Carla Ross

Sustainable Innovation Consultant & Thinker - Across Business, Education, Health

When writing a description it somehow makes you want to categorise, and I'm not sure how to categorise myself or what shape this blog will take. Also there's the nagging feeling that having a blog is the thinking person's lap-dog accessory. Still, here it is now.

A more formal bio would say that my background is in marketing and publishing, having managed CRM programmes, marketing campaigns, content management systems and a corporate magazine within financial services, I ran the consumer magazine Alodis for SEPs by a great little start up - Mongrel Worlds, and am also a trained Nutritionist and deeply interested in health, science and innovation.

Also a home-educator for 2 years and so too a keen thinker and reader on education and educational policy and the link between creativity and innovation in the workplace.

I'm currently a free-lance consultant, advising researching, project-managing, thinking across a number of different industries, analysing worldviews and trends to support strategy development.

I'm not really sector specific - more of a cross pollinator. I love finding out about stuff and then having conversations about that stuff. And that stuff cuts across many different 'categories', the natural world, innovation and ideas, sustainability, education and learning, health, food, systems of thinking - different ways of interpreting the world, biomimicry, language and more. What I really enjoy is connecting the dots, understanding the implications, the applications and where the opportunities are. More lately I've been looking at Soft Systems Mehtodology as a tool in facilitating my approach.

I'm lucky in that my work cuts across many of these areas too. It's the how, the why, and the possibilities.

I guess it's sort of what I already do, but my ideal way to make a living is to be paid to be curious. I recently read a theory by Scott Page of Uni. of Michigan, on the four frameworks needed to develop cognitive diversity, it struck a chord;

"Cognition of diverse perspectives - ways of representing the world
Diverse interpretations - ways of categorising perspectives
Diverse Heuristic - Ways of generating solutions to problems
Diverse Predictive models - Ways of inferring cause and effect"

Perhaps this blog will be a little like that. And I am hoping that now I've said what I'm interested in I can avoid feeling like I only belong to and can only read (as much as I can) in those silos, a kind of Industrial Keeping Up with the Jones Fever, which ends up in not being able to see the wood for the trees. Most of my best ideas come when I'm mooching about watching something new on TED or learning about Harris Tweed on Radio 4. Diverse perspectives as Page says.

Looking forward to the conversation :-)
Find me on twitter CarlaLally