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.

U.S. Innovation Policy, part 2

"Innovation will be the single most important factor in determining America's success through the 21st century...the legacy America bequeaths to its children will depend on the creativity and commitment of our nation to lead a new era of prosperity at home and abroad." 2005 Innovate America report

Even Obama's appearance yesterday couldn't sway the Olympic Committee in Copenhagen and we here in Chicago are nursing our wounded pride. I had some mixed feelings about hosting the Olympics, but there is no question in my mind that Chicago is world-class and has what it takes to put on any show. Given the current international climate and recent English-speaking dominance of the host cities, however, I don't believe any city in the U.S. could have swayed the Committee.

Nevertheless, the bid bodes well for innovation here, because what we did as a city was imagine a future vision and set a course to start building it. The innovation process has begun. In the same way, the Obama Innovation Policy sets a national vision that can spur real action. You can read an extended White House White Paper, A Strategy for Innovation, for more on the Obama plan. I like the breadth of the vision, which includes a call for society-wide innovation, including to "Improve Public Sector Innovation and Support Community Innovation."

As I mentioned before, U.S. innovation policy has not been entirely absent before Obama. At the end of 2003, the Council on Competitiveness, the key national innovation player in the past couple decades (made up of a non-partisan group of CEO's, university presidents and labor leaders), launched the National Innovation Initiative (NII), which led to an "Innovate America" summit at the end of 2004 and a quite impressive and comprehensive 2005 Innovate America report, very worthy of checking out (left). The report describes "America's Task" and the innovation imperative clearly: "For the past 25 years we have optimized our organizations for efficiency and quality. Over the next quarter century we must optimize our entire society for innovation."

Presumably building on this work, President Bush, in his 2006 State of the Union address, announced the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) to "encourage American innovation and strengthen our nation's ability to compete in the global economy." The ACI committed $5.9 billion in FY 2007, and more than $136 billion over 10 years, to increase investments in research and development (R&D), strengthen education, and encourage entrepreneurship and innovation.

One more recent initiative to mention: The National Governors Association’s (NGA) "Innovation America" initiative in 2007 focused on strengthening our nation’s competitive position in the global economy by improving our capacity to innovate. Click here to read their report. The goal was to give governors the tools they need to improve math and science education, better align postsecondary education systems with state economies, and develop regional innovation strategies.

"Innovate America" and NII appear to be no more, and new slightly-differently-named initiatives and acronyms continue to replace the old. It looks like the ACI led to an American Competitive Summit in 2008. But what we have now we'll call the Obama Innovation Policy and we'll see what follows.

For a few other relevant current websites on U.S. innovation policy, check out:

Innovation America
U.S. Innovation