Unstuck: Creative Interventions for the Future of Humanity
Nov 02, 2025By Chrissie Bonner, Visioning Strategist at FutureGood
Chrissie Bonner is a Visioning Strategist at FutureGood. Connect with her on LinkedIn or reach out to her by email at [email protected].
I spend a lot of time thinking about what creativity is and how to cultivate it, beyond making art. To be fair, I was a kid who loved to draw, always doodling in the margins, even though I never formally studied art. Over time, that same creative impulse found its way into other avenues, from working as a jester with Cirque du Soleil to teaching English in Italy. I’ve applied it to local community work too: maintaining public art across Philadelphia, working in philanthropy, serving on nonprofit boards, and eventually founding a creative studio that helps the social sector plan and share their work with visual storytelling tools. All these experiences have deepened my fascination with creativity as a tool for connection and progress.
Our own creativity remains one of humanity’s most innate and untapped sources of resilience. It is an essential skill that each of us already carries with us. It helps us integrate what we know with what is still unknown, combining our wisdom, expertise, and “hunches” to produce something new. Every time we engage with our creativity, whether it’s knitting, making dinner on a Wednesday night, or sketching ideas in the margins of a notebook, we are building creative muscle. These small, ordinary actions remind us that creativity isn’t rare; it’s part of how we survive and thrive together.
If we know how to listen and pay attention, anything can become a source of information and inspiration. I think of biomimicry: engineers studying how kingfisher birds dive without a splash to design faster, quieter trains; or architects looking at termite mounds to create buildings that cool themselves naturally. Nature becomes one source of wisdom and answers when we stop to pay attention.
As philanthropic futurist Trista Harris reminds us, when we don’t make space for creativity, we get stuck “loving the problem.” In other words, we get so good at articulating what’s not working that we soon discover we have no energy left to re-imagine or create something better.
But when we bring generative attention and a learning mindset, radical new pathways forward can miraculously begin to appear.
In my upcoming webinar, we will explore models and practices that help individuals and teams stay grounded and productive in the face of uncertainty. Together, we’ll examine the interventions of deep listening, generative attention, and using prototyping as a way to “play,” experiment, and shift our own mindsets around success and failure.
These creative techniques are not about learning to be an artist; they are about recognizing and strengthening the creative capabilities that we all already have, whether or not we choose to make art. You’ll leave with practical tools you can use right away; simple but powerful ways to stay creative when challenges feel stuck, to spark fresh ideas in your team, and to approach uncertainty with more confidence.
Free Webinar: Unstuck: Creative Interventions for the Future of Humanity
December 1, 2025, 2-3 PM ET
