Yanis Varoufakis on how Europe could be better by using our imagination

Former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis provides an interesting perspective on creative thinking in this short interview with financial commentator David McWilliams.
February 18, 2021
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Former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis provides an interesting perspective in this short interview with financial commentator David McWilliams.

Looking like he's just stepped off his motorbike, Varoufakis confidently states that everything could be made infinitely better within just a few weeks. All people need to do is use their imagination a little.

He reckons that trillions of Euros are sitting, doing nothing, with investors too scared to make any move. His solution? Invest it in the good stuff - things like green energy, sustainable technologies, health and education, looking after the elderly.He says we need to rid ourselves of the illusion that the powers that be know what they are doing, and start to think laterally, to look at things more holistically.

This is no doubt a huge subject and Varoufakis may be biased against the European "powers that be", but I'm always heartened when people advocate taking a holistic view, to try and take time out from the day-to-day and understand what is going on from a higher level. In our creative thinking workshops we discuss two techniques to do this:

  • Beginner's Mind - forgetting everything we know (or think we know!) about a subject or project, and viewing it as if we were completely fresh – with no expertise, experience or opinions.
  • Zooming Out - taking the wide-angle, helicopter view. We might consider a whole industry rather than just a single product, or look for the root causes of a latest trend to solve a bigger, more fundamental problem.

See if you can view things as a beginner or from a wider perspective this week - maybe it will cause you to see things differently as a result.

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