🌿 Thinking Aloud — An Invitation to Curiosity
Environmental challenges today are more than urgent — they’re entangled, fast-moving, and deeply human. Creativity can feel both essential and impossible. That’s exactly why I’m beginning Thinking Aloud: a space to slow down, notice more, ask differently, and explore the edges of what we think we know.
Curiosity feels gentle, but it isn’t wishy-washy.
It’s strategic.
It helps us see possibilities in places that initially look stuck.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Sir Ken Robinson’s simple but powerful line: “Curiosity is the engine of achievement.” In the environmental world, achievement rarely looks like a straight line. Progress comes through reframing, questioning assumptions, spotting signals, and opening doors we didn’t know were there.
Curiosity is what fuels that shift from “This is how we do things” to “What if…?”
🔍 What Curiosity Means in Practice
When I talk about curiosity, I’m not referring to a fleeting spark of interest — I mean the deliberate choice to look closer, ask again, and notice what sits beneath the surface.
In environmental work, curiosity becomes a way of navigating complexity:
- Asking deeper and sometimes uncomfortable questions
- Noticing patterns across ecology, culture, economics and governance
- Paying attention to what’s emerging, as much as what’s declining
- Challenging the assumptions we’ve become too comfortable with
- Staying open to multiple truths — and the tensions between them
Curiosity doesn’t remove uncertainty.
It helps us work with it.
🌱 Why Curiosity Matters Now
Across my work in natural resources, strategy and organisational change, I keep seeing the same tensions:
- We’re asked to be bold, but operate within constraints
- We’re encouraged to innovate, but judged by short-term results
- We want to collaborate, but systems push us into silos
Within that tension, curiosity isn’t just useful — it’s transformative.
It’s what helps us see patterns, understand people, and find sparks of possibility in places that feel stuck. It’s what shifts conversations from “We’ve tried that” to “What if…?”
I remember a project where everything seemed to grind to a halt. The challenge wasn’t resource-related; it was curiosity-related. Once we started asking the right questions — the genuinely curious ones — new routes forward started to appear.
This space is an invitation to linger in that “What if…?”
🌿 What You’ll Find in Thinking Aloud
This space will evolve, shaped by what we are noticing across and by the conversations happening in sustainability.
Expect posts that explore:
✨ Emerging ideas around AI, land use, climate and systems thinking
✨ Surprising moments that shift perspective
✨ Questions that challenge conventional approaches
✨ Insights from the projects Sunnyhill Consultants is involved in
✨ Elements of a playbook we are developing — still evolving, still being tested
Some posts will be practical.
Others exploratory.
All are grounded in curiosity, creativity, and a desire to think differently.