our educational systems, our media, our economy, our businesses, and even in our arts. Playfulness / creativity / design thinking (call it what you like) deserves the same chance. If we do want to make it into the next century, if we do want to make this world a great place, we will have to start valueing these ways of thinking, these other skills the way we value rationalism.

That is what I’m passionate about.

You have to live life in order to manage the art of living it. And the other way around.

Besides that, I’m quite a regular guy. I write poems, love dark fairy tale like comics and movies (Blade, Hellboy), Tim Burton, Dave McKean, Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro, Francis Bacon, Egon Schiele, Theodor Adorno (the instrumentalization of reason). I’m married to my lovely wife Lore and live near Ghent (Belgium).