On Artist-Athlete Hybrids

On a recent Tuesday night I got a chance to experience two different roles--the artist and the athlete. We rarely combine these two, and often friends of one world are shocked to find out that I "play" in the other. But how different are they, really?

I began the night as part of the Adam and Dharmesh Show (see picture, right), where juggler-extraordinaire Dharmesh Bhagat and I put on a program for teens at the Lincoln Park Cultural Center that combined music, song, dance and juggling. We call it our P.T.S. show, where all participants practice one of the key groundrules that fosters creativity--Permission To Suck--and in just 50 minutes learn, rehearse and perform in a show that integrates playing musical instruments and songwriting (my contribution) along with dancing and juggling (Dharmesh). Our goal is to stretch all participants' creative flexibility and change their mindset about what they are capable of performing, regardless of past experience or previously assessed skill.

At the end of that full-group performance, I ran off to perform for another group, this being the final championship game of our co-ed software league, where I pitch for the Cupcakes team. On my very first high-arcing pitch, their leadoff hitter smashed a bullet ball directly back at me, ricocheting off my arm (see left) as I was pierced with considerable pain. I kept playing, throb and all, pitching perhaps as well as I ever have, and we came together as a team to field and score with skill and consistency. We won going away.

Yes, the Cupcakes (named thanks to our sponsor Swirlz Cupcakes, orange t-shirts and all, see below) were indeed the champions, and gratifyingly so, after the razzing we had already experienced due to our rather unathletic name. That razzing underscores the tension that often exists between our conception of athletes and artists--masculine, hard and tough (the Killers) vs. feminine, soft and emotional (The Cupcakes). Many cultural forces are at work against the Athlete-Artist hybrid in the U.S.

But that's actually ridiculous. Many creative arts require tremendous physical dexterity, whether handling a paint brush or performing at our P.T.S. show. And the truly great athletes--I think of amazing quarterbacks and crafty pitchers, Walter Payton and Wayne Gretzky, a Steve Nash pass, a Roger Federer between-the-legs shot--are creative magicians. Creativity, as I've said before, is the great merging of polarities, the ability to access both the masculine and feminine, the soft and the hard, the mind and the heart. And because great innovations are often hybrids--or come from hybrid-thinking--we have a lot to gain from bringing athletes and artists together, and not just for one person on one evening. What would it look like if athletes and artists joined forces more often and learned from each other and performed together? Here's to the Cupcakes!

Diversity Jam for an Insular World

This morning I decided to sit in the Dunkin' Donuts at Belmont and Clark here in Chicago to watch the morning rush and see who really travels through that small corner of time and place.

I'm happy to report, in a too-segregated city, an astounding diversity in line. All ages and sizes. All shades of faces, white through dark brown. Tight black jeans with rolled cuffs, fleece vests over button-down shirts, dangling waist chains, sorority sweatshirts. Work boots and high heeled boots; heads with hoods, hats and bandanas. Ipods and phones, but thankfully not as many out as I might predict. A familiar-looking Allen Ginsburg-like homeless man comes in, sits, and leaves. Each person I watch is different--their walk and faces reflect a universe of relationships and work and attitudes likely to be quite different from my own. It's a great reminder that my reality is just one island of experience and perception.

How insular is your world? Our insularity--similar friends, routines, activities--is one of the culprits that limits our creativity. Because part of us craves order and simplicity in the chaos of life, we can get trapped in insularity, whether working in silos, going to the same bars, or having friends almost entirely of similar ages and social circles.

That's why I was particularly pleased to see an expanding diversity at our Creativity Jam (photo below, right, is from a previous jam) last night in Chicago. The Jam itself is an opportunity to experiment outside our insular islands, in this case with song and music and rhythm. But what has marked these Jams as unusual in the past couple years has been the different ages attending. Where else are we able to have a communal experience with different generations not only present but contributing and expressing themselves in front of others? (Please share if you have this experience regularly or on occasion.) For me and most people I know, it's rare to have a social activity with ages 5 to 65+ represented, and here we were with that very group, people in almost every decade in life singing together, expressing a little piece of themselves along with others they don't typically spend time with. Add to that a multiplicity of instruments coming together at the same time--guitars and drums and percussion, along with keyboards, violin, mandolin, ukelele and more--and you got yourself a genuine diversity jam.

Where can you go and what can you do to explore your own flexibility and experience your own brand of diversity jam?

The Simpsons & TV Breakthroughs

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The incomparable Matt Groening (his self-portrait, below right), creator of the Simpsons, spoke here last week as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Alongside cartoonist and former college friend Lynda Barry (who frankly overshadowed him with her bubbly storytelling), Groening (pronounced "Gray-ning") shared a bit about how he got started and a few keys to the success of the Simpsons, still making us laugh and cringe after 21 years.

Amazingly, he still publishes his original "Life in Hell" cartoon, which he considers his "foundation." This says a lot about the man, maintaining this 30-year weekly streak despite the Simpsons' incredible run and his many interests and responsibilities, which has recently included developing Futurama, another animated show on Comedy Central. Groening uniquely balances the creative polarities of serious and silly, of preparation and spontaneity, like few others.

I believe the Simpsons to be one of the great breakthroughs in television history and one of the most enduring creative acts of our time. Breakthroughs are distinctive in not being predictable from what preceded them--and irrevocably changing the landscape of the domain. Two key creative breakthroughs I see in television this generation:
1. The Simpsons. Even though there were cartoons before, the Simpsons created a human-surrogate family and world in a new way, using the limitless parameters of animation to allow us through them to experience realistic and fantastical turn of events and not be worse for wear. Combine that with rare intelligence, more jokes per frame than ever imagined, creative range and satirical commentary on the day's issue, and you have a breakthough.
2. Reality Television: While there has always been an audience for realistic characters and real-life stories, the breakthough here was in thinking, Why not actual people? Sure "Candid Camera" had at least hinted in this direction and clearly the advent of cheaper video enabled producers to edit hours of film to capture the low percentage of interesting moments. But it was the crafting of narrative--telling a compelling story with real emotions and unpredictable turns reflective of real life--that has resulted in millions of addicted viewers and the prevalence of a new kind of program that did not exist before.

Developing our creative capacities includes cultivating our ability to make breakthroughs, so let me ask: What TV breakthroughs am I missing here? What do you see as the hallmark breakthrough innovations of television and what enabled them break through?

Accessing Multiple Intelligences to Break Through

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As a culture--and as individuals and organizations--we more than ever need to make some breakthroughs. Sometimes this can be in the form of a "Breakthrough Innovation" that changes the way we work, communicate, access information, or structure our healthcare system (this would be a "miracle breakthrough," I'm afraid). Other times it's you as an individual suddenly seeing differently and getting insight that can make your life a lot better.

The creativity competency here for you to build is flexibility, which includes your ability to break out of a paradigm or mindset that you may not realize you're stuck in. Here's a mindset challenge I like to offer in my creativity sessions:
A great mathematician determined that half of eight can actually be zero. How is that possible?

If you can't figure this out immediately (usually only about 1/3 of people can), it means you need to change the way you're thinking, which researchers refer to as "breaking set" or "blockbusting." I call this the skill of shifting--your perspective, your lens, sometimes even your attitude. Understanding and consciously flexing our multiple intelligences is one way to do just that.

Multiple Intelligence theory, widely accepted in the world of education, came out of the work of Harvard researcher Howard Gardner, a great paradigm-shifter himself, who studied prodigies and people with brain damage to build his theory that intelligence cannot be measured as a single entity. In addition to the IQ-associated S.A.T. intelligences--mathematical/logical and verbal--he delineated at least six other autonomous intelligences that all healthy people possess, but not necessarily in equal strengths. They include the four above--visual-spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal and bodily-kinesthetic--as well two others, auditory-musical and natural. These intelligences are quite different from each other--thus you can be great with words and terrible at math, smart in your head but not smart in the world. The key to understand about intelligences is that we are all smart. But it's how we are smart that matters, especially when it comes to our flexibility and creativity. Flexibly acessing different intelligences is not only a hallmark of creative people, but it is also essential for teachers and presenters who need to engage people who learn differently.

Consciously shifting your intelligence is a technique I use in brainstorming/ideation sessions to get you to think in ways you hadn't considered. When you're stuck, ask yourself, "What if I think about this visually or interpersonally or naturally?" Most creative business breakthroughs--ranging from wearing your music to the latest software program, from an experiential marketing campaign to the new restaurant that feels like it's outdoors--come from insight originating from a flexibility among intelligences, a movement from logical to visual, from words to moods, from the man-made to the natural.

Now back to our mindset challenge. To figure out why half of eight is zero, just shift from your mathematical intelligence to your visual...

The Future at our Fingertips

I've been waiting for a commercially viable Dick Tracy watch--you know, the all-in-one watch/phone/television/computer that will surely adorn all our wrists soon enough--but this video (below) makes me realize that the future may depend less on what we wear and more on what we project.

Pattie Maes and her research lab at MIT have actualized through the SixSense Device a different way of accessing information, one that I never considered before and one that we may all become much more familiar with in a few years. She explains that the device can act as a "sixth sense" to equip you with more ways of navigating your world.

Great breakthroughs and inventions come from thinking differently about a challenge. The aspiration for many businesses and inventors is to come up with a Breakthrough Innovation (as opposed to incremental innovation), which can be defined as a creative occurrence that cannot be predicted by what has proceeded it. The question becomes this: If you're unable to figure out a new way based on what has happened before, then what do you do? One of the tools I use in workshops to help people access different perspectives is shifting intelligences, based on the original research on Multiple Intelligences by Harvard's Howard Gardner. The move out of our logical intelligence to our visual intelligence, for example, may have helped this team of innovators to see a solution that hadn't been considered before. More on Multiple Intelligences next time.

If you go to the 7 minute mark of this video, you'll see there isn't really a need for a physical watch on your wrist if you can draw one yourself! Who knows, maybe in ten years we'll all be installing our ultimate "Sixth Sense" brain implant.

Halloween Identity Instructions

Sure, I loved the candy-accumulation of Halloween as a kid, but I think I love the holiday even more as an adult because it gives us rare permission to try out a new self, to experiment with who we think we are. In case you haven't decided on (or whether to wear) a costume yet, here are my creative instructions:

1. Use the opportunity to truly explore an identity quite different from yours. Come on, time to initiate.

2. Consult your inside to figure out what you want to be on the outside. What do you feel like being? Whose identity would you like to check out? Look around your home for possible costume components that call to you to put them on.

3. Avoid the standard personas and come up with something that you've never been before or perhaps you are creating just this once.

4. Stay in character all night.

Taking on another identity is a great way to build the creativity competency of flexibility--your talent in appreciating different perspectives and experiencing the "other." To be flexible means that you are willing and able to try on different coats and see from different lenses, to visit diverse neighborhoods in the city and in your mind.

It's not easy to take on another, especially unusual, identity, even on Halloween. People want to figure out "who you are" and don't have a lot of patience for something they can't easily categorize. Here in Chicago I've found people are hesitant to stay in character even if well-costumed, preferring to meet you at a party with their real name and the literal "What do you do?" question. Screw 'em. This is Halloween. Commit to your identity, do what feels true to him/her/it, and forgive yourself later for any indiscretions. Believe me, I know, as I was extremely unpopular last year as "Manimal," the hair sprouting, woman-repelling hybrid man/animal; and almost entirely unknown the year before as the great Sufi poet Rumi (San Franciscans certainly would have known me and more actively welcomed my poetic proclamations). I did get some needs met, though, as "Mr. ExSqueezeMe" the year before (see shirt, minus a few squeezables, in photo above), where I used a glue gun to attach random touchable items, from a toilet paper role to stress balls, and encouraged interaction (and hugs).

You might get a kick out of an article I wrote a few years back when I was so taken by the colored leaves of the moment that I transformed into "Leaf Man":

"It's Halloween and I find myself going down into the bowels of Excalibur, a downtown bar, to enter the Red Masque Ball. Dozens of Chicagoans are in disguise, and I quickly find myself chatting with a Martha Stewart here, a bloodied biker there, an assortment of devils and angels everywhere. I hang out with a large, green cylindrical walking bong, while Marilyn Monroe and several versions of felines purr nearby..." Click to read entire article.

So Happy Halloween week to you, and may you use this opportunity to expand the confines of who you are and gain that special creative insight when you take on an identity that is not your own...

Awarding Innovation in Chicago

"Chicago is always changing, and technology and innovation are the keys to our future," proclaimed our not-as-popular-these-days Mayor Daley, making a still-welcome appearance at the Chicago Innovation Awards on Tuesday night at the lovely downtown Goodman Theater. Now in its 8th year, the Awards celebrate the creative spirit of the Chicago region by recognizing and honoring the city’s most innovative new products and services.

The evening was truly a top-notch event--well-produced videos, brief and appreciative acceptances by honorees, local luminaries in attendance, and quite a bit of fun. Our congenial founders and hosts, innovation firm president Tom Kuczmarski and former Chicago Sun-Times business editor Dan Miller, brought their own creative spirit to the proceedings, at one point donning track suits and "popping and locking" with the much younger members of Stick & Move Dance Crew. The stories of start-ups and worthy ideas made manifest were inspiring and eye-opening. As this Businessweek article notes in an overview (with an excellent slide show) of the winning honorees, "Innovation requires taking risks, and these are risk-averse times." But somehow these innovators were able to buck the too common current business paralysis. The winners ranged from a solo firefighter invention of the "Hero Pipe" to a mom-friendly product of a large corporation (Abbott Labs) to the venerable Art Institute with its new "Modern Wing." Other web-centric start ups included:Groupon: A website harnessing collective buying power to offer unbelievable daily deals for your hunger (restaurants), social life (dance classes) and health (acupuncture).
Every Block: Who knew you could get the news as local as your own block or zip code?
Visible Vote: This is an application that makes it easy to know who represents you, what they've voted for, and describes what's at issue. So needed.

Right now I'm looking through the goodie bag I got at the Awards--let's see, magazines, a towel from "rescue-vac," an actual "handi-ramp," a fire hydrant stress-toy from "Hero Pipe," a nutrition square, pens, flashlights, and lo and behold, a Groucho funny nose and glasses, courtesy of the Goodman Theatre, whose "Animal Crackers" is playing until November 1st.

Okay, maybe not the deluxe goodie bag of the Academy Awards, but an entertaining and inspiring event proving that innovation is not dead here in the midwest.

Lucinda's Eyes

The first thing you notice when Lucinda Williams takes the Park West stage as part of her three-day Chicago run this week is her more-intense-than-usual eye-liner and eye-shadow. Once she starts singing in her melancholy, husky voice, her eyes roll up and, though visible, seem to disappear into an ancient reverie of longing.

Here's the deal on getting older: everyone around you is also getting older too, including your favorite musicians and bands you grew up with or even more recently discovered. At a certain point in your life Lucinda Williams might have appeared--she's been singing for more than 30 years--when you needed someone to help express your own raw regrets, your deeper hunger and desires. Now in her 50s, Lucinda proves, as singer after singer we've loved keep proving: age doesn't prevent us from continuing to perform music with an individual signature of passion and style.

She is one of those wonderful, original hybrids who doesn't quite fall into an easy category, combining the specificity of a storytelling folk singer, the down-home blues of a spurned lover, the wailing guitars of country and the hip-shaking beat of rock 'n roll. A southern woman used to the company of men, she is the soulmate sister to both Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen.

Her 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was Williams' breakthrough into the mainstream and received a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. She shared some of those songs with us, which I believe most reflect her creative originality--in particular, her willingness to reveal her raw, often pained heart for all to see and hear. Her songs take you to American cities that perhaps you've never visited before in search of understanding and lost love.

"You took my joy and I want it back," she repeats in only the way she can in "Joy" (see video below), searching for her lost joy in West Memphis and Slidell, Louisiana. In "Metal Firecracker," the name referring to the busses she toured in for years (which she once shared as the only woman among too many men), she sings of a past love: "All I ask/don't tell anybody the secrets/don't tell anybody the secrets/I told you."


Last week we had about 8 guitars, a violin, mandolin, conga drums and perhaps 20 people singing and sweating and revealing a bit of our own original musicial hearts together in a living room at a Creativity Jam. One of the songs we like to play is "Can't Let Go" (see video above), one of Lucinda's most popular and best to jam to. Next time, come join us.

Seeing in a Creative Light

This Saturday night I found myself walking off the elevator into a dark room on the 24th floor of Chicago's John Hancock building. The only thing lit in front of me was a rectangular portion of the floor where two miniature, white water towers stood. For about ten minutes I watched with other barely visible onlookers as a slowly moving light altered our perception of the scene. Shadows shifted and a narrative unfolded, all determined by a changing light source.

This exhibit was the installation work of Jan Tichy, now on display for the Richard Gray Gallery (above is a snapshot of another room with a similar light experience). I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it, and I found myself grappling with a common reaction many of us have when experiencing modern art: Do I like this? Am I engaged by this? What makes this worthy of public acclaim? As other visitors--that night a rather exclusive group of museum directors and art collectors--later heaped praise and made occasionally inscrutable comments, I thought about the age-old question: When it comes to art, what distinguishes creativity?

Remember, creativity does have a clear and consensual (by researchers) definition: something that both is different and has value. As I explain in my talks and workshops, it's not enough just to be unusual or strange. Being creative requires integrating two fundamentally different forces: one that opens to the never-quite-imagined-before (divergence) and one that narrows to what is appropriate for the challenge or what "works" (convergence).

What makes art so difficult to evaluate is that the convergence is much more dependent on your reaction. We are unlikely to agree that Tichy's light installations "solves a problem" or "works," as we may be able to for products or other solutions. The convergence piece for artistic creativity has to do with meaning: Does it evoke something meaningful for you? It could just be a feeling, a sense of pleasure, or an intuitive resonance. If you can derive some kind of meaning, then the art is indeed creative for you. The people next to you might not see or feel anything meaningful and therefore the same installation cannot be deemed creative. For them.

Particularly for art, but really for many creative endeavors or insights, creativity is dependent on the interpreter. The eye of the beholder determines whether there is convergence and therefore whether the act or idea is creative.

Personally, I found Tichy's work to satisfy my own creative lens. I particularly appreciated the story of the moving light--which though sometimes puzzling was evocative enough to stir meaning for me. Here's more information about the exhibit in case you want to see whether it lights you:
Jan Tichy: Installations (October 9 – November 24, 2009) consists of nine works made over the past three years and is the artist’s largest solo show to date. Tichy works at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, and photography. Richard Gray Gallery · John Hancock Center · 875 N. Michigan Avenue · Chicago · IL · 60611.(312) 642.8877. Please contact gallery for specific hours.

It's about Time

I got the chance to share my take on creativity and innovation with two different business audiences this week, including an Illinois Technology Association group, comprised of sales and human resource folks who work for technology companies. Many companies talk about the goal or value of a "culture of innovation," but most don't support the time required. Innovation, it turns out, takes actual time--for divergent thinking, to seek out and consider other perspectives, to pilot ideas that might fail, to allow people to pursue what they are passionate about. Time, as these folks can attest, that most employees--and leaders--don't have, or don't make.

A recent report, "Leading Innovation: Insights from the Real World," from the consulting firm Achieve Global emphasizes three key challenges to having an innovative culture: Time, the existing organizational structure, and insufficient top-down support for innovation. "Time is an ever-present dilemma for managers and executives," the report states. "Both groups struggle to make innovation a top priority, even when its value and strategic importance is crystal clear."

Based on more than 40 one-on-one interviews with senior leaders and managers from a cross section of industries both in the United States and internationally, the report discusses five factors that play the greatest roles in fostering organizational innovation:
• Make innovation a strategic priority
• Demonstrate leader commitment
• Create a culture that supports it
• Align systems and processes
• Collaborate broadly

Creating an organizational culture that supports innovation requires the honoring of the time it takes to be creative. It may mean you have to schedule time to think, talk to others, reflect, read, stir up imagination and insight of those around you. As I shared in my talks, Google still keeps its "20% Passion Time" rule--referring to each employee allotted one full day out of five to work on projects they are passionate about (without anyone questioning how they're spending their time). As impractical (and pie-in-the-sky) as that seems to most working people in companies, Google has found that 50% of its new products and services are a direct result of the passion time it supports.

You can download the report here by offering up your name and email (you may have to click on "research"). If you are interested in organizational innovation, I recommend you make the time to read it.