If you want to understand the mainsprings of human-action, then understanding the remembering self is more important than the experiencing self.

Politicians often forget that people are much more complex, and are a mix of many identities – and each of these identities can be of differing importance to the individual.

There's an adage, 'you don't ask? You don't get!' And in the curious world of humans, this applies more than you'd expect. You'd be astonished at how many people kick themselves after an event not having secured the contact they wanted to, or speaking to the person they had aimed for. In truth, this came down to not being bold enough.

It's about catching that surge of emotion, be it offense or anger, usually incited by someone attempting to ignite your social identity or signal an outgroup threat, with a likely aim to shape your thoughts or actions.

The essence of this connection lies in an enduring quest to effect positive change in the world. The judgement criteria revolve around whether the individual in question endeavored to make the world a better place.

Habituation is a very basic mechanism. It's something we find in every neuron and every system of our brain, including our fundamental abilities like perception. Essentially, we stop responding to and perceiving things that are not changing or are changing very gradually.

The reality is that most consumers aren't excited by incremental changes. To capture consumers' attention and make the market take notice, you need meaningful innovation—something genuinely new.

Social synchrony is a big feature of human behaviour—it's a weird thing if you think about it, but we do things like marching in time and parading and singing in choirs in ways that are highly coordinated and synchronised.

If you feel scared; the starting point is to understand why. You need to then understand how to make the fear work for you – if an emotion doesn't work for you, it works against you.

If your strategy is to do everything, you have no strategy at all.

Design is the great 're-configurer' of problems for business…for example design takes an engineering solution for transmitting signals called a phone and reconfigures it into a hyper complex problem of glass and metal shapes, etc.

Rather than the emerging markets, or weaker economies, this problem originated in the most sophisticated and advanced financial markets because those are the markets where leverage was the greatest and people took the most advantage of it.