Recent Keynotes: (click for detail)

Hi there, I'm Steve Collis.

I'm an ideas and innovation guy. I love finding the sorts of "what ifs" that seem to create energy in the room out of nowhere. 

My big thing is 'space'... the living environment that surrounds us. It tends to fade into the background as we live our lives and get stuck in patterns that become defaults and then ruts. 

All the while who we are gets baked into our environment. 

Then we decide want to change. At home - a new habit, a new 'me'? At work - a new culture, a new capability. In education - new ways of learning, something better than dish up and deliver. You know how life is - in each chapter, we evolve, or we stagnate. 

The blind spot is, people try to change internally, never quite cottoning on to the "puppet master" role that the built environment plays in how we feel, what we think, say and do, and how we interact with each other. 

It's aesthetics, yes, but it's also function. It's physical space, yes, but it's also technology, and more broadly "information flow". And finally it's the catalogue of unstated shared agreements on conventions, routines, permissions. 

These three layers operate together to profoundly shape the way we are and what we do. We might talk of 'affordances' and 'constraints' - behaviours that our environment is promoting on the one hand, and censoring on the other. 

My life's work is to achieve transformation by acting intentionally to re-imagine the design of the outer-world that shapes our inner-world and behaviour.

I concentrate particularly on two areas:

#1 Education (I'm a veteran classroom teacher, school leader, and learning space consultant)

and

#2 Corporate - from my base with Amicus in Circular Quay, Sydney, I work with Australia's top companies during that amazing phase where they are refitting or moving offices. I function as the glue that brings everyone together - leaders, designers, technologists, HR - to establish a vision for workplace culture, breathe it into every level of design, and execute transition processes to bring people on the journey. 

But of course this is my blog website, and here so anything that interests me is fair game for publishing!

Steve