My Belonging

National identity is one of the most significant manifestations of belonging. A shared sense of identity shapes how nations produce, perform, create and co-create, innovate, manage their affairs, and respond to days of feast as well as famine. There’re countries in the Caribbean where what comes from outside – whether it’s people, ideas, content, culture, knowledge, services, solutions, or innovat...

p Modern technology requires more from us than we’re willing or able to give. Marshall McLuhan, the one some call the father of media studies, warned that “our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.” Thinking that’s truly transformational goes beyond the mere accumulation of data, information and knowledge. New thinking is t...

There’s a difference between inspirational leadership and transformational leadership. After years of studying, researching, observing, and advising on digital transformation, I can say this without fear or favour. Leadership that inspires, that moves people, that stirs their emotions and gets them fired up, isn’t necessarily leadership that transforms or that’s able to produce meaningful, measura...

Innovation isn’t one dimensional. Neither is digital transformation. To be successful, they both require an artistry that’s collaborative, community-based, and empowering. Years ago, my doctoral dissertation used the lens of Caribbean writers to explore how the region might re-imagine innovation in an age of disruptive digital technologies and business models. Since then, Caribbean creatives have...

Radical disruption requires radical transformation. In this age of invasive emerging technologies, governments and organisations that want to survive and thrive must be prepared to challenge every assumption on which their operational and business models were originally designed. Yet, many Caribbean governments continue to introduce new technologies into public sector frameworks that are no longer...

National transformation without political transformation is failed transformation. People, particularly the kinds of young people Caribbean countries need to help reimagine the future, people with the ideas, capabilities, and character to rebuild nations, aren’t going to put up with an oppressive political culture that doesn’t create room for them to be fully themselves and to reach their maximum...

In 1919, Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote The Second Coming, vividly capturing the spirit of a fractured post-war Europe ravaged by a flu pandemic. “Things fall apart;” he wrote, “the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worse are full of passionate intensi...

Successful digital transformation is motivated by movements, not determined by decree. It’s a people issue not a technology issue. For decades, there’s been this incredible hype around the promise of new technologies to transform economies and societies. Turns out that success depends on more than wishful thinking. The environment into which we introduce new technologies has a sizable impact on re...

Principles shape and reinforce structure. They’re the cornerstones of life and of creation. … They either hold everything up, or their lack is the reason things fall apart. There’re eight principles I believe reflect both the opportunities and the threats of this historical moment. Together, they provide the contours for the manifestations of belonging. The first is the Principle of Alignment: syn...

It should be a no-brainer, but you can’t transform something if you haven’t been transformed. Transformation is a lived reality. It happens from the inside out … rarely, if ever, from the outside in. As Mahatma Gandhi so wisely said, “We but mirror the world. … As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thi...

Trinidadian Nobel Laureate the late Sir Vidia “VS” Naipaul once wrote, “I cannot really explain the mystery of ... inheritance … sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves”. As artificial intelligence forces us to think about what it means to be human, Naipaul’s words ring truer today than ever. While AI is a storehouse for vast amounts of human information and knowledge, it does not know everythi...

Caribbean life is a work of art, an act of creative will. The narrative of the Caribbean emerging from the brokenness of slavery and colonialism is a becoming … the “gathering of broken pieces” into a new way of being. It’s the “restoration of shattered histories” into a fresh story that tells of Caribbean triumph through the challenges of liberation and independence. And the story is still being...

The Promise of Belonging is powerfully articulated in the “Children of Independence”, an opinion piece I wrote to reflect on Barbados’ 44th anniversary as a sovereign state. It was published in the Sunday Sun edition of the Barbados Nation Newspaper on November 28, 2010. As smart technologies accelerate the pace of change in the world, it continues to astonish me how fitting the original words wer...

As we watch the things our parents and grandparents built collapse under the weight of universal demands for justice and a balanced, sustainable future, these days I find myself reflecting more and more on the memory of belonging. Who or what is a Barbadian, a Bajan as we say? What makes Barbados unique? What role has the island’s history as a plantation economy founded on the trade in enslaved Af...

“Know yuh place!” That’s how Bajans warn people to stay in their lane. While it usually signals someone has overstepped or is in danger of breaching an invisible line, on the flip side, there’s value in understanding where we belong. There’s power in knowing our purpose. As the world faces upheaval triggered by countless existential crises, I’m launching this 14-part series My Belonging to encoura...

The Time of My Remembering is a poetic piece I began years ago that continues to speak to the moment. Its theme is understanding who we are, what we were born to do and how who we are and what we were born to do has the potential to connect us to each other in empowering communities of purpose that anchor us in the world.  

Nothing stays the same. Change is an inevitable by-product of the human condition. But as time seems to accelerate in a 21st century reality driven by the technologies and global crises of the moment, what imprint has Barbados’ history as a plantation economy had on its development and its perception of what it means to belong to today ? How does a tiny nation preserve its distinctiveness in an in...