The Fertile Unknown

Colorers and Advancers

Color/Advance is a popular improvisational theater technique. I have seen it done many ways, but the basic premise is, in partners, one is the director and the other is the storyteller. The director gives the storyteller the tile of the story and the storyteller starts telling a story. The director intervenes frequently, saying either “Color” or “Advance.”  Color means the storyteller it so start adding details - to describe more fully sensory details, thoughts, and feelings – deepening the story.  Advance means action – going forward, moving along with the plot – advancing the story.  In either case, the storyteller adapts the instruction the story in real time, either coloring or advancing, until the director gives the next cue or the story ends. In using Color/Advance as a storytelling techinque, stories become richer, deeper and more inventive.

We all have a colorer and an advancer within ourselves, and every organization has colorers – those who deepen into the everyday experience, indulge details, appreciate the finer nuances of situations, focus on the journey, and advancers – those who focus on end-goals, move forward, stay on target, and forge ahead. In pursuing the gifts each aspect brings - sensory experience and action - you access more of your creative potential and vibrancy in any situation.

Beyond Business Buzz Words

Word Spy denotes the definition of a buzzword as: "An an often-used word or phrase that sounds more important than it really is, used primarily to impress other people." We're in a time where innovation is a core organizational value. Yet so often, adhering too tightly to the buzz words du jour actually inhibits potential for creative ingenuity. Some of the most common business buzz words which do not do a whole lot to inspire innovation are:

benchmarking                        competitive advantage                     actionable
diversification                       decentralization                               leverage
joint venture                         mission statement                            low-hanging fruit
vision statement                    strategic planning                             market segment
intellectual property               incentive plans                                mission critical
quality improvement               best practices                                 operationalize
market risk                            opportunity costs                             value-added
distribution channels              product mix                                     positioning
target market                        win-win                                           risk management
multitasking                           B2B                                                outside the box
offline                                   bandwidth                                       mindshare
smartsize                               strategic alliance                              empowerment

New ideas often emerge wrapped in new language. In workshops, emergence coaching sessions, and creative projects, and I have noticed consistently the best ideas, the most novel ideas, and the most innovative business ideas emerge, not in business language, but in human language - holistic, conceptual, metaphorical, emergent, impassioned, poetic, story, visual images, excited.

If you have to reel in your communications into business speak, do that at the end of the creative process, not at the beginning. It's not about never using the buzz words, because they are a form of communicated understanding - a common language, but just not being limited by them. Leave the business buzz words on the back burner as you engage the creative process initially, and then, only after the new idea/vision/mission/product/service/strategy has been cultivated, is it a good time to come back and focus the language for the understandings of your "target market."

The Living Language of Talking Your Business

A discussion on a leadership conference call earlier this evening, where a business leader/entrepreneur feared that by using her authentic langauge with her cleints she would not be taken as seriously in the business community, inspired me to write the following:

For inspired entrepreneurs: In being true to yourself, finding your passion, and structuring it into a business, how do you market yourself - and be authentic to the language you think, live and engage - without sounding "woo-woo" in a business world that thinks and speaks mainly in jargon, buzz words, and often empty mechanistic terms?

Be fully present to what you genuinely have to offer and speak from that place. Those who are best suited for your message will hear your message. They will resonate, even if the words are less familiar - because you are speaking to the human underneath the buzz words. If you confine your message too heavily into everyday business speak , it is like freezing the substance of what you have to offer...it can't move and grow and generate.  It ceases to contain the life energy of inspiration, passion, and newness. People are drawn more to the energy and enthusiasm underneath the words than the words themselves. In other words, believing in and embodying what your are saying and doing will naturally engage others.

Engage in living language - that which is alive with natural exuberance, creativity, and new possibilities. Impassioned language is larger and more encompassing than professional buzz words. It may contain them at times, but it goes beyond them. Buzz words are inadequate to express the aliveness, potential and capacity of what you have to give. There is so much advice out there on how to communicate what you have to offer, and while that is valuable, it is seriously incomplete. There is also a place within our selves - where our dreams, creative ingenuity, and enthusiasm exist - that can only be cultivated and expressed from within us, and has its power in our own words...the place where external advice gives way for inner authority to emerge.

Waterfalls and the Brain

A couple of years ago I read a book written by a brain researcher who discovered how profoundly physical environments correlate with intelligence and brain function. They would measure brain usage and activation in different environmental settings. From that research, they developed a spectrum of environmentally-influenced intelligence, going from most conducive to least. They found people were most intelligent and creative next to a rolling waterfalls, mainly due to charge of the negative ions in the air (another reason fountains are good in an office to stimulate creative thinking). In contrast, they were least stimulated into original and creative thought in a room in an office building that has no windows, no natural air, and no natural lighting - in other words, a typical meeting or strategic planning room. That environment stimulated the least brain activity of the 20 or so places they had measured.

This picture of Boulder Falls was taken by my boyfriend during our trip to Boulder last week, where we got a refreshing dose of negative ions.

Practical Brilliance

If you will be in the Washington, DC area on Thursday, July 27th, join Dr. Win Wenger, founder of  Project Renaissance, and me for an introductory workshop on Creative Problem Solving and Breakthrough Thinking in everyday work and life. This is a unique opportunity to learn from one of the world's most prolific thinkers and published authors in the field of creativity and creative problem solving, Dr. Win Wenger, who wrote The Einstein Factor, 48 other books, and several best-selling audio courses with Learning Strategies and Nightingale-Conant.

The workshop integrates Dr. Wenger’s famous whole brain methods and teachings with story and improvisational techniques for a multi-dimensional experience. You'll learn cutting edge tools and techniques, then put them to work on real issues in real time - tools you can use for life. You will explore easy-to-learn, easy-to-use whole brain methods for accessing deeper levels of creativity, inventiveness and innovation; moving forward in any situation; and using more your natural creative abilities. 

Details and Registration

Developing Innovation Leaders

David G. Gliddon, PhD in Workforce Education from Penn State, researched what it takes to become an innovation leader for his dissertation. Out of that research, he developed a competency model of innovation leaders which can be used in human resource development initiatives. To read more about his study, go to http://live.psu.edu/story/18678. He discovered:

It is not necessarily the innovation leader who must generate new ideas; rather, they must understand what creative employees value. They must encourage new ideas by seeking active input from their employees.

Innovation leaders collaboratively interact with their employees and support high levels of teamwork, providing opportunities to share innovations. Once an innovation has been shared, employees should be empowered to then adopt the innovation if it is useful. Employees then can support the innovation leader by initially adopting the innovation, and encourage the diffusion of the innovation throughout organization's social system, Gliddon said.

Innovation leaders also must take personal responsibility for and be dedicated to projects that require innovations. Therefore, innovation leaders must establish a trust culture and maintain relationships based on trust. They must display initiative, set challenging project goals, and link those goals to the needs of the customer, department and enterprise.

Why Learn about Brain Dominance?

The Accsys Corproation has a web page entitled, "50 Reasons to Learn About Your Thinking Styles Through Brain Dominance."  I have included 9 here. To see all 50, go to http://www.accsys-corp.com/HBDI_50_Reasons/hbdi_50_reasons.html.

Reason 1 - Become self-aware - By becoming more self-aware of your own thinking styles you will have more choices in your behaviors.

Reason 2 - Relate to Others More Effectively - If you have a better understanding of others and their thinking styles and preferences you will be better able to relate.

Reason 7 - Improve your problem solving ability - The more tools you have available for solving problems, the greater your ability to solve them.

Reason 13 - Become a more effective leader - By understanding what motivates people it becomes easier to lead them. When you can speak to their preferences communication becomes more effective.

Reason 15 - Build better teams - To create effective teams it is critical to understand the make up of the team. Homogenous teams function with less tension but typically are not as creative as a heterogeneous team.

Reason 24 - Develop better strategic and tactical plans - Considerations in strategic and tactical planning can be organized according to thinking styles. By addressing planning issues that arise because of these styles, a more comprehensive strategic or tactical plan can be created.

Reason 25 - Develop strategies to resolve organizational conflicts - Pinpointing the possible causes for organizational conflicts using a knowledge of thinking preferences allows one to create more focused strategies to resolve these conflicts.

Reason 35 - Develop better products - Not only can new products be developed, but better products can be developed by making them address the needs and preferences of different kinds of people.

Reason 38 - Make work more fun - By better understanding out preferences it will be more possible to engage in work that energizes us as opposed to work that is energy draining.

Reason 41 - Create a whole-brained organization - Whole-brained organization is one in which all thinking styles are represented and utilized. Creating such an organization can offer tremendous potential to achieving the mission of the organization.
 

Participatory Culture

The mission of the Participatory Culture Foundation is to build an open and democratic television platform - built on creativity and collaboration:

Television is the defining medium of our culture. There's now an opportunity to create a television culture that is fluid, diverse, exciting, and beautiful. Built by people working together.

The platform is open-source and built on open-standards. This matters because it keeps video flowing freely. When you lock people in to closed, proprietary services, you lose everything that makes the internet work.

Television is moving online. Will it be the same narrow, top-down cultural stagnation that we see on traditional television? All the major media and computer companies are clamoring to control video online. If they succeed it will be a disaster.

We don't have to spend years playing catch-up. Open-source and open-standards can lead this fight for the future of video online.

Arts, Entrepreneurship and Technology

There is a new program at UNC Chapel Hill integrating the arts, technology, and entrepreneurship. The curriculum follows the strcutre of a hero's journey. During the semester, students will tell their story - they are the hero entrepreneurs on a modern, and simultaneously classic, mythic journey. Passion is their guide and realized dreams their destination. This course is part of the larger cultural integration of creative expression, business, and technology now emerging with increased speed. More of these programs are popping up in more mainstream institutions all the time, further contributing to a society where creative and inspired work is the norm, not the exception. 

Artistic Entrepreneurship & Technology 101

Make your passion your profession...This class is where the arts & sciences walk hand-in-hand...The class's structure will be based on classical story elements as outlined in Aristotle's Poetics and Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces. The independent projects will be adventures akin to Campbell's "Hero's Journey," wherein students will become protagonists as artists and entrepreneurs attempting to realize their dream by launching a successful venture. Along the way students will encounter antagonists and pitfalls, but these shall be overcome by the end of the semester, when students will present their artistic ventures...Every work of art tells a story, and behind that work of art is another parallel story--the business of its creation, promotion, and distribution

The Structure of the Journey:  Departure - The Call to Adventure - Refusal of the Call - Supernatural Aid - The Crossing of the First Threshold - The Belly of the Whale - The Road of Trials - The Meeting with the Goddess - Temptation - Atonement with the Father - Apotheosis - The Ultimate Boon - Return - Refusal of the Return - The Magic Flight - Rescue from Without - Crossing of the Return Threshold - Master of Two Worlds - Freedom to Live

The Creative Imperative at the World Economic Forum

The annual World Economic Forum attracts global business and political leaders to examine global trends in economics and development, identify emerging issues, and engagein dialogue and positive action. The theme of the 2006 meeting in Davos, Switzerland was "The Creative Imperative."  Recognizing creativity and innovation as critical components of sustainable development, this year's meeting called for business, political and civil society leaders to harness creativity to provide new answers to the world’s problems.

“The assumptions, tools and frameworks that leaders have used to make decisions over the past decade appear inadequate. It is imperative for leaders of all walks of life to develop new capabilities if they expect to be successful and to maintain relevance,” said Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum.

“...In a context where uncertainty, risk and doubt are on the rise. Despite (or because of) these changes in the global environment there's great opportunity for those who innovate and create. In other words, Creativity is an Imperative.”

Creativity is needed to find new tools and solutions to tackle dark clouds like global imbalances, according to Mukesh D. Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries, India, also a Co-Chair of the Annual Meeting 2006. “The world has a real chance if we form global partnerships to banish poverty and we need creative solutions...” he said.

“Business is in a unique position to play a leading role in helping to shape the global agenda, and can provide government and civil society with the tools and capabilities to better adapt,” said Jonathan Schmidt, Director, Global Agenda, World Economic Forum. “The Annual Meeting aims to bring this message to participants, in order to stimulate creative capabilities and the courage to embrace change, which is at times disruptive and painful, but can ultimately be uplifting and rewarding,” he said.

The Great Story

The Great Story, articulated by Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd, is a universal story of creative emergence - it's a creative, generative, inclusive, unfolding, scientific, purposeful, sacred, synergistic, conscious, compassionate, integrative, emergent, multi-dimensional discovery process still in the process of being told. It is an encompassing "Yes-Anding" story that weaves multiple realities simultaneously, and adds new levels as more of the story is discovered and cultivated. An excerpt from the website:

THE GREAT STORY (also known as the Universe Story or Evolutionary Epic) is humanity's common creation story. It is the 14 billion year science-based sacred story of cosmic genesis, from the formation of the galaxies and the origin of Earth life, to the development of self-reflective consciousness and human technology...the sacred narrative of an evolving Universe of emergent complexity and breathtaking creativity and cooperation — a story that offers each of us the opportunity to find meaning and purpose in our lives and our time in history.

Five Unique Characteristics of The Great Story

1. The Great Story is the story of the changing story. Whenever a new discovery is made in the sciences, this creation story changes. Change is to be welcomed — not feared.

2. The Great Story is a creation story that is not yet over. Evolutionary change at all levels (cosmos, planetary, life, culture) will continue into the future, and we humans bear a responsibility for how the story will continue on Earth.

3. The Great Story is a new creation story shaped with a planetary perspective to which all cultures contribute. Because the scientific enterprise is now global in scope, this story necessarily has its origins and ongoing influences centered at the scale of the whole Earth — influenced by peoples of all ethnicities, all religious traditions, and hailing from all bioregions.

4. The Great Story is radically open to multiple interpretations. Because the empirical and theoretical sciences search entirely for material explanations of the world, whenever one ventures into the realm of meaning or into the realm of spirit, the interpretations necessarily go beyond the science. And yet, make meaning we must! Humans are intrinsically meaning-makers, whether we construe that meaning to be innate in the cosmos or created by the human mind.

5. The Great Story manifests synergistic coherence between science, religion, and the needs of today's world. Because the creation stories of classical religions and primary peoples were birthed well prior to the discoveries of an evolutionary universe, these stories can at best be reconciled with scientific awareness. In contrast, The Great Story grounds its celebratory creation story on the contributions of the scientific endeavor, and the interpretations are nuanced to be empowering for today's concerns.

For more on The Great Story go to http://www.thegreatstory.org/what_is.html or the Wiki version at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Story.

How Art Made the World

How Art Made the World is a 5-week program on PBS - showing right now - on the expansive significance and influence of art and creativity on society over the ages. From the write-up:

Dr. Nigel Spivey [an art historian at Cambridge] takes viewers on a quest to comprehend mankind's unique capacity to understand and explain the world through artistic symbols. Speaking in colorful, non-technical language and aided by state-of-the-art computer graphics, Spivey explores the latest thinking by historians, neuroscientists and psychologists regarding the deep-seated and universal human desire to create art...Combining aspects of history, archeology, forensics, sociology and aesthetics, Spivey leads an extraordinary video expedition that spans 100,000 years and five continents: from the vast galleries of prehistoric art in the caves...to the pop culture and advertising imagery that bombards us in the digital age.

"The essential premise of the show," says Spivey, "is that of all the defining characteristics of humanity as a species, none is more basic than the inclination to make art. Great apes will smear paint on canvas if they are given brushes and shown how, but they do not instinctively produce art any more than parrots produce conversation. We humans are alone in developing the capacity for symbolic imagery." In fact, scientists have found growing evidence that our brains are "hardwired" for art and that the shapes, colors and structures inherent in art originate deep within our collective psyche. The series uses the latest research to investigate the biological, social and political forces behind major artistic movements of the past. Spivey then demonstrates how these great turning points in art have reverberated through the centuries to define the visual landscape we now inhabit.

Next Level Art

Taking everyday art forms to their next level:

Sand Castles

Street Art

Juggling

The Evolution of Leadership: A Conscious Dialogue

Join us tomorrow morning, July 11, for a teleconference dialogue on “The Evolution of Leadership” from 8:00-10:00a.m. EST (USA). It is part of the Conscious Dialogues™ hosted by the Power of Our Way Community.  I will be on the panel along with Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, Dr. Larry Lyons, Jim Oher, Amy Skolen and host Anita Pathik Law. It's free to call in. Here's part of the write-up:

A new generation of leaders is being called to evolve and emerge from the frameworks in which they currently operate. This evolution is creating a demand for the emergence of leaders who are not dependant on position power, manipulation, fear, exclusion, and coercion but rather leaders, who operate under a higher mindset, believe in human potential, continuously evolve, and see themselves as an influence for powerful, social change.

A powerful look into the future call of leaders around the globe, we will:

• Delve into the critical behaviors and attitudes that assist leaders in building sustainable and positive influence
• Share proven strategies to achieve more effectiveness as leaders and as human beings
• Explore the opportunities for creating profound change, innovation, and collaboration within your organizations

Go to http://www.powerofourway.com/JulyConsciousDialogues/ to sign up and get the call-in number.

Inventions through Dreams

The language of dreams is sensory, visual and non-linear, whereas the language of waking life is predominantly verbal. In a dream state, the "left-brain" editor is off duty, and the "right brain" can work its magic, weaving together solutions to challenges that the conscious mind might ignore if it did not come through habitual thought patterns or verbal channels. Throughout history, inventors, scientists, innovators, and artists have solved problems in their dreams, whether intentionally or not.   

Brilliant Dreams has compiled a list of twelve of these famous discoveries and creations in literature, science, music and even sports attributed to dreams, including:

Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz discovered the Benzene molecule:

"...I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis."

The tune for "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney in a dream:

"I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th -- and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it."

Elias Howe invented the sewing machine in 1845 from a dream:

He had the idea of a machine with a needle which would go through a piece of cloth but he couldn't figure out exactly how it would work. He first tried using a needle that was pointed at both ends, with an eye in the middle, but it was a failure. Then one night he dreamt he was taken prisoner by a group of natives. They were dancing around him with spears. As he saw them move around him, he noticed that their spears all had holes near their tips. When he woke up he realized that the dream had brought the solution to his problem. By locating a hole at the tip of the needle, the thread could be caught after it went through cloth thus making his machine operable.

For more examples, go to http://www.brilliantdreams.com/product/famous-dreams.htm.

Invention and Paradigms

The most inspiring movie I have seen this year is Something the Lord Made - the amazing true story of Vivian Thomas, an African American carpenter turned prolific inventor in the field of medicine. He was the innovative genius who discovered the techniques and invented tools to perform the first ever heart surgery. He never went to medical school. This is a moving story of creativity, passion, invention, intuition, collaboration, and emerging a new paradigm.

Fired from his carpentry job, yet interested in medicine, he went to work with Dr. Alfred Blalock at Jones Hopkins University in the 1930s and 40s. It became apparent Vivian was a creative genius. His passion, inventiveness and perseverance against many personal and societal setbacks became the driving force of discovery that led to the first heart surgery - something that was believed impossible at the time

Together Vivian and Dr. Blalock were trying to figure out how to solve some of the challenges posed by working on the "blue babies" – babies who were not getting the proper circulation through their heart and therefore had a blue tint.  There was no cure at that time and these babies died within months.

Vivian’s successful methods were a result of research and extensive experimentation, combined with vision, exploration, making previously unforeseen connections, and intuition – in a dream, Vivian saw their first patient as a grown up, but with a baby’s heart. She was holding held her baby heart in her hands and she died. He woke up knowing that to ensure the success of the surgery, they must use sutures that grew along with the baby into adulthood, and therefore the heart could grow into its adult size.

Vivian was there, guiding Dr. Blalock and their team of surgeons through the surgery. It worked and the surgical team was esteemed worldwide. All except for Vivian. The brains behind it all, he was not acknowledged by Dr. Blalock nor the rest of the team in the media frenzy. Feeling betrayed, Vivian quit and went into pharmaceutical sales. After time away, he realized his heart was in the lab, furthering the advancement of medicine.

He swallowed his pride and faced the man whom he felt betrayed him, asking him of he could come back to the lab. Dr. Blalock replied, "I am still the same arrogant bastard who was here before." And Vivian then said the words most demonstrative of the way those who are responsible for the innovative advances that expand what's possible: "It is not about you. It is about the work" - and he went back to work.

Vivian went on to earn an honorary doctorate Johns Hopkins years later, and his picture hangs in their walls to this day, next to Alfred Blalock's. Before Vivian, it was understood in the medical establishment to not touch the heart during surgery. He not only invented a life-saving procedure, he helped change a paradigm.

The Creative Economy 2

Creativity is the emergent business strategy - an awareness surfacing more and more frequently in business literature. In an earlier post, I referenced Creative Clusters and the annual Creative Economy Network and Conference. The theme of a creative economy - creativity for profitable business - has been gaining momentum over the past few years…and it seems to be reaching a tipping point. (Finally!) I recently revisited an article I read a few years ago in Business Week Online called The Creative Economy. Still relevant today, the follow are excerpts from the article, written by Peter Coy:

Which companies will thrive in the coming years? Those that value ideas above all else.

Now the Industrial Economy is giving way to the Creative Economy, and corporations are at another crossroads. Attributes that made them ideal for the 20th century could cripple them in the 21st. So they will have to change, dramatically. The Darwinian struggle of daily business will be won by the people--and the organizations-- that adapt most successfully to the new world that is unfolding.

The sheer abundance of capital could be bad for the capitalists themselves, including ordinary investors in the stock market. That's because the commodity they supply--money--is no longer scarce. What's scarce are the good ideas. Thus, shareholders are likely to lose some power in the 21st century, while entrepreneurs and idea-generating employees gain it.

In the Creative Economy, the most important intellectual property isn't software or music or movies. It's the stuff inside employees' heads. When assets were physical things like coal mines, shareholders truly owned them. But when the vital assets are people, there can be no true ownership. The best that corporations can do is to create an environment that makes the best people want to stay.

But in the Creative Economy, the power to exert influence is nearly unlimited because there's no ceiling on how many people can be made to depend on idea-based assets.

Many corporations have already begun to adjust to the new realities of the Creative Economy--by allowing power to tilt from the sources of capital toward the sources of ideas, by embedding themselves in fertile corporate ecosystems, and by adopting codes of social responsibility to win the trust of a wary public.

Read the full article at http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_35/b3696002.htm

Hardwired for Collaboration & Altruism

We are hardwired to collaborate, co-create, and serve. In their book, Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel cite this case study of the brain - one of the many studies on the interplay of collaboration and the brain:

Dr. Gregory S. Berns, an Emory University professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, uses functional MRI and other computer-based technologies to study how the human brain responds to various stimuli. In short, his team wires the brain to see how the brain is wired. A few years back, Berns studied the interaction of biology and altruism. He used a functional MRI to scan the brains of 36 women playing the behaviorist’s game “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” in which participants are rewarded according to the choices they make.  Berns found these women displayed cooperative behavior even when they knew they would receive greater rewards for not cooperating. The technology revealed that the striatum, a primitive brain sector, grew active during collaboration. In fact, it secreted five times the normal level of dopamine, the chemical that activates during such stimulating activities as sex and gambling. In short, humans are wired to collaborate.  Altruism turns people on even more than making money.

Belief System Quiz

How you view the concept of creativity directly impacts how and what you create in your work. Personal and spiritual beliefs and values play a significant role in creative process: what you choose to create, how you experience creativity, what creativity means, what its role is in your work and life, what inspires or motivates you, where your muse comes from, and whether or not you think you are creative.

Creativity means different things to different people: an outlet, a life force, work, relaxation, innovation, personal expression, a job, a passion, play time, a fun diversion, risk, talent or abilities other people have, "thinking out of the box", a new company value, etc. Beliefs strongly influence creative process.

My boyfriend, Tom, found a quiz on Beliefnet that he shared with me as we were getting to know each other and it stimulated some fascinating discussions.  Beliefnet offers a series of quizzes to reveal some of your more deeply held values and beliefs about how the world works or should work. Regardless of your spiritual perspective, their Belief-O-Matic™ quiz offers an easy and interesting way to learn more about your self and your belief systems.  You answer 20 questions about your concept of the universe, human nature, and more, and Belief-O-Matic™ will tell you what religion (if any) you practice or which are most similar to your set of beliefs.

I find this quiz relevant to creativity because it is a quick, light-hearted way to discover more about our universal belief systems. So much of what we think about creativity and ourselves as creators are based on personal beliefs we have about ourselves, as well as universal beliefs we hold about how the world works. Once we see our belief system influence on creative process - not just personally, but holistically - we can see which ones serve our creative goals and which ones hinder them. This knowledge and understanding gives the power of choice.