Creative Personalities and Polarities

“Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk—the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set. We need both of these programs. But whereas the first tendency requires little encouragement or support from outside to motivate behavior, the second can wilt if it is not cultivated.” ~Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Creativity ultimately is a balancing act between the heart and the mind. You have to be able to access your heart, feelings, imagination, impulsiveness and uniqueness--necessary for divergent thinking--and also bring in your head, your mind, your best judgment, your convergent thinking. Most of us are pretty good at employing our judging mind but it's easy for the heart to become more and more inert, especially as adults in work situations.

The great researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (as in, that "chick-sent-me-high), whose books on creativity and flow have been essential contributions toward understanding peak creative performance, describes creative personalities as complex, containing contradictory extremes. Creative people, he found, are more flexible, "able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy.”

They are able to embrace polarities in a way many cannot, and Csikszentmihalyi found these to be some of the most important integrated creative traits:

Divergent and Convergent Thinking
Wisdom and Childishness
Rebelliousness and Traditionalism
Extraversion and Introversion
Playfulness and Perseverance
Passion and Detachment
Risk-taking and Caution

The ability to embrace these opposite-pole traits is part of the flexibility competency of creativity, and the facility to move flexibly among different mindsets, perspectives and fields distinguish the most creative among us. But actually mind and heart are not polar opposites. The opposite of heart is fear, and it is those two that are most incompatible (you can't have an open heart when you are afraid). For a while I've been playing with this theory shown in the diagram--that there are three main currents running through us at any time, which I'll call heart, mind and fear.

As long as we have any fear, we can't be our most creative. If we only have mind we can be smart (like a computer), but that only goes so far. Only heart and we are feeling and open but not necessarily able to communicate or make something work. It is the intersection and integration of mind and heart, the smaller red current shown, that make up our optimal creative state. What currents are running through you right now? Am I missing one or do you see any revisions needed to this simple model?

Being a Creator not a Spectator

To become more creative, we need to seek out opportunities to participate and interact more, to be the creator rather than just the spectator in our lives. Our culture for many reasons prefers us to be a more passive spectator, to spend more of our time consuming entertainment rather than generating our own, purchasing the latest doohickey rather than inventing things ourselves. And when we go out to explore the world, most of us get comfortable with repeating the same kinds of experiences--watch a movie, have dinner, meet friends at a bar (a favorite pasttime in Chicago). Though certainly it's "active" to go out to bars or shows, I notice here in Chicago that most people prefer to keep to themselves, rarely speaking or interacting with others outside their own pods of friends, staying in a bubble of familiar boundaries.

Well, I say it's time for us to pop our bubbles, explore new and unfamiliar experiences, and find ways to be part of the action rather than just being passive receptacles on the sidelines. The more bubble-popping and exploration we do, the more we cultivate the key creativity competency of flexibility.

This weekend I decided to take a dip into waters that perhaps you haven't tried--the local drum scene. Yes, in Chicago and most cities there are people who get together to make rhythm for reasons communal, musical and spiritual. I checked out a Taiko drumming performance in Rogers Park, led by one of our local drum masters, John Yost. I saw that there would also be a community drum--i.e., opportunities to participate--so I brought along some rhythm devices of my own (drum, shaking apple, castanets, see below). At different points of the evening, including in between the sets of amazing Japanese-based drumming performances, people like me in the audience became the creators, building a rhythm together in the moment, instead of just waiting for the next act. The room filled with a rising sound of aliveness and possibility, something anyone can explore (see John's site or google for drum circles near you).

Okay, it's true that I do have a mission to get people to play more music, to jam together, because I believe that participating in music elevates our creativity and connects people in ways few other activities do (Not to mention that you are never too old to learn and sing/play, so get started today). Last week I hosted a music jam at my home (see below), where a dozen of us were all able to create together as participators in a group experiment that stretched us to collaborate and improvise and sing, and didn't require us to consume anything.

What are other ways can we create rather than spectate? How else can we more actively engage in the world while out on the town? What social options have you found that lead to real participation rather than just purchase-and-sit?

Is Creativity Incompatible with Business?

Most businesses begin with an innovation, a creative idea that is special and needed enough to lead to nice financial returns. During the start up Phase 1, new approaches to getting things done and reaching customers are alive and well, but once a business finds its success formula, openness to creativity is usually replaced with standardization. The culture of this new Phase 2--which prizes efficiency and reliability over anything risky or new--tends to wring out creativity like water out of a shamwow.

While we know that business, especially in these times, need cultures of innovation to be able to change and grow, people I speak with in companies large and small share the same complaint: Senior management may talk about it but rarely support creativity. Here were some recent comments from people working at various companies:

>We're reactive but not proactive
>We say we're innovative to the outside world but no one dares come up with new ways of doing things
>It's all about the bottom line, and if an idea doesn't have an immediate, short-term benefit, than it's discarded
>Certain departments are allowed to be creative but most are not
>There is too much hierarchy and bureaucracy for any new idea to see the light of day
>People are afraid of change and when questioned say, "This is how we've always done it."

Some of these common creativity killers--and suggestions for how business and creativity can get along better--are discussed in a new article from my friend Eric Doctors and colleague entitled Activating Creativity Culture online in Training Magazine. After years of working for Towers Perrin, Eric has put together a Creativity Scorecard to help businesses assess their current culture, and offers strategies for managers to activate creativity, which to him is "one of the most cost effective tools managers have available to reposition their businesses for recovery and to insulate themselves from likely economic volatility in the future."

I believe that leaders need to commit to culture change, with the goal being to raise the entire creative DNA of the organization. Training for skills of innovation is needed, as well as other suggestions Eric offers in his article. What other ideas are there for moving leaders from just paying lip service to actually fostering a culture of innovation?

Summer Creative Explosion

Summer finally arrived this weekend in Chicago with an explosion of creativity, as the streets filled with art, music and food, finally reminding us why we put up with the deep freeze for so long. This is our chance to taste and experience and get inspired, and I ended Friday just that way at the Double Door where Bob Schneider performed. Click on the first video below to have your own musical experience while you read.

Now it's always a mystery why certain musicians get famous and others do not, but for pure talent and entertainment, Bob is in a class of his own (despite his uncool name; no, he's not that comedian). An Austin musician who has had a few songs hit the radio, he has always remained somewhat unclassifiable because of an astounding versatility. On Friday night, he rocked the house with a final encore that lasted until almost 1:00 a.m. and was a living (and amplified) demonstration of creativity--in particular, of musical and vocal fluency.

Fluency is the creativity competency that refers to our ability to generate ideas, to turn on our faucets of imagination without censoring (see P.T.S. mindset). Bob just explodes like a firehose, directing his stream in so many directions I couldn't believe I was just at a single concert. People with high creative fluency demonstrate these three skills:

1. Initiation: Bob's a multi-instrumentalist who is unafraid to dive into different genres, to try something new or explore new territory that perhaps an "indie" singer-songwriter is not supposed to.
2. Improvisation: He went from guitar to improvised piano to a trumpet duel with a bandmate, brought people on stage, changed directions and included the audience in ways few performers would dare.
3. Experimentation: We went from a Latin samba number ("Tarantula") to a James Brown funk song to the most sexually explicit little ditty I've ever heard to a classic rock anthem to a rap/hip hop finale of mindblowing vocal dexterity. This video below only gives partial justice to the experience:

May your summer be full of such creative experiences--and may you practice initiating, improvising and experimenting all summer long.

Visionaries, Flower Children and the Conceptual Age

I was just talking with my old friend George Aguilar, with whom I once shared a rat's nest of an office in our volunteer roles for the now-defunct National Poetry Association (once a groundbreaking nonprofit, its web address has been taken over by a French sex site). George ran the poetry-film festival and is a digital videographer (and cin(e)-poet--there's a creative hybrid still ahead of its time); I ran Poetry USA, an ambitiously-named tabloid journal that in its time was well-known at least in San Francisco. We basically were cleaning up the nostalgic detritus left from artistic experimenters and hippies of a past era.

George was saying something like this: Isn't it amazing that many of the radical ideas of the 60s/70s Counter Culture--the "green" movement, sustainability, solar power, as more obvious examples--have now become the economic solutions for a new generation of pragmatists? Despite being ridiculed throughout the past few decades, the Flower Children proved themselves to be the true visionaries.

Perhaps we have seen the bottom of this recession, and as we try to swim back above water, I'm wondering like everyone else what new age will emerge. One of my favorite thinkers on this is Daniel Pink, whose book A Whole New Mind describes the transition we're making from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. He explains why we need to develop our right, creative brains now more than ever, with left brain thinking more and more replaceable (see video below) and the innovation imperative of our time demanding more skills of creativity.



Pink asserts six skills, or senses, that he sees as key to the new age, which, if more developed, may indeed help us keep our heads above water as a new United States of Creativity that these time demand:

1. Design: Creating something beautiful and emotionally engaging
2. Story: Creating compelling narrative, not just facts and info
3. Symphony: Connecting pieces, synthesis not just analysis
4. Empathy: Understanding others, developing emotional intelligence
5. Play: Going beyond seriousness to joyfulness and humor
6. Meaning: Pursuing purpose, passion and spirituality

Certainly sounds more like the post-Beatnick old timers at the NPA, doesn't it, George?

Higher Ed is a Creativity Killer

As I prepare to teach a course on Creativity and Innovation next week at Depaul School of New Learning, I'm thinking about how much our entire education system needs to change. K-12 generally continues in its cocoon, teaching isolated subjects and doing little to prepare students for the world as it is or the world as it could be (the two main goals for teaching). But in some ways higher education, i.e., esteemed academia, is even worse, snuffing out creativity a lot more than sparking it.

I've written before how poorly we engage adults in learning, as teaching is too often a low priority for academics, and lecturing is a lot easier. But there is something more insidious about our current state of higher education--and it has to with an idolatry of narrow expertise. We need people educated in a way that harnesses their original creativity and prepares them to flexibly tackle the challenges of the world. But instead most Ph.D. seekers I've known get drained of their passion early on, struggling for years in minutiae to learn an insular and exclusive language so they can be crowned as experts. As Liz Coleman, Bennington College President, captures it so well in her TED talk below, students learn more and more about less and less, "despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of all things."



We have glorified expertise so much that some of the smartest people in the world are spending years of their lives on the narrowest of ideas, and very quickly are unable to communicate those ideas to anyone except the few other experts in their field. While in some cases this is necessary and leads to scientific breakthroughs, our need for creative solutions requires us to bring brains and ideas together across disciplines. While there has been interdisiciplinary movement in the past decades, often the new department, such as "Cultural Studies," too quickly creates its own insular language. It is still very challenging, as I've learned myself, to get an interdisciplinary course on creativity and innovation in a curriculum at any university since it does not fit nicely into an existing department.

As I've argued before, we need a new class of comprehensivists--and "experts" who can speak more comprehensively--to lead us through an new age of innovation. But hasn't the great American liberal arts education accomplished that? Here's Liz Coleman:

“Genuine liberal arts education no longer exists in this country. We have professionalized the liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. Over the past century the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment. Expertise has for sure had its moments, but the price of its dominance is enormous. Subject matters are broken up into smaller and smaller pieces within increasing emphasis on the technical and obscure.”

The result of this is an academy that generally prizes the technical--proof of your expertise--over creative action. “As one moves up the ladder," says Coleman, "values other than technical competence is viewed with more suspicion," and when it comes to changing the world, "the academy is more likely to engender a learned helplessness than to create a sense of empowerment."

Thankfully, new liberal arts action-oriented curriculum is emerging, where skills of rhetoric, design, mediation and improvisation are gaining their deserved status, where resourcefulness and imagination are key, where students are more engaged outside the walls of academia, and where, according to Coleman, "artists at long last take their place at the table when strategies of action are in the process of being designed.”

What the heck is Pecha Kucha?

Here's a creative challenge for you: I'm going to give you a microphone and the undivided attention of a willing audience for about seven minutes. In advance I ask you to put together exactly 20 images--of anything you want--which will be projected on a large screen for exactly 20 seconds each. What would you share? What story might you want to tell?

This is Pecha Kucha Night (pronounced p'CHAH-k'CHAH, from the Japanese word for chit chat), an evening dedicated to adult show-and-tell, that has been spreading virally throughout the world in the past few years. Originally organized as a way for designers and architects to meet, network and share their work (without droning on too long), Pecha Kucha nights now are regular staples in 200 cities worldwide, including Chicago, where I got a chance to sample one this week at Martyrs'.

At least a few hundred people crowded together to watch a somewhat motley crew of 12 presenters, whose visual narrations ranged from serious commentary to playful randomness. Felix Jung (whose blog will tell you more about the night--and has better pictures) shared some entertaining autobiographical insights about repetition, while others shared physical and mental journeys through nature, popular culture, life in a rock band (the boys of All Things Lucid can play, too), Shanghai and artwork, including one somewhat mind-bending design plan to create a mass protest in New York City.

While not all presenters were as engaging as I might have liked, what was on display was originality at its best, an evening of self-expression and individual passions that reflected creativity through the eyes and words of very different human beings (Here they are taking a final bow).

Like the Kreative Evenings I hosted for many years as part of the Kreativity Network in San Francisco, there is something magical and empowering about hearing and seeing perspectives that would otherwise be unknown to you. At Pecha Kucha, many of the folks with the microphone were not skilled presenters or artists, but each offered an opportunity for us to see a different view of the world, which can't help but boost our own creativity. More Pecha Kucha nights are coming up in Chicago very soon, so you can get a taste for yourself and also sign up online to be chosen as a future presenter.

Perhaps the creative constraint of 20 seconds and 20 images can help you decide: What passion, story, commentary, skewed view would you want to share if you had a chance?

The P.T.S. Mindset

To become more creative individually and to foster more innovative workplaces and communities, we need to develop a whole new set of skills that have not been part of our formal education. Actually, skills are not quite enough. Creativity requires something else--a shift in attitude or, as I prefer, mindset--that also needs to be practiced and learned. It is this mix of mindset and skills that make up the 3 creativity competencies I've been discussing in this blog, Fluency, Flexibility and Originality. And, if you've ever taken a workshop with me, you know that the most essential mindset for creativity is P.T.S.

If you don't know what P.T.S. is, try not to peek below and let me ask you as I do my workshop participants: What do you need, right now, in order to be your most creative? What ground rules would increase your chances of feeling most creatively comfortable and able to generate new ideas and make unusual connections? Just for fun, use the three letters given, P-T-S, to come up with three words that would best convey suggestions or conditions that would be most optimal for your creativity to shine. Come up with lots of possibilities, using individual words or a 3-word-phrase. Let's start with 2.

P_____________ T_______________ S_______________

P_____________ T_______________ S_______________

Like any creativity exercise, this one has no right answers and actually hearing what different people come up with helps everyone think more freely. Perhaps we'll get: Personal...Thoughtful...Shockworthy or Play...Trust...Safe or Pretend...Thought...System or People...That...Sing. Some people will have trouble coming up with any--which is instructive in itself. Really the question I'm asking is: what do you need so you are not blocked, so that you can fully turn on your faucet of ideas?

Creativity, you see, happens in the moment. Usually when it comes to sharing ideas and asserting our own perspective, the mindset in the moment that trumps all others is: How do I look smart, clever, right? That's how we've been trained, even when we're all alone not even thinking about impressing others. Unfortunately this is not the mindset for divergent thinking, the real engine of creativity. It's too often the mindset for paralysis or very safe ideas.

So what I've learned after teaching and facilitating creativity for more than 20 years is that the most effective ground rule for allowing us to turn on that creative faucet is this particular P.T.S.: Permission...to...Suck. That's it. Giving yourself full permission to suck. It's a different mindset, one that allows you to turn on the faucet of your ideas without editing, blocking or judging. Once you give yourself permission to suck--to be wrong, lousy, idiotic, rude--everything changes, everything opens in a way it would not otherwise.

Now of course you don't want to be bad all the time, but the most creative people know how to access this P.T.S. mindset and to appreciate how bad they can be. "It's good to be bad," knows the most enlightened creative, because that way you access possibilities that you otherwise would dismiss. And, it turns out, sucking is harder than you think. Try to come up with bad ideas and here's what you'll find: More intriguing, provocative ideas that make you go hmmm--exactly what you need to foster a culture of change, imagination and possibility.

So, Klondike of the Frozen Archipelagos, Madame Curie of the Swine Flu Media Sneeze, Mr. Steroid of the Atrophying Mind Muscle--unfry your chimichanga and give yourself P.T.S. more often and see what happens.