Are you allowed to dream on a Wednesday?

Perhaps like yours, my weekdays these days have been filled with one work activity after another, giving me little in-between time for my creativity to breathe. The less time to breathe, to incubate, to connect with the part of me that feels, dreams and envisions--the more I am left only with my list-making mind and before I realize it, creeping thoughts of worry, not possibility.

In short, too much mind and not enough heart and my creative mindset has vanished.

So let's try to alter the mindset, even if it's midday on a Wednesday. I pick up a book of an entirely different mindset and see where I can go. It's The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, the dream-like story of a young Spanish shepherd who goes on a journey to find his "Personal Legend" and a treasure he has dreamed of. He meets up with an alchemist in the desert who helps him get there. Let's see if there is a reminder in here that can shake me up just enough to remember that I am not just a list-making drone stuck in front of my computer endlessly trying to catch up.

The boy and the alchemist are discussing the heart, and its role in pursuing the dreams we have or once had for our lives. Now the boy's heart itself talks to him.

"Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him," his heart said. "We, people's hearts, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no longer want to go in search of them...unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them--the path to their Personal Legends, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place."

Hearts actually suffer the most, according to the book, when they have to keep reminding people to continue to follow their dreams. So they stop telling them.

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.

"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself," the alchemist says.

Identifying your Creative DNA

In the Mindset of Innovation course I'm teaching at Depaul this summer, I asked my adult students to come up with a final project that they actually want to learn/do/create, something that will showcase their unique signature of talent and motivation. As the choreographer Twyla Tharp would call it, I'm asking them to be true to their "creative DNA." Part of the goal is for them to come closer to discovering what their creative DNA naturally wants to explore and express. Even as adults we are always discovering.

Are you being true to your creative DNA? Are you taking advantage of your particular concatenation of passion and skill and experience and intelligence and putting it out into the world?

Tharp's book The Creative Habit is one inspiring source for some DNA self-discovery. There are many books out there on boosting your creativity, but Tharp's is special--more of a creative work of art and the serious reflection of a writer willing to take risks and put her own creative stew out there.

She offers many ways to explore and build your creativity competency of originality, with exercises and insights from her decades of daily creating. A few of her thoughts to help flex your originality muscle:

“Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.”

“Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning truths and principles.”

“Looking foolish is good for you. It nourishes the spirit.”

Celebrating Diversity, Poetic and otherwise

Our personal creativity expands the more we are exposed to different people, ideas and cultures, and this past year I've gotten a jolt of new learning and fresh perspectives by being part of Poetry Pals, a nonprofit here in Chicago dedicated to celebrating diversity through the creative expression of poetry, art and music. My particular jolt came both from facilitating and working with large groups of children, which I haven't done much of since my teaching days in the 1990s, and by learning more about Muslim, Catholic and Latino culture at participating schools where religion and culture are part of the woodwork.

In the video below, I was interviewed, along with a Poetry Pal student, for Different Drummers, a program of the Christian Broadcast Ministries here in Chicago. As always, bringing together different cultural groups is an opportunity to learn how much we have in common as well as how different we are--and how all individuals carry within them talent and uniqueness all their own.



I was fascinated to see how much the adults in this particular program--which brought Muslim and Catholic students together--needed and wanted to learn about each other's cultural background. Are you familiear with Eid, for example, one of the most important Muslim holidays (actually two separate holidays)? I wasn't.

Does your boss want your new ideas?

When there has been success for many years, most companies prefer to stick with their winning formula and tend to create--perhaps without any intention--a culture that frowns on questioners and boat-rockers. While there is still some innovative thinking needed to improve standardization, trim the fat and keep the brands buzzing, risk-taking and openness to new ideas usually get a short shrift. The larger the company and the more conservative the industry, the less likely your boss is very interested in your new ideas.

But more and more companies are finding that their winning formula is not winning as much these days. They are wondering how they might indeed be able to tweak, or even overhaul, their stagnant culture, with one large company recently asking me to make suggestions on how to spread innovation throughout the organization.

In this blog, I've been fleshing out three creativity competencies needed for the 21st first century: Fluency, Flexibility and Originality. These competencies are needed not just for individuals to be more creative; organizations, too, need to become more fluent (encouraging and spreading many ideas), flexible (able to see from different perspectives, combine ideas and adapt to change), and original (sharpen their competitive advantage and empower staff). These are hallmarks of an innovative organization.

One excellent book to help foster fluency in organizations, Ideas are Free, makes the simple and compelling argument that ideas drive a high performance culture of innovation. Unfortunately, explain the consultant-scholars Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder, organizations are "far better at suppressing ideas than promoting them.” For anyone trying to start or improve an idea management system, or needing some clear examples of how small ideas can make a huge difference in change, the authors show that every company needs ideas from everyone, and employees are happy to offer them without needing a reward.

Here are some key recommendations:
8 Keys to an Effective Ideas Process
1. Ideas are encouraged and welcomed
2. Submitting an idea is simple
3. Evaluation of ideas is quick and effective
4. Feedback is timely, constructive and informative
5. Implementation is rapid and smooth
6. Ideas are reviewed for additional potential
7. People are recognized and success is celebrated
8. Ideas system performance is measured, reviewed and improved

I would love to hear: Does your boss want your new ideas? Maybe you should slip a copy of this book under her/his door.

Fluent in the Language of Creativity

Thanks to the latest ad campaign for Snickers, taxi cabs and billboards all over Chicago are prodigiously demonstrating creative divergence, and in particular the creativity competency of fluency, your ability to generate numerous ideas without regard to how "good" they might be. Perhaps you've seen it: Huge, punny, snack-related words in the familiar Snickers font that range from clever to ridiculous (e.g., "Hungerectomy," "Snaxi," "Dunk on Patrick Chewing").

I'm curious to see how successful this barrage of the often bizarre "Snackabulary" will be for Snickers as a product, but there is no doubt that the company is going all out, even creating a translator on Facebook to get you playing around with this newly invented suffix-friendly language. Put in "Creativity" and you get "Crunchivity"; try "Innovation" and you get the odd "Indulgnovation." "Chicago in summer" becomes the lovely "Chewcago in Sumbar." Really!

But that's fluency for you: To truly be creatively fluent, you have to be able to turn on an unpredictable faucet of ideas, which requires embracing the P.T.S mindset of no-judgment. Just as the term fluent in a langugage means you can communicate just about anything, fluency as a creativity competency means you have the ability to take off your helmet of cautiousness and self-censorship and let your hair fly with the wind. Sometimes what comes out may be offensive or just plain bad (The Snickers campaign definitely has both) but it's a necessary part in the process of fostering creative solutions.

Now, to fulfill the consensual requirements of creativity, there is at least one more step: to review your fluent array of divergent names and consciously converge--use your judgment to find the ones most clever, fitting, funny, or, in this case, mouth-watering. But Snickers is doing a lot less converging than we normally see, and their snackabulary concoctions seem more like the reckless post-it notes of a raw brainstorming session. Will people take to this willingness to be publicly good and bad? What do you think? I guess sales numbers will be the arbiter of that, but the truth is it's nice to see fluency in action, because it is exactly that ability and practice that ultimately leads to creative ideas, innovative organizations and new products that we never would have conjured up otherwise.

Hump Day Inspiration

"The only difference between a creative person and an uncreative person is that a creative person takes her ideas seriously." ~Mary Zimmerman, Theater Director

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” ~Szent-Gyorgyi

“All of us have a gift, a calling of our own whose exercise is high delight, even if we must sweat and suffer to meet its demands. If only that life-giving impulse might be liberated and made the whole energy of our daily work, if only we were given the chance to be in our work with the full force of our personality, mind and body, heart and soul...what a power would be released in the world.” ~Theodore Roszak

“When we get out of the way and act creatively, something comes out of us that may even surprise us. Pieces of ourselves may appear that no one has known about before, that no one has ever seen before.” ~Thomas Moore

“If you ask me what I have come to do in this world, I who am an artist, I will reply: I am here to live my life out loud.” ~Emile Zola

Fire spinners performing at last night's Full Moon Jam in Chicago

Last night the moon came drooping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing.
~Rumi

Adam speaking on Creativity, Thursday, July 16th in Chicago

Friends and Colleagues:
Here’s your chance to see me live presenting on creativity and innovation at the program below at Google in downtown Chicago. While it’s geared for trainers and facilitators (specifically, part of the American Society of Training and Development’s Corporate University group), it should be a good crowd, the public is welcome and it’s free. If interested, I encourage you to RSVP soon to make sure you get a spot.

>>Join us for our July ASTD program, Training for Creativity and Innovation, inside Google headquarters Thursday, July 16.

Now more than ever all organizations need to raise a different kind of IQ—the Innovation Quotient—to continually improve the ways they serve their members, customers or stakeholders. In this interactive session, organizational consultant and creativity expert Adam Shames will share the key creativity competencies necessary for individual and organizational innovation. You will learn more about the mindsets and skills that boost creativity—and experience for yourself ways to make every meeting and training an opportunity to build these competencies in others.

What: Training for Creativity and Innovation: Creativity Competencies for the 21st Century

When: Thursday, July 16, 2009, 6 – 6:30 p.m. networking; 6:30 – 8:15 p.m. program

Where: Google, 20 West Kinzie St. (between State & Dearborn), Chicago, IL 60610

Who: Adam Shames is an organizational consultant, facilitator and speaker whose clients include Accenture, McDonald’s, Edelman Public Relations and Credit Union National Association. He designs and facilitates leadership retreats, learning seminars and team meetings that help organizations build cultures of innovation and collaboration. He is the founder of the Kreativity Network (http://www.kreativity.net/), writes about creativity in his “Innovation on my Mind” blog (http://www.innovationonmymind.com/) and has a master’s degree from Stanford University.

RSVP: Jan Wencel (jan@lifecontained.com) 630.803.6650

About the Corporate University PDN: The Corporate University Professional Development Network (PDN) of CCASTD provides a forum for professionals involved with corporate universities to share information and network. For the purposes of the PDN, a corporate university is defined as "the strategic umbrella for developing and educating employees, customers, and suppliers in order to meet an organization's business strategies." (Corporate Universities, Jeanne Meister, 1998).

Participation is open to all those who have an interest in exchanging ideas, experiences, strategies, etc. related to corporate universities. Membership in CCASTD is not required, but it is encouraged. The PDN was started in July 2003 and meets every other month at rotating locations.

"Wicked" Problems and Global Innovation

For economic, cultural and personal reasons, we as a culture need to embrace creativity and innovation like never before. But the innovation imperative is not just limited to the United States, as John Kao, author of Innovation Nation and former Harvard professor, makes clear. Kao recently formed an NGO, Institute for Large Scale Innovation, and brought together international leaders for a global innovation summit in June.

How do we tackle innovation on a global scale to address the really "wicked" problems of the day? Kao asks. "There are too many questions that affect all of us," he says (see video below), "for which an approach to innovation for those global problems is both needed and lacking in the present era."


Leaders from different countries gathered to begin a very important discussion--what the current state of innovation policy is in individual countries and how a global innovation strategy can be created to address the common problems of climate, infectious disease and financial markets, among others. Read more about this meeting in this New York Times article.

Kao made a big splash with his 1997 best-seller Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity. While that book was a bit less meaty than I would have preferred, his recent Innovation Nation examines our country's practices and resources, and makes a compelling and detailed case for the U.S. to get its innovation act together. He explains that we need to change our mindset to make innovation part of "the very core of our national vision and strategy." “What is required is nothing less than a major commitment of America’s resources, human and financial, to rejuvenate our innovation engine," Kao writes.

He focuses on how to make innovation a national priority, from increased funding to a National Innovation Council to education. I like this one: “While our competitor nations focus on educating and training engineers and inventors, our schools are turning out youngsters who are better consumers than they are creators.”