"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them" - Einstein Ideas and practices to help us to think differently. <br/><br/><a href="https://freshthinking.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">freshthinking.substack.com</a>
Fresh Thinking Podcast
Claim This Podcastby Mike Chitty
16 episodes
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Podcast Overview
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them" - Einstein Ideas and practices to help us to think differently. <br/><br/><a href="https://freshthinking.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">freshthinking.substack.com</a>
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Publishing Since
4/13/2025
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Recent Episodes
August 31, 2025
The Bargain of The Mirror King
<p>This story or parable is from the first of eight sections of an inquiry I am running into Relational Disobedience.</p><p>The world today gives us plenty of reasons to resist. Wars rage, ecosystems collapse, politicians play games with truth and trust, and economic systems deepen inequality. Many feel the urge to fight back. Yet the dominant images of resistance remain loud, angry, and often violent; burning barricades, bitter slogans, pitched battles of us versus them.</p><p>But what if we want to resist without adding to the hatred in the world? What if we feel called to stand firm, but not in ways that perpetuate cycles of fear and blame? This is the way of Relational Disobedience.</p><p>Listen to the parable or read it. Let it sit with you. </p><p>* Have you struck a bargain with The Mirror King? </p><p>* Is it a bargain you can renounce? </p><p>* What other bargain might you make? </p><p>Long ago, in the land now known only as the Severed Thread, the people lived by attunement. Their days were woven from story and song, their nights from silence and stars. They listened to one another as they listened to the wind: with care. No need was too small, no joy too quiet to be shared.</p><p>But then came the Mirror King.</p><p>No one saw him arrive. One day, a strange pavilion appeared in the central square: tall, angular, and cold to the touch. Its walls shimmered like still water, reflecting the image of anyone who drew near. Above the door was inscribed:</p><p>“Come and see yourself… as you were meant to be.”</p><p>Curious and weary, the people entered one by one. Inside, they were shown visions: a life without struggle, without shame. Their homes, clean and efficient. Their jobs, tidy and optimised. Their children, high-achieving and well-behaved. They saw themselves smiling, surrounded by metrics that glowed like stars.</p><p>The Mirror King himself never spoke. His messengers, silver-masked and honey-tongued, made the offer clear:</p><p>“All this can be yours.</p><p>Simply pledge your alignment.</p><p>Let go of the burdens of care.</p><p>Trust the system.</p><p>Comply with the new design.”</p><p>Some hesitated. But most accepted. After all, it was only a form. Only a signature. Only a dashboard login. The difference seemed minor, at first.</p><p>They returned to their homes, which now echoed with automated voices and gentle reminders to optimise their schedules. They wore wristbands that congratulated them for efficiency. And when they began to feel restless, or melancholic, or strange, the Mirror King sent gifts:</p><p>- Clarity Coaching™,</p><p>- Emotional Resilience Packs™,</p><p>- Wellbeing Wednesdays™.</p><p>They stopped gathering in the village square. Stories felt indulgent. Silence was no longer valued, unless it was productive.</p><p>It was a child, born on a night of heavy rain and flickering power, who first began to notice.</p><p>She asked her mother, “Why doesn’t Nana visit anymore?”</p><p>“She lives further now,” her mother replied, though Nana’s house was five doors down.</p><p>“Why doesn’t the river sing?”</p><p>“It’s been paved over, love. For safety.”</p><p>“Why do people look at themselves so much, but never at each other?”</p><p>There was no answer.</p><p>The child began to wander the village, listening. She noticed things others ignored: the way laughter now ended too quickly. How people spoke without touching. How the elders, once revered, now sat alone, unmeasured and unproductive.</p><p>One evening, she returned to the pavilion. A silver-masked figure appeared at the threshold.</p><p>“You are not authorised,” he said gently. “You have not yet aligned.”</p><p>“But I don’t want to see myself,” said the child. “I want to see the world.”</p><p>The figure hesitated.</p><p>“No one has asked that before,” he said.</p><p>He led her past the mirrors into a dark room, and there, for a moment, the child glimpsed something terrible: a great ledger, stretching to the sky, where names flickered and vanished as compliance was recorded. And in the centre, bound in thread and gears, sat the Mirror King, eyeless, earless, endless, compiling performance reports.</p><p>The child stepped back, terrified.</p><p>“What is he doing?” she asked.</p><p>The silver figure whispered, “He is counting what cannot be counted.”</p><p>“And what does he offer in return?”</p><p>The figure removed his mask. He was weeping.</p><p>“He offers safety. And silence. And forgetting.”</p><p>The child returned to her home, where the stars no longer shone through the smart-glass roof. That night, she lit a candle. She whispered a story to the dark. She left her front door open.</p><p>And so it began, not a rebellion, but a remembering.</p><p>A tiny, flickering refusal to forget what had been traded away.</p><p>If you would like to join with a group of us exploring the topic of Relational Disobedience and how it might be helpful please get in touch…</p><p><p>Thanks for reading Fresh Thinking! This post is public so feel free to share it.</p></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Fresh Thinking at <a href="https://freshthinking.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">freshthinking.substack.com/subscribe</a>
August 25, 2025
Relational Disobedience
<p>There are times when obedience is deadly, when following the rules, sticking to the plan or hiding behind the institution means ignoring the subtleties of life as it unfolds in front of us.</p><p>Relational disobedience is the choice to refuse that deadening obedience. It is the courage to respond as a living sensing creative human being. It means listening more deeply than the policy allows. Caring when the system tells you to move on. Staying open to complexity when the institution demands a simple tick box. Choosing presence over prediction, relationship over regulation, creativity over compliance.</p><p>Relational disobedience is not rebellion for its own sake. It is fidelity to something more alive and more real than the machine logic of our institutions. It is a refusal to betray our own humanity and a commitment to the subtle harmony of the world we share. This is the call the invitation. Step out of the dinosaur logic of control and step into the living weave of relationship, become disobedient so that life, creativity, and care may flow again.</p><p>Institutions by their very nature are blunt instruments. They simplify complexity, reduce variety, and attempt to control what cannot be controlled. They lumber like dinosaurs in a living world that is always more subtle and more varied than the plans they impose upon it. The result is predictable, side effects, unintended consequences, harm to the very people and places we claim to serve.</p><p>Science, technology, computer models and policy studies, valuable though they are, cannot match the nuance of human life and ecological systems.</p><p>And yet there is hope. Institutions are not machines. They're made up of people. People who think, feel, imagine, and care. People with brains and bodies attuned to complexity. People with the capacity and the souls for unlimited creativity.</p><p>The invitation then is simple but profound. Stop trying to master life with plans that can never be subtle enough. Start creating conditions where human creativity, values and feelings can shape responses as they unfold. Replace control with care, prediction with presence, and compliance with creativity.</p><p>This is not the abandonment of institutions. It is their renewal. It is the way they might evolve from dinosaurs of control into hosts of possibility, capable not of domination, but of participation in the living systems of which we are part.</p><p>Of becoming places fit to house the human spirit.</p><p>Relational disobedience is the seed of this transformation. It begins in the choices of individuals, but it holds out a vision of institutions that are no longer at war with the world, but in harmony with it.</p><p>Relational Disobedience: A Way Beyond the Dinosaurs of Control.</p><p>How can any plan or policy meet the challenges of a system that is more subtle and varied than the institution that seeks to control it? We know the answer... it can't. Interventions that rely on control, prediction and standardisation are doomed to failure.</p><p>Science, technology, computer models, policy studies, they all fall short of the task. What is needed is something at least as subtle, as alive and as sensitive as the world itself.</p><p>That something is us.</p><p>Not our institutions, which lumber like dinosaurs, clumsy in their attempts to dominate complexity, but our living, sensing, feeling, creating selves.</p><p>Each one of us carries within us the tools to navigate complexity. A human brain, body, heart, and soul, attuned to relationship, alive to nuance, capable of creativity.</p><p>Relational disobedience is the name we give to this way of being. It's the refusal to collapse into the dead weight of prescribed systems. It's the choice to honour creativity over compliance, care over control, presence over prediction.</p><p>It's the practice of saying "I will not reduce life to categories and metrics. I will not let the logic of the institution override the reality of the relationship. I will respond as a human being, alive, feeling and creative."</p><p>This is not disobedience for its own sake. It is disobedience in service of a deeper obedience to the subtleties and beauty of life, to the coherence of our planet, and to the call of our shared humanity.</p><p>Institutions may lumber on, but when we choose relational disobedience, we remind ourselves and each other that harmony is not imposed from above. It is born in the living weave of human creativity, values, thoughts, and feelings. Relational disobedience is not a doctrine. It cannot be prescribed. It is ever changing and ever new because it arises from one place institutions cannot touch: our capacity to care, to love, to imagine, and to create together.</p><p><p>Thanks for reading Fresh Thinking! This post is public so feel free to share it.</p></p><p>If you would like to join our exploration of relational disobedience please do get in touch.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Fresh Thinking at <a href="https://freshthinking.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">freshthinking.substack.com/subscribe</a>
July 18, 2025
The Boy Called Nilo
<p>Nilo was born in the City of Angles, where towers touched clouds and everything had a number. Even the birds, what few remained, were tagged and tracked, their wings weighed against efficiency.</p><p>He lived on the thirty-second floor of a glass building that never opened its windows. Air came through vents. Food arrived in packages. His parents worked on screens that glowed day and night, solving problems that never quite stayed solved. Their eyes were always elsewhere.</p><p>No one spoke of the Thread. No one spoke of silence.</p><p>But Nilo felt something, in the spaces between sounds, in the ache behind people’s eyes, in the strange pull he felt whenever he walked past the last green patch in the city, now fenced and marked with a sign that read ‘Development Opportunity’.</p><p>He didn’t have words for it. Only restlessness.</p><p>Only questions he was told not to ask.</p><p>“Why can’t I hear the trees?”</p><p>“Why do I feel like I’m forgetting something I never knew?”</p><p>“What is the world not saying?”</p><p>At night he would lie awake, listening to the hum of machines, the endless scroll of adverts on the ceiling screen. But beneath it all, sometimes, just barely, he heard it: a low vibration, a hum like a thought the world had stopped thinking.</p><p>He didn’t tell anyone.</p><p>One day, without plan or permission, Nilo left. He packed no bag, took no screen. He simply walked. Past the high towers, past the security zones, past the numbered checkpoints.</p><p>Out.</p><p>He walked until the concrete gave way to soil, until the sky widened and the silence thickened, not the silence of absence, but of presence not yet spoken to.</p><p>He walked until he could no longer explain why he was walking.</p><p>And there, in the soft hills beyond the maps, he found her.</p><p>The Weaver was humming to her bees when he arrived. She did not look surprised.</p><p>“I’ve been expecting you,” she said, without turning.</p><p>“You have?” Nilo asked.</p><p>“Something in the wind changed.”</p><p>She made him tea without asking, placed a thick woven blanket around his shoulders, and said nothing more for a long time.</p><p>They sat together for hours. No questions. No lessons. Only the crackle of the fire, the distant call of birds, the scent of thyme rising from the garden.</p><p>At last, Nilo spoke.</p><p>“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I feel… wrong. Like I can’t breathe right in the city. Like everyone’s running toward something that isn’t there.”</p><p>The Weaver looked at him carefully, not with pity but with welcome.</p><p>“You’re not wrong,” she said. “You’re tuning. It hurts, at first. Like a limb waking after sleep.”</p><p>“Tuning to what?”</p><p>“To the world beneath the world. To the Thread.”</p><p>He frowned. “I think I’ve heard it. At night. But only when everything else is quiet.”</p><p>She nodded. “That’s how it begins.”</p><p>Over the following days, Nilo stayed. He learned not by instruction, but by rhythm. He followed the Weaver through her tasks, feeding bees, mending fences, gathering wild mint. She taught him to walk with his ears, to see with his breath, to wait until the land was ready to speak.</p><p>He struggled, at first. The silence frightened him. So much of his life had been filled with noise, opinion, urgency. Now there was only space. And in that space, his grief began to surface, grief he hadn’t known he carried.</p><p>The Weaver did not try to fix it. She simply held it with him, as if grief were just another season.</p><p>One evening, as the sun slipped behind the western ridge, Nilo turned to her and said,</p><p>“I want to help others remember. I want to help them hear what we’ve forgotten.”</p><p>The Weaver placed her hand on his chest.</p><p>“Then first, you must become the kind of silence the Thread can speak through.”</p><p>“How?”</p><p>“By living as though the world were listening. Even when it seems deaf. Especially then.”</p><p>That night, Nilo dreamed of a vast loom stretched across the sky. Threads of light moved through it, some frayed, some knotted, some brilliant. And in the centre, hands wove gently, patiently, drawing each thread into coherence.</p><p>He woke not with answers, but with a stillness he had never known before.</p><p>The next morning, he wrapped the old woven cloak the Weaver had given him around his shoulders. He took the spindle she had pressed into his palm.</p><p>He turned to her.</p><p>“Where should I go?”</p><p>She smiled.</p><p>“Wherever the noise is loudest. But walk softly. You’re not going to teach. You’re going to listen.”</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Fresh Thinking at <a href="https://freshthinking.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">freshthinking.substack.com/subscribe</a>
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