He worked on projects like ‘ Sweetie’ for Terre des Hommes to develop a creative solution that police everywhere could adopt to end this terrible phenomenon.

Dennis has worked at Havas Lemz, an ‘creativity as a force for good’ agency in Amsterdam. Infinite conversations with Dennis followed. Lesson learned was, amongst other things, when a group of like-minded people collectively focus on something, all with their individual qualities, knowledge, skills, personality, expertise, and energy, seemingly impossible projects can shift from idea to reality, from shadow to substance.įast forward. Jeroen referred to the ability to consciously collaboratively direct things to get out of hand: initiating something, to then make it up along the way with the power and energy of many to concrete and tangible results. To sometimes surface to maybe use for something. So-called causative verbs are verbs that imply action, verbs that encourage action, instead of proposing something like ‘let’, ‘make,’ ‘have,’ ‘get,’ ‘do.’ Ever since it has been lingering in the dusty corners of hard drives and the back of minds. Jeroen van Erp (founder of Fabrique, a design agency) repeatedly called me ‘veroorzaker’, Dutch for ‘causer.’ My poor translation skills turned that into causatives, a word used in language to describe the characteristics of certain verbs.

In 2004, I registered the domain name ‘causatives’. It is great when fun, connections, stories, and projects that contribute to a nicer and better world come from it. Important: the group is not a fishing pond. Because you yourself can only view the world from your own eyes, eye height, culture, background, beliefs, skills and specialisms. People first, and where they think, work, operate does not matter - the more diverse the group becomes, the better. But to have access to an informal group of nice people who share a similar mindset and have the ability and capacity to get something done. In less poetic words: someone who can make things happen. So, let’s cause things!Ī causative is a person that can give substance to shadows.

Who knows what and where this will lead to, but let it be fun and valuable and rewarding. Causatives is becoming this fantastic international and diverse group of people.

Lessons from Shadow by Shadow Bregman