Colin showed up at my first open online workshop under the title of „Happy & Healthy Workshop Experiences Online“, which I offered as a response to an overwhelming wave of online events happening in spring 2020. I was very nervous, as I figured he must be one of the IT people from the context of the Int. Design Thinking Conference – and then happy and relieved when he took up the rhythm of my little workshop immediately and offered to lead a following-up session. He did it with Jenny, and it is still one of my personal highlights with regard to creativity in online facilitation.
Colin is a theatre man. Born and grown-up in South Africa, he made his way through Norway, Russia and Japan, for example. And through an impressive number of schools of thinking, performance, embodiment practice and storytelling. As a regular to the WWJ, he helped to shape the narrative for the WWJ community, the „villagers“. He gave a session about storytelling, and he was the troubadour when we sent the participants on a wild ride across social media channels in a virtual escape room game.
Colin is fun, and he can put things into words that are not even yet tangible for others. Moreover, he has the magical talent to accelerate and stretch time. Therefore, at some stage in early 2021, I asked him if he would give a TEDx talk at our TEDxMünster conference. He has grown dear to me on this journey of developing the talk: weighing options, discussing concepts, experimenting and rehearsing, trying to find the essence and core of what is his very own beautiful message to the world.
Having experienced the light and dark aspects of humanity in depths through theatre and life, Colin nevertheless brings a lightness into the world that is easy going and relaxed, spurs connections and animates people to be part of whatever he does. No surprise the TEDx conference grew into a live encounter of a couple of Wednesday Web jammers. I had the honour to have Colin in the house for a couple of days, and he joyfully explored my home town on a bike. „I feel as if I had been living here a couple of months“, he said one day. „I keep running into all these new people that I met.“
