Wonderpreneurs™: IDEArchitects of the Future
Excavating the Tools of Quantum Storytelling: Rituals, Mythologies, and Tabernacles
By Theo Edmonds Founder, Creativity America | Bridging Creative Industries and Brain Science with Future of Work & Wondervation™
The Vocation of Vision
Strategic foresight is the practice of exploring multiple potential futures to better anticipate and prepare for disruptions, trends, and opportunities. It invites leaders to consider three critical questions: Where do we take action? How do we know it is wise action? Moreover, what will we need to stay strong, curious and resilient when the unexpected happens?
In sectors ranging from technology to healthcare to finance, strategic foresight is being adopted to anticipate emerging opportunities and threats. Organizations are increasingly recognizing the value of thinking beyond short-term goals and linear projections, instead choosing to engage in creative, future-focused exploration that helps them prepare for various possibilities. As a result, strategic foresight is growing in demand and becoming a critical skill set for leaders who aim to stay competitive and innovative in an uncertain world.
Innovation is the story we tell of the journey between where we are and where we think we want to be. Transformational innovations—like the wheel, the combustible engine, and the internet—redefine our understanding of time and distance. When we start to think of time and distance differently, our brains, wired for efficiency, begin to reorganize expectations for how work, innovation, and relationships get done. As these expectations shift, so does human behavior.
This change in perception radically transforms how we conceive of our investments of time, talent, and treasure in new endeavors. What we once viewed as risky may now feel essential or even inevitable. As our expectations evolve, so do our assessments of acceptable risk, ultimately reshaping how we innovate, collaborate, and move toward the future.
Strategic foresight is a quantum storytelling approach to innovation – providing a framework for navigating complexity in a way that linear models simply cannot. Quantum storytelling blends principles of quantum mechanics with the art of narrative creation, emphasizing the complexity and multiple possibilities that can exist within any given story. By integrating quantum storytelling into daily leadership rituals—such as team retrospectives or strategic planning meetings—organizations can rapidly prototype future scenarios, aligning team members on multiple possible outcomes while encouraging continuous creative iteration.
In a business context, quantum storytelling is used to shape organizational cultures and strategies by allowing leaders and teams to explore a variety of narratives, perspectives, and future scenarios. It enables organizations to create stories that are not fixed or singular but are adaptable and capable of evolving with new information. By doing so, quantum storytelling fosters innovation, helps align diverse teams, and facilitates the co-creation of meaning in complex, dynamic environments. It invites organizations to embrace ambiguity and multiplicity, allowing them to navigate uncertainty and complexity more effectively.
In industries like healthcare, quantum storytelling can be applied to patient care strategies by enabling teams to co-create multiple treatment paths, fostering a culture of adaptability and empathy in navigating complex medical uncertainties. In the finance industry, quantum storytelling can help financial institutions design more inclusive products by allowing teams to explore diverse customer narratives, fostering the creation of financial services that anticipate and adapt to the evolving needs of different communities and life stages.
Genius: A Cultural Outcome
Entrepreneurship today is no longer about a single, brilliant individual making incremental advances. Low success rates, the impact of cultural shifts like the loneliness epidemic, and persistent product feature creep indicate that something crucial is missing. The next big leaps will come from entrepreneurs who know how to lead teams by cultivating environments, narratives, and emotional dynamics that fuel creativity. These teams will be geographically distributed, interdisciplinary, and diverse in their cultural contexts.
The era of the lone genius entrepreneur driving innovation is behind us. In the Wonder Economy™, leadership shifts from the individual to the collective, recognizing genius as a shared cultural achievement co-created by teams. Even one of the innovators most associated with the concept of genius acknowledges this. Steve Jobs wrote:
“I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object-oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being.”
Quantum storytelling needs quantum tools. Rather than relying solely on traditional cause-and-effect strategies, quantum tools invite leaders to think in terms of possibilities, compressing time and space to consider diverse scenarios simultaneously. These tools are not limited to advanced machine technologies; humanity has long used rituals, mythologies, and tabernacles as quantum tools, fostering collective creativity, unifying teams around shared narratives, and creating spaces where innovation can flourish.
Whether in the R&D division of a multinational corporation or within a traditional business accelerator, the entrepreneurial leaders who will excel are those who understand that human creativity—cognitive, emotional, and social—is the ultimate competitive advantage. These leaders, whom we can now think of as Wonderpreneurs™, harness rituals, mythologies, and tabernacles as quantum storytelling tools of innovation and strategic foresight.
Rituals: The Foundational Code of Innovation
Rituals are more than structured habits; they are deeply encoded practices that infuse meaning into action. Historically, rituals are bigger than just marking significant moments (e.g., birthdays). They create conditions for collective focus, creativity, and the transmission of knowledge across generations. Whether it was the construction of the pyramids or the building of cathedrals, rituals created the framework within which communities converge toward a goal.
Rituals still play an essential role in modern entrepreneurial ecosystems, but they take on more strategic forms. The structured rituals of design thinking and the controlled chaos of innovation sprints mirror the cognitive processes required for creativity.
Research supports this strategic understanding of rituals by demonstrating that structured problem identification and construction significantly enhance creative outcomes (Reiter-Palmon et al., 2008). Without these foundational rituals, teams tend to converge too quickly on solutions, limiting their creative potential. Teams that balance divergence and convergence generate more innovative solutions, as time spent on problem construction is strongly related to creativity (Arreola & Reiter-Palmon, 2016). Further, rituals also serve as mechanisms for establishing Shared Mental Models(SMMs), which are critical to team performance. SMMs allow team members to align their understanding of tasks, anticipate each other’s needs, and respond adaptively to changing conditions.
Wonderpreneurs recognize that for rituals to be transformative, they must be meaningful. Without meaning, rituals become hollow, leading to stagnation. This is where tabernacles—the second quantum storytelling tool —comes into play.
Tabernacles: Emergent Spaces of Human Creative Potential
In ancient times, tabernacles were sacred spaces where the divine met the human. Today, these spaces are no less important, serving as environments that nurture creativity and facilitate the collision of ideas. The word itself originates from the Latin tabernaculum (meaning a temporary dwelling). A tabernacle represents a space that holds something spiritually, intellectually, or emotionally valuable. It is a place of transition, reflection, and communion.
In 2024 America, it's not a stretch to look at the world’s most innovative companies—Google’s innovation hubs or Pixar’s open-concept studios—as modern-day tabernacles designed to foster collaboration and creative breakthroughs.
However, it’s not the bean bags or whiteboards that make these spaces effective. Instead, it’s the intentional creation of a cultural space where psychological safety, wonder, and risk are embraced. Research shows that spaces promoting psychological safety are essential for fostering creativity, as they allow for open dialogue and risk-taking without fear of judgment.
Historically, civilization has encountered four distinct tabernacles of human creative potential, each corresponding to a fundamental aspect of human experience. These spaces serve as the primary containers for understanding and engaging the world, and they hold the key to unlocking a deeper creative connection to oneself and others.
First Tabernacle: Body
The first tabernacle is the tabernacle of our human body and mind. This is where our physical and intellectual experiences are housed. It is the vessel through which individuals experience the world, housing their emotions, thoughts, and actions. This tabernacle is foundational, as it is the gateway to all other experiences, allowing humans to process, reflect, and interpret the world around them.
Second Tabernacle: Nature
The second tabernacle is the natural world that surrounds and sustains us. Nature serves as a sacred space for reflection, providing wisdom, inspiration, and renewal. This tabernacle reminds us of our connection to something greater than ourselves and offers the cycles of life, death, and rebirth as a continual source of creative potential.
Third Tabernacle: Organizations
The third tabernacle represents the spaces where society comes together to investigate (science), adjudicate (legal), determine (political), and prosper (business). It encompasses the arenas where collective decisions are made, justice is sought, and economic activity flourishes, defining the structures and frameworks that guide the functioning of society.
Fourth Tabernacle: Spiritual Spaces
Whether through organized religion or through dogma-free personal spirituality, the fourth tabernacle represents humanity’s search for meaning beyond the material world. In temples, churches, mosques, synagogues, or personal meditation spaces, the fourth tabernacle allows individuals to engage in rituals and practices that foster spiritual growth and offer solace in times of uncertainty. It is the space for prayer, meditation, and worship, guiding individuals toward a deeper understanding of existence and purpose. It shapes an elemental truth— we humans exist in relationship with the unfathomable forces of the universe.
Arts. The Fifth Tabernacle of Creativity
While the first four tabernacles represent tangible spaces—whether physical, natural, organizational, or spiritual—the arts transcend these boundaries, becoming a vessel for human expression, connection, and liberation. While the mechanisms of human creativity fuel science, business and every other professional area, the arts express creativity in, I believe, the most unique way. It’s an expression of creativity that evades easy categorization or replication. A historical perspective of creativity itself helps us understand why.
We didn't always understand creativity like we do today. Creativity's journey has evolved from being seen as a divine gift to a democratic human capability. In antiquity, creativity was viewed as a force controlled by the gods, with humans acting only under their direction. The Renaissance shifted this perspective, placing humans at the center of creative agency, celebrating artists like da Vinci and Michelangelo as creators in their own right. The Enlightenment further transformed creativity into a rational, intellectual process, while Romanticism reacted against this, emphasizing emotional expression and intuition. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, creativity became intertwined with technology and efficiency, creating tension between mechanization and emotional depth. By the 20th century, creativity was fully democratized and recognized as a fundamental human trait that anyone could cultivate, playing a central role in individual and societal progress.
The Fifth Tabernacle of the Arts is where personal experiences and collective expressions of creativity converge into active co-creative participation. Unlike the tabernacle of the body, which focuses on individual experience, or the tabernacle of organizations, which centers on societal structures, the arts invite us into a shared space of creation, where boundaries between self and other dissolve. We are called to create, reflect, and transform in this space. The arts are not just entertainment; they are a vessel for understanding human creative potential, a way to confront the unspoken, heal the broken, lift the weary, and unchain the oppressed. In the fifth tabernacle, we find not just release but the possibility of liberation—a chance to remake ourselves, our communities, and our world through the power of imagination and wonder.
In this fifth tabernacle, the personal and communal merge. Over the centuries, from Sophocles to André Robin De Shields —whose words are also the inspiration for this article— theatre makers know that the audience is also an “actor” engaged in producing the sacred feedback loops upon which the work of theatre depends. In community spaces, concert halls and theaters across America, we gather in the darkness with strangers, not just to watch but to share in a quiet liberation. Liberation from the unspoken regrets, the wounds we carry but cannot name, the weight of lives half-lived, and dreams deferred. We come seeking a kind of shared wisdom. We come seeking evidence that our human ache of longing and loneliness— the ache that we hide from the part of ourselves living in the pocket of another person’s dreams— still has a reason to hope. In these dark spaces, filled with the mirrors of other faces, we seek not just to hear a quantum thread of connection to our past or to witness a story, but to make peace with our own.
When we engage with the arts, we don’t just watch; we actively participate and co-create future history. After all, our decisions— what we see as possible and valuable— will always be shaped by the questions we are brave enough to ask. Our limits and frontiers always defined by how well we understand ourselves. This communal aspect of the arts frames out what research confirms are ideal conditions for team innovation. Namely, that the quality of our collaboration defines the depth of our creative performance.
Mythologies: The Stories That Make the Impossible Possible
Emotional and psychological barriers can still block creativity even in the most well-designed tabernacles. Wonderpreneurs, however, understand that these challenges—attachment to old ideas, envy, anger at failure, or ignorance of new possibilities—are human poisons that can be transformed through mythological antidotes.
For example, Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and renewal, teaches that we must destroy what no longer serves us to create space for new possibilities. This reflects the research on problem identification and construction, where letting go of old mental models is necessary for innovation (Mumford et al., 1991). Wonderpreneurs reframe emotional challenges as opportunities for growth, transforming poisons into fuel for creativity.
From Akan mythology, the mythological figure of Sankofa reminds us that envy can be transformed into trust by learning from others' successes. This aligns with research showing that teams benefit from perspective-taking, as understanding diverse viewpoints leads to greater creativity (Hoever et al., 2012).
Similarly, Janus, the Roman god of transitions, teaches that anger over past failures can be converted into freedom to embrace new beginnings.
By integrating mythologies as an antidote to innovation poisons— attachment, envy, anger, pride, ignorance— Wonderpreneurs craft environments where creativity is inevitable. They reframe emotional barriers as opportunities for transformation, much like how quantum systems exist in multiple states until observed.
Every game-changing innovation begins with a compelling story. Mythology is not ancient lore; it is a modern technology for leadership, a framework that aligns individuals around a shared vision and makes the impossible seem inevitable. In Wonderpreneurship, mythologies are the driving force behind creating cultures where innovation thrives.
For example, Steve Jobs created a mythology around Apple that framed the company as a revolutionary force. It wasn’t just about sleek products, rebellion, creativity, and transforming the world. Jobs harnessed the power of storytelling to make Apple employees feel like part of a greater mission, thereby unlocking creativity and loyalty. This aligns with research that shows how Shared Mental Models (SMMs) contribute to team creativity by promoting alignment and reducing conflict (Santos et al., 2015). Similarly, research by Gilson and Shalley (2004) reveals that teams with shared goals and a unified narrative are more engaged in the creative process, leading to greater innovation.
However, myth-making is not reserved for multinational corporations like Apple. Wonderpreneurs of all sizes can use mythology to help address the Representational Gaps (rGaps)—differences in how people or groups understand or interpret the same situation, often leading to miscommunication or conflict— that arise in diverse teams. Cronin and Weingart (2007) suggest that differences in how team members conceptualize problems can either hinder or enhance creativity. Mythology bridges these gaps as a unifying narrative by creating a shared mental model that integrates diverse perspectives, reduces conflict, and fosters creative problem-solving.
Poetry: A Case Study in Quantum Storytelling
In quantum storytelling, a poem serves as a powerful example of how meaning, emotion, and possibility coexist in a dynamic, participatory space. Just as quantum mechanics reveals that reality exists in multiple potential states until observed, a poem holds infinite interpretations until a reader engages with it. Each reader shapes the poem’s meaning based on their own experiences and emotions, collapsing the poem’s many possibilities into a unique, personal narrative. This interplay between observer and text mirrors the quantum principle of nonlinearity, where different truths and layers of meaning can exist simultaneously, offering a multifaceted experience that evolves with each reading.
The power of quantum storytelling also lies in the superposition of language. A single word or line can evoke multiple emotions or meanings in poetry, allowing for rich, layered interpretations. This is similar to how particles in quantum mechanics exist in multiple states at once. A poem doesn’t offer fixed conclusions—it invites readers to explore its ambiguity, embracing uncertainty and opening the door to infinite possibilities for interpretation and emotional resonance. This fluidity of meaning makes poetry a perfect medium for illustrating the principles of quantum storytelling, where nothing is static, and every engagement reshapes the narrative.
Finally, quantum storytelling in poetry demonstrates how ideas and emotions become entangled across time and space. Just as entangled quantum particles influence each other despite the distance, a poem's emotions, metaphors, and symbols resonate deeply with readers, linking personal experiences with the broader human condition. This entanglement allows poetry to transcend its words, connecting individuals across cultural, temporal, and spatial boundaries. By inviting readers into this co-creative process, quantum storytelling transforms a poem into a living, breathing narrative, continually reshaped by those who engage with it.
For business leaders, this concept of quantum storytelling offers a compelling framework for rethinking strategic planning, and R&D. Imagine designing flexible and adaptive initiatives like a poem that invites multiple interpretations. By embracing nonlinearity, ambiguity, and the entanglement of ideas, organizations can foster a culture where creativity thrives, and possibilities are never fully constrained. This approach could unlock breakthrough innovations in a rapidly changing world, allowing businesses to stay ahead by navigating complexity with the same fluidity and depth that quantum storytelling brings to poetry.
Wonderpreneurs: Architects of the Future
As AI and quantum economies reshape the world, Wonderpreneurs will lead us into the future. They are not just business leaders but architects of cultural ecosystems, creating environments where human creativity can thrive. In this new landscape, success is not defined solely by financial metrics but by the ability to create spaces that unlock human potential.
Creativity America is now identifying pilot companies interested in maximizing their investments in emerging technologies, like AI, with a wonderpreneur approach. Our WONDERVATION™ Method of Quantum Storytelling is a revolutionary opportunity to fostering creativity and innovation within entrepreneurial teams working in the Wonder Economy – the human side of technology and the future of work. By blending quantum mechanics principles with collaborative storytelling, our method helps teams explore a multitude of future possibilities simultaneously. In practical terms, the WONDERVATION™ method involves dynamic, interactive sessions where teams co-create "quantum narratives" that exist in a state of superposition—multiple potential futures are explored and held open, rather than collapsing into a single, linear plan.
Through co-creating new innovation rituals built around the pilot company's actual strategic R&D priorities, participants engage deeply with these stories, identifying hidden connections between trends and uncovering breakthrough innovations. The WONDERVATION™ method not only compresses time and space, allowing organizations to anticipate and navigate disruptions faster, but it also enhances collective creativity by making innovation a shared, emotional journey that continuously evolves with new information. This technique reshapes how teams approach risk, collaboration, well-being and strategic foresight, making it a transformative tool for entrepreneurial leadership.
Wonderpreneurs know that the human imagination remains our greatest untapped resource in business cultures, where machines process data at unimaginable speeds. The quantum storytelling tools of innovation—rituals, mythologies, and tabernacles—are the keys to unlocking this resource. Through them, Wonderpreneurs build cultures where people are liberated to dream, create, and challenge conventional wisdom.
At this moment in history, when the world cries out for bold, imaginative leadership, the Wonderpreneur stands as a guide—a creator of new possibilities, a storyteller of transformative myths, and an architect of deeply human spaces where the future is not just imagined but built. The companies that will shape tomorrow are those that understand this truth: the quantum leap in innovation begins with a story, a space, and a shared mental model of what we can achieve together.
Theo Edmonds, Culture Futurist® & Founder, Creativity America | Bridging Creative Industries and Brain Science with Future of Work & Wondervation™
©2024 Theo Edmonds | All Rights Reserved. Please credit the author when using any of this content. The views expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of any organization with which the author is affiliated.