winded.vertigo

we treat a lack of resources as the enemy of good ideas. it usually isn’t.

a review of 145 studies found that constraint, in the right dose, reliably increases creativity across individuals, teams, and organisations.

when there’s less to work with, something shifts. you stop searching for the perfect tool and start using what’s already there. ideas come from rearranging, not adding.

you can see it in small ways. a child will often do more with a cardboard box than with the toy it came in. the box doesn’t come with instructions, so they have to decide what it becomes.

there is a limit. too much constraint can close things off. but the idea that more resources always lead to better ideas doesn’t really hold.

abundance gives you more to choose from. constraint gives you something to work with.

so a different question to sit with:
what’s the best thing you’ve ever made out of almost nothing?

🎊PRME is thrilled to recognize 710 certified educators from the 2026 PRME Pedagogy Certificate Series!

Through this five-week programme, participants explored pedagogical approaches shaping the future of business and management education.

Congratulations to the global community of educators for their dedicated to advancing innovative teaching practices that help transform learning experiences and prepare students to navigate an increasingly complex and interconnected world.

We are grateful to our partners at winded.vertigo for their support in facilitating this certification series.

🔗Stay up to date on future PRME Pedagogy opportunities: https://unprme.beefreecontent.com/ZuqoK-subscribe-to-the-prme-newsletter

here’s a finding that should change how we design learning.

in one study, people were given a list of words and 40 seconds per word. some were asked to write each word down, while others drew it. those who drew the words remembered more than twice as many later on.

it wasn’t about artistic skill. even simple, rough sketches led to the same result.

what made the difference was the act of making itself. when you draw something, you have to decide how to represent it. you choose what matters, what it looks like, and how to translate an idea into something visible. that process pulls together seeing, thinking, and doing in a way that reading or writing alone does not.

and yet, most learning is still designed to be consumed. we ask people to watch, read, and listen, and then we check what stayed.

the evidence keeps pointing somewhere else, quite consistently. understanding deepens when people are involved in shaping what they are learning, not just receiving it.

the hand is not separate from the mind in this process. it plays an active role in forming meaning and strengthening memory.

so a better question for learning design might be this: where are people actually making something, and how often do we give them that chance?

what’s something you only really understood once you made it with your hands?

Wammes, J. D., Meade, M. E., & Fernandes, M. A. (2016). The drawing effect: evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(9), 1752–1776.

Read it (open access): https://dspacemainprd01.lib.uwaterloo.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/994c229b-465a-4480-9586-75b3a9064d21/content

Plain-English summary: https://uwaterloo.ca/psychology/news/need-remember-something-better-draw-it-study-finds

boredom has a worse reputation than it deserves.

in one study, researchers split people into two groups. one group had to copy numbers out of a phone book by hand. the other group didn't. then both took the same creativity test: think up as many unusual uses as you can for an everyday object.

the group that had been bored did better. they came up with more ideas, and more original ones, than the group that hadn't.

a wandering, under-stimulated mind isn't idle. it's searching. and when it finally gets something to do, it does more with it.

which reframes the empty summer afternoon entirely. "i'm booored" isn't a gap to plug. it's the run-up.

boredom isn't the absence of something to do. it's the beginning of it.

so, honestly: what did you make as a kid, in the hours nobody filled for you? and when did you last let yourself be that bored?

Mann, S. & Cadman, R. (2014). Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative? Creativity Research Journal, 26(2), 165–173.
Read it (full-text PDF, open access):https://knowledge.lancashire.ac.uk/id/eprint/22263/1/22263%20Does%2520being%2520bored%2520make%2520us%2520more%2520creativeV2.pdf

today is the UN's , and this year UNICEF's theme is one we'll happily shout about: protect play, protect childhood.

here's what we believe. play isn't the recess. it's the lesson. it's how a toddler learns the world is safe, how a team finds the idea the meeting couldn't, how any of us make sense of the things that are too big for words. and the lovely part is that it asks for almost nothing: no kit, no plan, no permission slip.

so here's our invitation, and your brain already knows the steps. it's been doing this since you were small, mostly without asking permission. go and find a face. they're everywhere once you start looking: the startled one on the wall socket by your desk, the smug one in the foam on your coffee, the scowling one on the front of a parked car, the whole cast of them drifting over your walk home. scientists call it pareidolia: finding a face where there isn't one. children call it tuesday.

spot one today and give it a second of your attention. what's it thinking? is it having a better morning than you?

that little flicker of delight is the whole thing. it isn't a phase we grow out of. it's the same play a four-year-old runs on all day, still in us, just buried under everything we've decided is more serious. catching yourself still doing it is the proof: of what play is, and why it's worth protecting in the children who haven't had to bury it yet.

so tell us what you find. your grumpy tree, the cloud that was clearly a dragon mid-sneeze. proof it's still in there.

we reward the smooth version. the clean deck.
the confident summary. the doc with no loose ends.

but smoothness is often just the sound of feedback being removed.

the hesitation someone edited out. the failed attempt nobody logged. the "actually, this didn't work" that got sanded down before the meeting.

a system can get very good at looking coherent without getting any better at responding to the world. it stays smooth right up until it meets something it was never built to register. then it snaps.

the crease is the inconvenient part. it's also the only place you can see where something actually learnt.

jamie has a piece on reading the marks instead of polishing them away — worth your time if you've ever mistaken a clean surface for a working one. there's a whole substack waiting once you start pulling that thread. https://open.substack.com/pub/windedvertigo/p/learning-to-fly-the-crease-as-curriculum?r=5ka9ut&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

much of sustainability education focuses on external systems. markets, policies, technologies, and organisational change. what is less often addressed is the internal capacity required to stay with those challenges over time.

we close the series by facilitating contemplative and regenerative pedagogies with Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), focusing on the role of reflection, attention, and inner development in responsible management education. these are not additional layers to an already full curriculum, but ways of shaping how learning happens within it.

in this session, faculty explore simple, structured practices such as freewriting, journaling, and moments of pause as pedagogical tools. the aim is not to introduce something abstract, but to create space for deeper engagement, clearer thinking, and more deliberate decision-making. inner development is approached here as a complement to systems change, not a replacement for it.

the question is less about adding new content, and more about what students need in order to stay present to complexity, make thoughtful choices, and sustain their work over time.

read more: https://www.unprme.org/pedagogy-certification/

most approaches to faculty development focus on the individual. new tools, new methods, new ideas to bring back into the classroom. what is less often designed for is what happens after, when those efforts need to be sustained, challenged, and evolved over time.

this week, we facilitate building communities of practice through sensemaking and storytelling with Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) by shifting the focus from individual improvement to shared practice. pedagogical change rarely holds on its own. it is carried through relationships, reinforced through conversation, and made durable through the ways people make sense of their work together.

in this session, faculty explore how communities of practice form and what allows them to last. storytelling is approached not as performance, but as structure. a way of articulating experience, aligning around shared purpose, and making decisions about what to continue, what to change, and what to let go of. the work is not only to build connection, but to create the conditions where that connection continues to generate movement.

read more: https://www.unprme.org/pedagogy-certification/

conversations about ai in education often move quickly to tools. what they can generate, how they can be used, and how quickly they are evolving. what is less often addressed is how these tools are understood, questioned, and situated within broader systems of responsibility.

this week, we facilitate leveraging ai and emerging technologies for responsible management education with Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) by starting from that gap. ai literacy is not only about using tools effectively, but about recognising how they shape decisions, reflect bias, and redistribute accountability. the challenge is not simply integration, but interpretation.

in this session, faculty examine how ai can be used as part of the learning process without losing critical distance. real-world cases, governance frameworks, and structured prompts become ways of engaging students in how these systems operate and where their limitations sit. the focus shifts from what ai can produce to how it should be evaluated, questioned, and applied within business contexts.

read more: https://www.unprme.org/pedagogy-certification/

we talk about learning like it starts from scratch, a blank page, a clean attempt

but nothing returns to blank

fold a sheet of paper into a plane, no instructions
throw it, then unfold it

the marks stay
the crease where expectation met reality and had to adjust

that mark doesn’t disappear
it shapes what happens next

in his latest reflection, jamie writes about the crease as curriculum
and why the signals we smooth out are often the only places learning has actually occurred

read the full piece on substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/windedvertigo/p/learning-to-fly-the-crease-as-curriculum?r=5ka9ut&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true