Happy Halloween: Is it scary to be an American?

There is nothing quite like waking up in one city, flying hundreds of miles, and then walking the streets of another later that day. The wild Chicago winds delayed but did not cancel my early Boston-bound flight so I found myself at Faneuil Hall Tuesday afternoon, surrounded by stunning fall foliage, curving streets and history everywhere around me. This new reality stimulated new insights, old college memories and hopeful thoughts for me, confirming that travel is indeed a creativity lubricant. During my few-day trip I facilitated a teambuilding program with an enthusiastic company, visited with old friends, and was a guest on a cable TV program called "Wake up your Magic." I buzzed with ideas and schemes.

But by doing a little reading, eavesdropping and now TV-watching back in Chicago, I am once again reminded of another pervasive reality--which is not optimistic, not conducive to new ideas. Just turn on your TV now in the week before an election and here is the voice of that reality: "Happy Halloween: It's scary to be an American." Here's one political ad example:

Now, creative thinkers are particularly adept at shifting among different realities, enabling them to see from different perspectives, flexibly consider possibilities, and shift their mindset to come up with new solutions. But the current "reality" that for too long has infected the American discourse and media--that these are scary times, and that extreme and often irrational views trump rational ones--blocks our creativity and squelches innovation and change. That's because fear and creativity are not compatible. The more afraid you are, the less ability you have to open to divergent ideas, consider new options and access your heart--all creative keystones.

We (meaning our predominant cultural conversation) appear to be stuck so deep--and constantly reinforced by media--in this particular "reality" of pessimism and fear that we can't honor other valid realities, like my time in Boston, which was great. It can be as scary to read rational commentary (I'll discuss the Time Magazine cover story on restoring the American Dream next time) as it is to watch Democrats and Republicans hurl fear-bombs in the current political campaigns on everyone's television. I wanted some relief so I read though my old college newspaper when I was on campus and found the same partisan and fear-inducing views parroted there. So it's everywhere. Right? America is in decline and we all should be afraid, right? Preachers are burning Korans and Obamacare is taking over our freedom.

Are we insane to ignore these threats or are we insane to listen to them?

This is the question that Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert (click on banners for more info) are addressing in this weekend's rally in D.C. Usually I'm on the side of crazy, as creativity is not possible without coming up with way-out-there ideas that some will call crazy. I am an advocate of letting our freak flags fly, engaging our individual and original passions as a birthright to being human. But right now we need more sanity. We need to stop reinforcing extreme views and irrational arguments--and subscribing to the "reality" that creative solutions are impossible in America right now. Stewart and Colbert will try their own creative take on shifting this reality, and I'm curious to see how they will attempt to pull it off.

I want to encourage you to take this Halloween opportunity to explore a different reality, to try on another identity for a little while --perhaps someone less crazy than our current politics is--to see where it leads.

Swinging through the Trees on a Path Less Travelled

I had the doubly natural pleasure this week of facilitating a retreat for the Nature Conservancy in lovely Door County, Wisconsin. Like most organizations, this leading advocate for preserving lands and water is looking for innovative ways to more effectively accomplish their mission and attract more supporters (this was the marketing group). In keeping with the retreat's theme, "Innovation: Freeing your Inner Brilliance," I invoked our surroundings to make the case that individually and collectively they needed more often to swing from the trees (as in the classic Piraro cartoon, left), not only during our time together but also when they returned to the workplace.

For any culture to be to be truly innovative, it must honor individual divergence and originality. Are you empowered to follow your own passion and encouraged to support and build on your colleague's tree-swinging ideas without squelching them? We can learn to do this better when we separate diverging time from converging time, when we put off judging an idea much, much longer than we normally would. Instead of jumping to what is weak or wrong with a suggestion, we instead place it into consideration, let it breathe, build on it and play with it for a while. Later we can converge and decide which course to go.

Too many organizations today do not allow for breathing room--the instinct to judge and dismiss quickly (that's what smart people have learned to do) is so strong, that most half-baked ideas get smothered before they even have the possibility of rising. Without an environment for at least some half-baked, oddball or zany ideas--originality disappears and innovation becomes impossible.

I left the Conservancy group to brainstorm among themselves yesterday and I took to the road around the still-leafy County. I found myself walking through the woods, stimulated by how yellow the leaves were. Then it hit me--the yellow woods took me right back to a memory of the classic Robert Frost poem that I hadn't looked at for years. Let me refresh your own memory with this excerpt of Frost's "Road not Taken":

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear...

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

If you can't literally swing through the trees, at least you can more often explore paths less travelled.

Creativity highlights so far in 2010

As we head into our final quarter of 2010, I wanted to recap some of the most important headlines on creativity and innovation this year. In a year full of lingering economic and cultural malaise, the innovation imperative--our need to be more creative as a culture and as individuals--is as urgent as ever, particularly here in the U.S.

Stunning news (at least for me) broke in the spring when the largest IBM CEO survey ever identified "Creativity" as the "single most important leadership competency." In a business world that loves to overuse the word "Innovation" (most often defined as "applied creativity") but shies away from the more personal "C" word, creativity itself was heralded like never before, as I summarized previously. Now you can read the full report, called "Capitalizing on Complexity," and even access an interactive version by clicking on the graphic on the right. "CEOs now realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics," states the report. "Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation. To connect with and inspire a new generation, they lead and interact in entirely new ways."

In July, Newsweek weighed in with a cover story called "The Creativity Crisis," which explored new research that has found that creativity test scores have declined since 1990 in the United States. The authors note that other countries are making creative development more of a national priority, with the European Union actually designated 2009 as the "European Year of Creativity and Innovation." "While our creativity scores decline unchecked," write authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, "the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike." You can read the story and hear a fascinating radio interview about Torrance creativity tests, schools and adult creativity myths here, and can experience your own creativity test here.

Both of these headlines are calls for action, and one new source of inspiration comes from Steven Johnson, whose subtitle alone in his new book "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation," makes its release a worthy event this month. While his book takes a wide-lens and historical approach to human innovation, he shared some of his more contemporary conclusions about creativity in the workplace in this interview with Salon.com yesterday. "The problem," he says, "is that most traditional companies...talk a big game about innovation and making their workforce more creative" but do very little to change the culture or allow for ideas to be nurtured in the normal structure of daily work. He argues for "innovation time off"--like the "20% passion time" Google allows for employees to work on what they wish--so that "you're always spending a little bit of your time working on something weird that's not part of the official plan," a "permanent track of hunches and half-baked ideas that runs alongside the regular work-week with its immediate deadlines and fixed concepts." Yes.

A local upcoming highlight here in Chicago local inspiration is the always entertaining and eye-opening Chicago Innovation Awards, scheduled for November 1, which honors our region's most innovative new products and services. If you live here, rush to reserve a free ticket (this link should work) and come join me as we see some positive examples of how humans are demonstrating the #1 leadership competency and combatting the creativity crisis as best we can during this time in our natural history...

Committing Acts of Innovation: Help Needed...

I keep thinking about my friend George asking me how much I actually "commit acts of innovation"--it's one thing to write about creativity and innovation but quite another to actually do it. In its rawest form, the creative process is simply the opening up—and then closing—of possibilities. We are engaging in it all the time. When you have a decision to make, you open your closet door of ideas, rummage around to see what’s available, and then choose one as you close the door. A more complicated decision or challenge may require much opening and closing of different doors, the pivot between divergent and convergent thinking. To be creative, we have to open wide to a divergent stream of possibility—fully turn on our faucet of ideas—but also know how and when to filter, evaluate and narrow the stream so that we’re left with the best, nourishing drops.

Innovation requires sustained creativity, repeated diverging and converging, leading to a result--a product, an outcome, a more courageous and risky perseverance that makes a positive impact. That's not easy. Right now I'm trying to bring two acts of innovation more fully into the world--a new kind of theatrical show, the Malaise County Fair, and an interfaith program for kids, called Poetry Pals. Perhaps like other acts of innovation, I realize there are two challenging realities for me here: 1. I don't really know how to do it. 2. I need help from others. And I'm trying to bring these two projects to life while at the same time sustaining my consulting business of live learning, leadership and innovation events that provide me with the money I need to live (also a particularly difficult enterprise in this economy).

Both of these projects have the goal of helping us get out of our malaise, the numbness I believe we all feel living in a culture of information overload and political paralysis, where we express ourselves less and isolate ourselves more, where we distrust our neighbors and prefer cynicism to creative possibility and personal participation to change the world. I know for many these attempts are "unrealistic" and have questionable "market value." But I've chosen to take them on. And I need help.

The Malaise County Fair is designed to be a new form of entertainment, one in which the audience participates and stretches their own comfort zone, steps beyond the typical spectator role and acts as part of the story. It's a love story and multi-arts performance that takes place at an unusual fair--where creativity abounds and there is singing and opportunities for the whole community to jam together. You can experience a free introduction to it yourself this Sunday as part of the Gypsy Jam showcase (this Sunday at 3pm at Arts at Large, 3318 N. Lake Shore Drive, just north of Belmont, in Chicago). I'm looking for more creative folks to participate, help shape it and share their talents. Can you help? Can you come to the event to support us, get involved, recommend it to friends who might be itching to be involved in an innovative project?

Poetry Pals brings together kids--and their teachers and community--who usually would not meet. Our main program has been partnering Muslim, Catholic and Jewish school kids to get to know each other and write poetry together. Everyone involved agrees that it's been wonderful and so needed in a too-divisive culture that focuses on extremism and keeps us insulated from others who are different. Click here to read more and see me on a television program sharing what we're up to. But we need help. Are you interested in helping interfaith communication and learning about other cultures? Are you good at facilitating groups of kids and fostering friendship, conversation and a little poetry writing? Do you have access to diverse groups and can help us bring in more schools and partners and money? Do you know others who might? Please contact me for a flyer, help spread the word and come to a meeting.

I know we're all busy and that these may not be the projects that interest you. I would appreciate any way you might be able to help, including donations. I also encourage you to commit your own acts of innovation however you can, starting today.