Overview
Festival is “Double” because it celebrates our discovery, some years ago, of the extraordinary 95% overlap between creative problem-solving and learning. Unbeknownst to the professional practitioners in either field, every creativity-evoking or problem-solving method can be used to create “Superlearning” effects and radically accelerate learning. Most “Superlearning” and accelerated learning practices can be used to facilitate creative problem-solving.

There is also a strong overlap with the human development field, many methods bearing upon the enrichment and extension of human development; child development; human abilities; human performance levels; the quality of experience, human repair; human wholeness; and the adventure of open-ended human discovery. As we continue to discover more overlaps with this field, we may eventually have to call this annual event the Triple Festival.

The Theme for 2010: Seeing 20/20

See with your own eyes and mind — with regard to:

• Education
• Economy
• Environment, and more....

See, with great EEEs and surprising accuracy —

• What features, so very different from today, HAVE to characterize Education by year 2020, in order for western societies and civilization to be viable.

• What differences in Economic policy and practice MUST emerge by year 2020, in order for western countries and the global economy to be or become viable.

• What differences in policy and in the Environment must have developed by year 2020, in order for our world and civilization to be viable.

— and what may have developed in your own personal life and experience by year 2020? Because personal stakes and prior opinion tend to affect one's reading of the data, getting accurate information here is more of a challenge but there are still ways to achieve this. Engage your own senses and your own mind, and come to your own conclusions.

For years we've used en scenario explorations of the future as a way to shed light on the present, and as a source of our various inventions and proposed solutions. On a number of occasions we've facilitated groups through the Beachhead experience for these explorations.

Now we are expanding our reach and our services, going beyond that process as but one of the ways we can usefully explore the future — "the" future. For highly probable futures and projections of trends, we will "visit" en scenario "the" future as it would have been had we not observed it. Observing it changes it — by how much, we don't know, but we can usually get a pretty good idea from context. But many of our best inventions, ideas and solutions have come from deliberately improbable futures experienced just for the sake of such discoveries.

You, personally, will experience much that may surprise — as will we. And, as at our other Double Festivals, you will be in very good company, experiencing through live processes as well as through other types of presentation, some of which are unique to these Double Festivals.

Part of the Plan —

We will run a Beachhead-like process on each of the three E's, interspersed with dynamite presenters and presentations on related topics. At least some of you reading this have experienced and responded well to Beachhead. (Here is one script of instructions for Beachhead; another type of en scenario process is in Winsights No. 76, "Visiting the Future: March 27, 2472." With the rich variety of en scenario-type processes featured here, you will gain surprisingly in your abilities to predict and even to modify likely futures, to project outcomes of decisions and of trends, and of course will gain insights from future contexts for inventions, innovations, solutions to problems, and hitherto unspotted opportunities.

Meanwhile, you'll be truly astonished at the resources we are bringing to bear on the Education and Economy themes. And the new world-wide debate over GeoEngineering that erupted in July 2009 has enriched further where we can go on the Environment and environmental policy front. Plus, we have major consensus-finding methods (see, for example, "Consensus and Syntheses" in Winsight No. 99, September/October 2007), ready to fire off on any debates which emerge in our Double Festival.

This eighteenth annual Double Festival began as a celebration of the discovery that creativity and learning are truly almost the same thing. That techniques for ingeniously solving problems - and there are literally hundreds of various such methods in professional use today - each can also serve as a profoundly accelerative learning method, so there are literally hundreds of methods for profoundly improving and accelerating learning. Of course: both sets of techniques are methods for figuring things out. Most of these methods also spill over into being ways to improve human performance, abilities, and quality of experience.

As early as in the 1980s, we had made the decision that our Double Festival was not going to be just a showcase for Project Renaissance, but a true intersection and meeting point for multiple disciplines, approaches and programs to meet and exchange and co-discover, a practice we continue to this day and seek to extend.

We also made the decision to walk our talk, designing and redesigning our conference format to ensure every participant the richest possible involvement in and understanding of what is presented, and to ensure every presenter the richest and most positively helpful feedback discussions and thinktank activities on their own issues, so that everyone gains. See Formats for some of our ways to make conferences into the extraordinary mutual growth and explosion into further discoveries that they can and should be.