Live Well in Turbulent Times S1E5 with Tony Lancaster

Live Well in Turbulent Times: We delve into the ‘’best bits’‘ our subscribers personally selected. This week we are talking to Tony Lancaster; an art school graduate who was taught to question assumptions. He maintained this instinct throughout his working life: as a graphic designer, creative director in direct marketing, and later as a web designer.

Chapters

02:25 Ranking every article: High to Low

03:08 “We’ve got it coming“

04:30 What Living Well means to Tony

05:45 Best Bits: Meeting Together

08:05 Book Group (rebellion!)

09:30 A meeting is not a seating plan

11:02 Recognition and continuity in a social group

12:30 Meetings form a small ecology

14:06 The emotional nature of buildings

15:35 The business of making Place

17:45 One-to-one check-ins and deep reflections

19:26 I am therefore I meet, I meet therefore I am

20:06 Tony’s closing comments

21:18 Tiny extra snippet! Engaging with AI (and engaging conversations)

More about Tony, from the man himself: There is a well-known joke about a tourist in Ireland who asks a local for directions to Dublin. The Irishman replies: ‘Well sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.’

That joke has stayed with me because it contains a serious truth. Many failures, in design, politics, planning and ordinary life, begin because we accept the starting point we are given. We set off obediently from the wrong place.

My art school education in the late 1960s was only one of many formative influences, but it has proved the most enduring. At root, it taught me to question assumptions. Are we designing a bed, or an environment in which sleep becomes possible? Are we solving the visible problem, or asking whether the problem has been badly described?

That instinct followed me through my working life as a graphic designer, creative director in direct marketing, and later as a web designer. The task was never simply to make things look better. It was to ask what they were for, who they served, and whether the conventional answer was still good enough.

In later life, that same impulse led me into the civic movement: citizens refusing to be passive consumers of the places they inhabit. The friction point is urban planning, where community aspiration too often meets a business model that treats place as an asset to be exploited.

My work now is a challenge to that lack of integrity. It asks a simple question, but one that feels more urgent in turbulent times: why can’t we do better than this?

This Live Well in Turbulent Times series accompanies the best seller and idiosyncratic novel business book ‘Good Leaders in Turbulent Times: How to Navigate Wild Waters at Work which is packed full of practical advice - see what shines bright for you - for leaders going through crises and emerging stronger. A story of nine characters over seven years, with 41 drawings by Steven Appleby and 138 nuggets of advice (definitely some for you in there).