Spring Retreat

After a full few months of speaking and consulting engagements, I am ready to go on retreat, and am heading back to my old home of Northern California for a leadership retreat where I get to be a participant to reflect and renew.

In the past couple months I had the chance to design a special teambuilding program in D.C.--called the Amazing Intelligence Challenge--for 150 staff members of GMAC, which had them taking on many different challenges throughout the city and then returning to the lovely Top of the Town in Arlington, VA, where I emceed a cavalcade of presentations and performances as part of their annual retreat.  I also had a repeat engagement as host of "Who's Got the Biggest FedHead?", a special game show I've designed for the Federal Reserve.

April also included the final Interfaith Community Evening for Poetry Pals, this time bringing together  Muslim and Catholic school communities in the Western Suburbs for an evening of student performances, adult dialogue and a special visit to participate in or witness evening prayer at the mosque that is part of Islamic Foundation School--a real treat.  To get a good sense of what we are up to in Poetry Pals, I encourage to watch these two video slideshows capturing the full school year program: Poetry Pals--Chicago North and Poetry Pals--Lombard.

Here are some visual highlights of my latest.  Wishing you your own spring retreat!

Images from (1) a team building program I led for GMAC in D.C. (the indoor portion!)
(2) a game show I designed and hosted for the Federal Reserve,
(3) a session on collaborative creativity I presented at Catalyst Ranch, and
(4) the final interfaith community evening in the Western Suburbs for Poetry Pals
where we presented poetry keepsakes to partner Catholic and Muslim schools.

Making a Creative Shift: Adam's Story

This Wednesday evening, April 17, Adam will be the final speaker at Juice on the Loose, a celebration of World Creativity and Innovation Week at Catalyst Ranch, one of the premier creative meeting spaces in Chicago, which published another version of this blog here. 

In my mid-twenties, I did not believe I could ever, ever, play music or respectably sing or write my own songs. Even though I loved music, my mindset was: I am not a musician and it would be impossible for me to become one. But thanks to spending time with others who helped me break that mindset and inspired me to risk trying, I became a prolific singer-songwriter and now a speaker-consultant-facilitator who uses music with corporate groups to help them become better at collaborating creatively.  (Read more about my musical story on a past blog here.)

I had always been interested in creativity and self-expression, having studied in college with Teresa Amabile, one of the world’s leading creativity researchers, and, after a master’s degree in education from Stanford, getting an opportunity to experiment with group creativity for five years as an eventual teacher-of-the-year at a top private school in Northern California.  At the time I began to play music, I lived in San Francisco and saw how easy it is for all of us to turn off our creative faucet, to accept being a spectator rather than a creator in our lives.  So I founded the Kreativity Network then, which eventually brought thousands of people together in the Bay Area to share and support their own creativity through events and workshops. When I moved to Chicago ten years ago, Kreativity Network became the name of my business.

As adults in organizations (and in our personal lives), many factors conspire to squelch rather than unleash our creative thinking and doing. To be creative together, a group needs to operate by different ground rules and permission to experiment, to risk, to sometimes be wrong and sometimes fail. I share with clients this definition of innovation: To improve what’s now and to create what’s next.  To do that requires a shift of mindset, a willingness to imagine and envision, that may seem nearly impossible. My job is to help groups and individuals embrace new possibilities, like the possibility, perhaps, that you too could become a musician. 

Now I’ve worked with more than 100 companies and organizations, including McDonald’s, Panasonic, Siemens and the Federal Reserve, to help them build cultures that are more innovative and collaborative. You can check out a brochure here. My goal, through innovation retreats, teambuilding events and strategy sessions, is for the group to experience creativity together so that they bring a new mindset into the way they work. 

I’ve also continued to take my own risks as a creator, now directing a groundbreaking interfaith creativity program for kids called Poetry Pals, recently writing a musical with unusual audience-participation components, and expanding my offerings to include how we are changing as a culture overall, based on research on Cultural Creatives.

So come out to Catalyst Ranch Wednesday night to celebrate creativity and experiment with ideas (and perhaps music…) with me—you might be surprised to find a shift is possible for you too.

Here is the description and bio for my 8:00pm program for Juice on the Loose. All information on the event can be found here. 

Creative Collaboration: Breaking the Creative Ice

How do we go from our left brain, logical side—which many our jobs demand—to our right brain, imaginative side?  And how do we best do that in collaboration with others?  Adam will take us from a left brain understanding of what creativity really is to an interactive exploration of how best to get out of our heads and into the creative moment together.  Using principles from the most creative groups—from improvisational theater to rock bands—you’ll learn key creativity ground rules and skills to help you and colleagues (or friends) be more imaginative together.

BIO

Adam Shames is a creativity expert, organizational consultant and speaker who specializes in innovation, teambuilding and community events, and whose recent clients include Walgreens, Whole Foods and the Federal Reserve.  He is also a musician, poet and executive director of Poetry Pals (www.poetrypals.org), an interfaith non-profit creativity program that brings together Muslim, Jewish and Catholic kids and their communities. A former “Teacher of the Year” with a master’s degree from Stanford University, Adam is the founder of the Kreativity Network (www.kreativity.net), writes about creativity in his “Innovation on my Mind” blog (www.innovationonmymind.com) and is adjunct faculty for Depaul University School of New Learning.  

Embracing Aging and Cultural Innovation

I finally replaced my old picture on the right panel here, which first appeared more than four years ago when I started sharing my ideas and happenings related to creativity and innovation as this blog.  Our online presence has forced all of us to see (or pretend not to see) how quickly we are all changing. When is the last time you updated all your online pictures and profiles? 

It's true, I have aged.  Innovation is in many ways about embracing aging--change, risk and unknown possibilities--and letting go of that which no longer serves us. Not easy to do but I am trying.

I'm shocked to see it's already April, but I'm thrilled that the birds are chirping again and much is going on in my life and work in service of cultural innovation--both good changes for our culture at large and among our individual organizational and team cultures.  Here are a few creative happenings coming up and recently passed I'd like to share:

If you're in Chicago you can find me Thursday emcee'ing Cafe Finjan, an unusual evening of interfaith collaboration that includes performances by Muslim and Jewish artists.  The following Thursday I encourage you to join me at the April 11th Envisioneers event, which is a follow up from last November's Envisioning a World Transformed at the Nature Museum, featuring Chicago speakers on the forefront of social, ecological, educational and spiritual culture change. It will be a chance for cultural innovators to gather--greens mixing with spiritual folks, artists with activists, conscious capitalists with healers. 

Adam warms up the crowd as part a 4-school Interfaith
Community Evening hosted by Poetry Pals in March.

Poetry Pals, where I am part-time executive director, celebrated a special Interfaith Community Evening for its Chicago North hubs in March and will be hosting one more in the Western Suburbs next week on April 10th.  Check out the Poetry Pals website or Facebook page to learn more.

Finally, check out the collage below for a glimpse at some of my recent gigs.  Wishing you a very happy spring and may you use this renewal time to embrace your own forms of personal and cultural innovation.

Recent engagements include a creativity session for interior design firm Soucie Horner,
a communication and collaboration day for a team at Walgreens headquarters,
a Greenheart dinner with Chicago changemakers
and team facilitation for new MBA students at the University of Chicago.

Innovation Is Still On My Mind

2013 has opened up new opportunities for me in my role as a speaker, consultant and educator specializing in live innovation and community events.  My outfit sometimes changes, depending on whether I am engaging corporate or educational groups, but the impulse is similar: To help individuals be more creative and to foster more innovative and collaborative cultures.  Here are a couple visual highlights of very recent events:

Adam leading innovation retreat for technology consulting firm Burwood Group

Adam leading Poetry Pals program: Muslim, Jewish and Catholic students visit
Sacred Heart School chapel and write and perform poetry together

Check out the new website for Poetry Pals here, where I am executive director running four current programs in the Chicago area.

Shift Time

It's Shift Time. For me and for you. 2012 is coming to an end, and while the world is unlikely to blow up on December 21^st, I am convinced of this: Look and you shall find a profound shift happening. 

I've done what I can to be polite and professional in this Innovation on my Mind blog of 4 years and 170 articles, so allow me to be a bit more direct: How about giving your inner-Skeptic a well-deserved rest on this one? Why not take this opportunity--as conversation about a global shift abounds--to give your old dream of love and purpose at least a walk around the block. That means shutting off the need to prove that nothing is changing or that believers are idiots. That humans suck or you suck or I suck and there is no Shift.  Tune out your monkey mind and tune in to this intuitive truth we share--that it is indeed time to shift. We need to shift, as a country, as a culture, as a planet and as individuals. 

It's definitely been a shifting year for me. As I've blogged about these past months, I've lost my father, been involved in new and growing projects, taken risks in leadership, in travel, in trying to stand up for and act in alignment with my values.  I continue to see how many blocks, bad habits and fears I have; how I am challenged by feeling isolated and unsupported, and by the way others react or often don't react to what I'm trying to do; and how much I let other people take my power away.

So to me and to you I ask these two Shifty questions:
1. When will you stop the incessant distraction-seeking and take some time to listen to your own inner wisdom? 
2. When will you stop letting other people take your power away and start showing up in the world more fully awake--as the creative, empowered source of ideas, action and influence that you know you can be?

Yes, let's use this end-of-2012 opportunity to actually wake the fuck up.  

"To be nobody but yourself ­—

in a world which is doing its best,

day and night,

to make you everybody else ­—

means to fight the hardest battle

which any human being can fight;

and never stop fighting."                           --e.e. cummings

Interesting and Interested: In Memory of my Father

"Everyone wants to be interesting -- but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out." ~John Gardner

To be both interesting and interested--that to me has long been the measure of the kind of person I want to be around and want to be. My father Martin Shames, who died last week at 77, was just that kind of person. More on his remarkable life below.

As we close the chapter on a presidential campaign that mostly wasted months of our collective attention, it is more vital than ever for us to be interested--to engage in the question of where we are heading as a culture and a country. If you live in Chicago, I invite you to join me for Envisioning a World Transformed, a day-long event on November 18th that asks us to imagine and play a role in creating a thriving future.  The event, hosted by Greenheart Transforms (a Chicago-based organization dedicated to personal and social transformation and part of the international cultural exchange non-profit CCI-Greenheart), includes speakers reflecting change in different arenas--ecological, social, educational and spiritual--and an opportunity to connect with other difference-makers and cultural innovators. Because of my relationship with the host, I can offer you reduced tickets for the full day, including lunch, for only $35! Just sign up here and select the "membership" option. 
My dad and I were different, but I know he appreciated my creative urges and aspirations. When he died suddenly of a heart attack last week, I got a chance to spend some meaningful post-superstorm days with my family and friends in Philadelphia thinking about the life of this special man.  Marty had a rare combination of kindness, curiosity and intelligence that made him successful as a businessman and much beloved by almost everyone who met him. People felt comfortable around him not just because he had interesting things to say but because he took interest in others and the world. He was a reader and a writer, constantly sending relevant articles to friends and family. He was a lifelong student--he loved history and Judaism and geneology--as well as a teacher, always patient and articulate. He loved to tell stories and to hear yours. His natural way of being--interesting and interested with a smile--put others at ease, whether they were complete strangers without obvious commonalities (he'd find them), our English-deficient Argentinian cousins  (he attempted broken Spanish), or a new nervous girlfriend (who would be laughing in seconds).

Originally of very humble origins and immigrant parents growing up in the Bronx, NY, Marty truly lived the American dream. He graduated from NYU (getting an MBA before they were even called that), learned some life lessons as a proud Marine, somehow snagged a beautiful woman from above his station, and took her and three growing children with him to Chicago as he quickly ascended the corporate ranks as a disciplined and effective financial manager. By 42 he became the president of the largest division of the largest picture frame company (Intercraft) in the world. Later he was the CFO of AAMCO Industries before becoming a business consultant specializing in the leasing industry.

I admired his courage as he switched professional gears in his 50s, carving out a varied consulting practice and easing into a role as advisor and mentor to many.  He never retired; just last month he was orchestrating a complicated final sale on a business he helped found many years ago. 

But mostly I admired him as a person. He wasn't flashy, but he knew how to run one heck of a Passover seder, welcoming loved ones and strangers alike, coaxing their participation, singing off-key and being the center and sage of the family. He knew how to be alone and he knew how to be with others. He appreciated what he had and never forgot where he came from.  He was a real mensch, a good, good man, and I loved him.

52 years of marriage with his beloved Joan

Creativity Flowers from Diversity

Check out some creative inspiration from the web: You are the Creative Type and Accidental Inventions.

America is the grand experiment in diversity. In this blog, I want to give an update on my efforts to build bridges among diverse communities through my work with the non-profit kids program Poetry Pals. But I'm going to begin with this assertion: Much of our innovative success in the U.S. has come from the mingling and melding of diverse cultures, perspectives and talents. As economist Richard Florida has established, cities that embrace diversity are more creative and economically vibrant. As other research has shown, spaces that optimize random meetings and interactions among diverse people--whether that be an urban center or work office--result in more innovation.  As we all know, the more we are exposed to different cultures, attitudes and practices, the more possibilities we see. 

Creativity flowers when we get out of isolation, and a new trend to foster innovation (and combat isolation of the growing virtual workforce) is the collaborative work centers that are popping up around Chicago.  I recently visited 1871, a spacious co-working center for digital start ups, which opened this year in Chicago's Merchandise Mart. Run by the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center with many partners and sponsors, it's a 50,000-square-foot facility that provides Chicago startups with affordable workspace and access to mentors, programming, educational resources, potential investors and a community of like-minded entrepreneurs. I also checked out the Green Exchange, another Chicago private-public partnership project, where green-oriented businesses can mingle. While I'm not sure it yet lives up to its claim as the "country's largest sustainable business community," it is a model of a sustainable building that can serve as a hub for diverse businesses and conversations related to the emerging green economy.

For diversity sake, let's change hemispheres and listen in on a video here (and below) at the Creative Innovation conference last year in Australia that addresses issues related to creativity and diversity.

Diversity flowering: Muslim, Jewish & Catholic students

Fall Update from Poetry Pals

In addition to my consulting and creativity work with adults and organizations, I am also executive director of Poetry Pals, which I'm happy to report is now gearing up for another year of interfaith collaboration and creativity.

Poetry Pals is a Chicago-area non-profit creativity program that brings together young people (8-12 years old) from diverse cultural and faith communities. Our programs—including our groundbreaking signature tri-faith program connecting Muslim, Jewish and Catholic schools—have already given more than 1000 elementary school children and their families the opportunity to share their culture and express themselves through poetry, dialogue, rhythm and song.  Our mission is to build bridges and relationships among young people and their communities in order to foster understanding, cooperation and peace in a multicultural and multi-faith society.

We were blessed with a significant donation this summer from a family foundation, which has energized us to continue to reach out to new schools and communities for partnership. If you are part of a day school, Sunday school or youth program and are interested in partnering your kids with a different faith/cultural community, please contact us at adam@poetrypals.org.

For the second straight year, we will be running a tri-faith (Muslim, Jewish and Catholic partnership) program with our Northern Suburbs Hub. 4th graders at MCC Fulltime School in Morton Grove, Solomon Schechter in Northbrook and Sacred Heart in the city will meet for at least three sessions and a special Interfaith Community Evening, scheduled for March 6, 2013, when the public is invited.  Last year's Community Evening was a special occasion with 200 kids, parents, siblings and community members sharing an evening of dialogue and performances.  Check out this overview and pictures from host Solomon Schechter.

We are planning a couple programs in our Western Suburbs Hub this year, renewing a 3-year previous partnership between Islamic Foundation School in Villa Park and St. Pius X Catholic school in Lombard, and are in the process of partnering a southside Muslim school and city Catholic school. We are also in conversation with numerous faith communities and Sunday schools, and are excited not only to bring more Muslim, Catholic and Jewish communities together, but also to include new Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and Baha'i community groups as well.

Poetry Pals poet-educators and participating teachers

We've recently expanded our board, which is now at work improving our infrastructure, strategizing for more funding and outreach, and creating  a special event for friends and supporters soon. We are also in the process of adding more paid Poet-Educators to our group, with a training coming up soon.

Donations are always appreciated and needed so that we can offer our programs to communities at a reduced rate--and help make Poetry Pals into a sustainable non-profit.  You can donate here through Paypal on our website or mail a check (please make out to "AI Partnership for the Arts") to: Donna Yates, 400 E. Ohio Street, #1002, Chicago, IL 60611.

For the quickest overview of Poetry Pals: Watch this Chicago Tribune video. 

Visit the Poetry Pals website and connect with us on Facebook.

So here's to the great American advantage--our diversity.  While sometimes it's challenging to get out of our own isolation, tribe, routine or box, there are creative and rewarding prizes that come from connecting, combining ideas and sharing perspectives.