Marty Avery

Marty Avery is a business advisor who collaborates with business founders and leaders to design and implement prosperity strategies. She has been consulted by the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Women in Business as well as NextMEDIA & Fortune Magazine. Marty has presented on trends affecting business at several CEO forums, and at Buzz–a CEO think tank in California. Chief Catalyst at What If?, faculty alumna of the Canadian Film Centre’s Media lab and at the Banff Centre’s BNMI, Marty’s passion is using the power of networks and connection to build a world where you can extend your reach and generate new realities.

using the power of networks and connection to build a world in which you can extend your reach and generate new realities.

Questions are the locksmiths to possibility and transformation. When you find the right questions to ask, your imagination opens up and new worlds emerge.

Voodoo from TEDxWaterloo: Sitting front row 1 hour before I was to go on stage, I heard The Voice in my head. It told me I must change my talk and open with verse from Romper Room--a vintage kids TV show. "No way! I won't do it. Go away!" I thought back at The Voice. Again it pressured, "Start with 'Romper bomper stomper boo, tell me tell me tell me true, Magic Mirror tell me today, did all my friends have fun at play?" Seriously?! No!!! I can't do that. It's too out there. I don't have a prop mirror to look through at "all my friends". I won't do that! A 3rd time The Voice spoke. I fled back stage to the green room, found a box cutter and cardboard, then nearly sliced my index finger off making the Magic Mirror (note packing-tape bandage). I started the talk as The Voice suggested, peering through cardboard mirror. Nervous I was sooooo "out there". Afterward, several people told me it took them to childhood. Plus,Romper Room originated in Waterloo!!! How'd The Voice know that? How??!

Thinking sideways. I possess Zoom-out Zoom-back superpower. I can go out into the unimagined future, fully experience it as real, then bring that vision back to here and now wrapped in a vivid story.