The Fertile Unknown

8 Ways to Unlock Creativity in Challenging Times

Throughout history, times of great challenge have also always brought with them times of great creative opportunities. They are inexorably linked - crisis and opportunity. The world as we have known it is changing in so many ways at an unprecedented rapid pace. We can't sugar-coat or avoid that...but we do have agency in our response. We have it in us to adapt, respond, and create.

We may not have control of much of what plays out on the world stage, and we many need support to be with it...but we can influence our small part - in our own lives, and in the lives of those we serve in whatever way we are called to serve.

The following are questions I put together as a reminder of what we can choose amidst the chaos. I divided them up in 8 categories. These are offered as a "yes-and" to whatever else you are already doing and being, and this list not complete. As always, take what resonates and leave the rest.

1. Foundation Building. What foundations are you building to be able to navigate the tumultuous and rapidly changing times? What are your daily practices? What are you doing for your own self care? What are you doing for your creative expression? Strong foundations keep us grounded in the storms. They support our resilience, strong ideas, and purposeful actions.

2. Pattern Breaking. What patterns are you consciously breaking? What small pattern can you start with to practice? By consciously breaking patterns in low stakes, low risk ways, breaking patterns becomes more natural. So when life gives us higher stakes challenges, we can pivot more easily, and break our habitual patterns more easily to be able to meet those challenges. Pattern breaking not only helps creativity, it helps build resilience. Life will break our patterns for us anyway, so become more fluid in pattern-breaking helps prepare us for the pattern-breaks we cannot predict.

3. Aspiration Framing. What vision of story do you to hold for the present Do you hold a bleak vision for the future, or an aspirational one? Or a bit of both? If we can play with zooming out of our current story, and ply with imagining larger, more aspirational stories to live into, it can free up our creative energy to move toward the larger visions. By not denying the current story, but reframing it in a larger narrative where people can triumph over adversity (like history has shown us), we can move our creativity, and ourselves, into more generative new territory.

4. Creating. What types of creativity call to you? What can you do right now for your creative self? What have you always wanted to try but have keep putting off? Studies have shown that taking up some kind of creative endeavor in one area helps us open up more or our creative flow in other areas, and in practical ways. For example, when we take up painting, or improv, or playing an instrument, etc., it helps us them meet life situations and challenges from a more possibilities-oriented perspective. Try approaching it like a child, with no expectation (or evaluation) except the joy of creation..and see where you creative self takes you.

5. Releasing. What have you carried that was useful at some point, but no longer serves you? What stories are ready to be released or transformed? What perspectives are ready to be expanded? What limiting belief systems are ready to be shifted? What are you holding on to tightly that can be held more loosely and spaciously? Where can more light get in? Part of the creative process is letting go of what no longer serves us. And that includes for sure letting go of anything in you that tells you you are not creative.

6. Accepting. In every creative process there are constraints - things that can not be changed. We can fight them, resist them, avoid them, try to force them, or accept them. There is a huge sense of peace, and freedom, that comes with accepting constraints - there things we can't change - and creating from within those constraints. Instead of being a limitation in the creative process, the constraints can drive the creative process. All creativity needs flow and structure, and constraints are a particular kind of structure. Acceptance of what is, paradoxically, free us to create something else.

7. Taking Action. Taking action is about acting on what's there for you, and not waiting to feel comfortable in doing it. It sometimes means feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Stepping into something before you feel guaranteed everything will go perfectly and feel easy. A cornerstone of creativity is dynamic tension - the "Yes" energy of birthday something new often comes with the "I'm not sure if I am ready" energy of our natural resistance. Is there something in you that has comes to you in whispers, but you have not acted on because you weren't sure how? What if you act on that now?

8. Partnering with the Unknown. I've have written about this for over 20 years because I feel so strongly that our relationship to the unknown dictates so much of our creative lives - what we create, how we create, and how we serve. Seeing the unknown as the fertile place of creative possibilities instead of only something to fear or avoid make all the difference. (Check out my blog post 7 Tools for Navigating the Unknown.)

There is no way to not be impacted by the atrocities and polarization in our world. My hope is you may find something in here to support your own journey, amidst both the immense devastation and the immense beauty of our world. I believe so deeply in the creative spirit we have, the vast power it has for transformation. History has shown us time and again what human ingenuity can transform with passion and focus.

Michelle James ©2024

Creative Resourcefulness within Constraints

My creative facilitation book, Pattern Breaks, is now available to order online!

I am delighted to announce my creative facilitation guidebook, Pattern Breaks, is now available on Amazon and other online
booksellers to pre-order. You can go to
https://amzn.to/3QDbZ65 for the book details, and to order it if it resonates with you.

 

My hope it that this guidebook reaches those who resonate with it, and can benefit in some way from it - for yourselves and for your groups. In a world where much is out of our control, we each can contribute to a better world by contributing to what we do have control over in our local world. It may small, but it is something. For some of us, that includes the groups we lead, teach, or facilitate. If that is you, this book is dedicated to you.

Order at https://amzn.to/3QDbZ65

About the book: Pattern Breaks is a handbook for navigating the world of creative facilitation. It is for facilitators, trainers, educators, group leaders, and anyone who would like to bring more creativity out of their groups and out of themselves. It provides food for both thought and action. If you would like to cultivate creativity and aliveness in your design and facilitation, this book has ideas for you.

• Bring more enthusiasm and ingenuity out of participants
• Become a more adaptive, improvisational, and resilient facilitator
• Gain more confidence and ease in navigating challenges, resistance, and the unexpected
• Actualize your unique creativity for impactful and meaningful design
• Establish environments more receptive to novelty and transformation
• Bring more fun and lightness into facilitating serious topics
• Get easier buy-in from clients for nontraditional approaches
• Cultivate conditions for emergence and co-creation
• Generate life-giving outcomes that serve the good of the whole

Pattern Breaks explores both ways of being and ways of doing. From concepts to mindsets to practical applications and more, this book provides a rich trove of ideas, principles, and practices, along with an abundance of activities, to apply before, during, and after your workshop or event. It focuses on two levels at the same time— you as a facilitator of creative process, and you as a creative individual.

Order at https://amzn.to/3QDbZ65

Extracting the Creative Gifts from the Challenges of 2020

This morning's full moon...
closing down the chapter of our lives that was 2020. While 2020 was unquestionably challenging (for some devastating), challenges almost always come with seeds of opportunities. We can use this "pattern breaking" time to look back and release whatever no longer serves, and cultivate what is or can be useful. We can extract the gifts out of last year, as a creative alchemical practice - turning the led into creative gold. Below are 12 of the gifts I'm taking from 2020 (a year where I had many losses as well).

12 gifts I'm taking from 2020:

 

1. I learned how to use Zoom features (break out rooms, the white board, using visuals and videos, etc.) which allows me to facilitate client workshops online. I would not have learned the Zoom features had all my on-site workshops not been cancelled.

2. I reconnected with old friends and colleagues because we were all home and available, and formed some new and renewed partnerships, ideation sessions, and learning labs.

 

3. I learned new and varied types of body-centered practices online that I would not have taken the time to do had I been going to my health club.

 

4. I created a couple small practice groups and masterminds to explore and try out new concepts and practices.

 

5. I went to more backyard social-distancing gatherings/dinners/rituals/bonfires with local friends instead of public events.

 

6. I started updating my website, which had been long overdue (coming soon).

 

7. I took a lot of time to reflect on who I am now, what I still want to offer that I have been offering, what to let go of, and what new offerings and practices are calling to emerge. What I offer and how is changing - in my coaching and my facilitation. I had the time to take stock on where I am now, and what is next.

8. I started working on some projects and products that I will be unfolding in 2021.

 

9. I re-visited painting, and started creating Emergent Mandala drawings, which has been transformative for me at many levels...and also will be leading to new offerings.

 

10. I found some thought-provoking, inspiring (some more analytical, other more aspirational) podcasts which I love - a kindred, diverse tribe of like-minded aspirational people who I don't personally know - that I wouldn't have taken the time to do had life been as-usual.

 

11. I learned a lot, questioned my assumptions - in my own life, in society, and in the world - about what I value, and had countless thought-provoking, generative, sometimes challenging/often enlightening conversations that continue to help me grow and evolve. It was a year of deep reflection, questioning, and discovery around certain issues and ideas I had not previously reflected upon in the same ways. My frameworks expanded.

 

12. I feel I was able to serve my clients at deeper and more expanded levels due to what they were/are facing and experiencing with their own 2020 challenges..and helping them stay creative, resilient, and adaptive during these times.

 

I'm not trying to paint a pollyanna picture. There was much I missed terribly (like in-person facilitation, which is a big part of my soul-food) for which there is no substitute. And many people suffered much larger losses. My heart goes out to you if that was you. This is just to say that once we are forced into a contracted space, not of our own choosing, we still all have the capacity to extract some meaning and creativity from it - some creative nuggets. This has been true for every society in every era - many of which had more limitations and darker times that we have just had.

 

Instead of looking at only what was lost in our work, we can acknowledge it, and mourn the losses...and...look at some of the gifts, even if still only in seed-potential form, as hints of what we can create in the new year. Our creative source (the creative wellspring inside of us) is unlimited...and will give us ways to create new doors when old ones close if we embrace the mindset and heart-set to engage with it...and give ourselves the time to do so. There are always choices within every contraction.

What are some of the nuggets, learnings, or seeds of potential you are taking into the new year?

Michelle James ©2020

The Pregnant Creative Moment

Michelle James©2020

2 FREE Juicy Creative Aspirational Online Events in September!

Creativity, Frameworks, and New Possibilities: Two FREE Online Aspirational Events this Month Exploring a Generative "What's Next"

I'm delighted to be one of the speakers in both these online events focused on a more hopeful, positive, creative future! With the world as it is, we can all use some inspiration, hope, support, and aspirational explorations and visions of what can be possible - along with applicable practices you can start right away. We all contain the seeds of creative change we've been looking for to birth healthier new foundations...and we all need each other.   The Magnificent New Normal Speaker Series September 14 - October 24   How do we want to respond to the calling of our collective future? This series is an exploration in making generative, impactful choices for yourself and others.   With one interview/day for 40 days, this series offers daily infusions of hope, wisdom & opportunity to inspire transformation and propel civilization forward in this new, emerging reality. Forced out of familiar patterns, we have the chance to make creative new choices for moving forward. This series engages creative visions, principles, and hand-on practices for a generative, creative, hopeful post-pandemic civilization.   A diverse array of other speakers include Dr. Bruce Lipton, Matthew Fox, Lynne McTaggert, the singer Jewel, Lynne Twist, Alberto Villodo and many others, each coming from a different lens and framework. Magnificent New Normal FREE Registration     Creativity and Culture Online Conference September 19   This conference is designed to provide a creative space for stimulating conversations between academics, educators and entrepreneurs with a deep interest in developing a creative economy, and more creative, generative, prosperous future. This year's themes are Presence, Emergence and Impact.   Following the conference, there will be an opportunity to remain in contact with the speakers and other conference attendees through monthly online follow up sessions to continue creative conversations which may lead to collaborative projects and creative business opportunities.   An international group of other speakers include Frijof Capra, Terry Tillman, Talmud Bah, Susan Sharp, Paul Z Jackson, Siddarth Agarwal, and Linda Naiman among many others. Creative Culture FREE Registration

NEW Program! Creating with Purpose: New Foundations for Creating and Producing What's Next in an Uncertain World

9-week Immersion Program! 

CREATING WITH PURPOSE:
New Foundations for

Creating and Producing
What's Next in an

Uncertain World Using

Whole-Brain,
Whole-Self Creativity

9-Week Immersion Deep-dive into Creating from the Inside-Out With Meaning, Purpose, and Heart for Tangible, Applicable Outcomes to Meet the Needs of Today's World - and Your Own!

Discover, Design, and Develop What’s Next in Your Work or Life 

Where Purpose, Creativity, Your Uniqueness, and Tangible Outcomes Meet

People with a strong sense of purpose find opportunities others miss. The internal sense of purpose and meaning anchors and grounds us to better weather the external storms. When we discover and feel connected to what is ours to do - what we are uniquely designed to offer - it acts like a compass in a volatile storm or uncertain fog. It then becomes not certainty that gives us security, but meaning. In these times, many people are feeling called to take positive action. This program focuses on strengthening your inner compass, being intentionally directed, and producing something tangible from it (even if you have no idea what that will be when we start).

New Foundations: Using Transformational Creative Principles, Frameworks, and Practices

In this workshop, we will explore and experience some of the foundations - constructs, frameworks, ways of being, and principles - that establish the conditions for purposeful creativity to emerge. We'll use creative whole-brain, whole-being-engagement approaches, and actualize our unique Inner Creator, to craft and carry out what we're called to create and contribute. This is not about just knowing it cognitively, but embodying the ways of thinking and being to draw it out into the world.

 

Use the Creative Resources within you to Create New Directions,
Offerings, Projects, Products, Services, Workshops, Programs,
or Thought Leadership in your Work, Cause, or Mission

Who is this for?

Entrepreneurs, leaders, educators, coaches, consultants, change-makers, healers, creators, pioneers, social transformers, and anyone who wants to contribute and create a more life-giving what's next for themselves and others. This is an intensive immersion program. It is for those who are truly committed to themselves and their process, and to showing up for each other in a safe, supportive space.

 

Why?

•  You want to purposefully create what's next in your work/mission
•  You were clear before, but now feel a little like a deer in the headlights
•  You have a sense about what you'd like to do, but need it further fleshed out

•  You want to do something that matters to you and serves others

•  You know what you want to do, but feel inner "blocks" or fears around it
•  You want to develop your signature process and offerings
•  You have a sense of purpose, but not sure how to move forward with it
•  You want to carry out your work/mission in a way that fits who YOU are

•  You want to bring more of your hopeful energy amidst the chaos
•  You want to actualize your unique creativity in your work/calling/mission
•  You want to find a peaceful inner creative sanctuary within you
•  You want to move beyond self-imposed limitations about what’s possible
•  You're seeking what is yours to do here, now, and in what's next
•  You want to move forward authentically and with confidence
•  You want to cultivate and apply your gifts, skills, talents and experiences toward something purposeful

How? The Exploration and Experience

It's so important to take care of and ground yourself - taking "your own oxygen" as you discover your ways to support and contribute to others to come from a centered place. This deep-dive program focuses on both your inner landscape (being) and your external expression (doing). It contains a balance of left and right brain activities, crafting and emerging, thinking and being, reflection and action, and structure and flow, and mind/body/heart/soul creativity. We’ll use the Creative Emergence Process with an integration of storytelling, improv, the arts, imagination, movement, body-centered practices, reflection tools, ritual, depth psychology/archetypes/mythology, systems thinking, and structured creative solution finding approaches. By working on releasing what no longer serves, creating new foundations, and expanding what is most generative, the external expression of our work changes.

Leave with:

The next evolution of your work or personal project, approach, product, service, process, offering, program, concept, or model; a sense of purposefulness and meaningful contribution; a self-designed structure for applying your unique gifts, skills, experiences and talents toward something that inspires you; and practices to use beyond the workshop setting to stay in your creative flow.

 

Includes:

• Five 3-hour virtual interactive workshops with the group, each building on the one before.
  (there are super engaging, creative, and interactive - not lecture format - we will take 2 short breaks)
• One 90-minute personal Creative Emergence coaching session
• A course materials and resources list (for various creative projects we'll do)

• Engaging whole-brain and somatic assignments and practices to do in between workshops
• Ongoing support throughout the program

• Bonus 2-hour Follow-up Integration Session

Schedule

When: 5 Fridays, over the course of 9 weeks – 1:00pm to 4:00pm EDT (10:00-1:00 PST). 8/28, 9/11, 10/2, 10/16, 10/30. Individual coaching sessions will be done in the break between the 2nd and 3rd workshops  If you have to miss a workshop, we'll do a personal Zoom call to catch you up. Bonus 2-hour Follow-up Integration session 3 weeks after the course is completed to further integrate the learnings. 

For the Program Structure, Registration, and more information go to:

http://www.creativeemergence.com/creatingwithpurpose.html

Thoughts on Creating What's Next while in the Unknown

I run a group on Facebook Applied Creativity Network (open to anyone if you'd like to join) where someone asked, "What's next? How is the world going to be with this coronavirus? How are the remaining people going to relate to each other...social life?"

Kay Ross, a member of that group wrote: "I don't know how it will be. The question is: How do we WANT it to be? What kind of world/life/society do we want to design and create?"

I really resonated with her answer, and "yes-anded" it with some thoughts of my own. Because they're directly related with the work I do with my clients, I thought I would share them here:

Also don't know how it will be. I don't think anyone can know at this time, but we can make choices about what's ours to do now, even in this big unknown. We can discover where what we are inspired to do meets what is needed now, even without knowing the whole picture.

We do have agency and, like Kay Ross said, can ask what we want, and what we can design and create. Our feeling of creative empowerment comes from looking at what we CAN do in any given situation...what calls to us, what inspires us, what we want to do, what needs we can meet, what can we create, and how we can serve the situation, etc.

As far as relating, while challenging now, I imagine people will adapt as they always have to find ways of connecting - or create them - even within these unprecedented constraints. I don't think we can know what the will look like...so that means being OK (or at least accepting) being in the unknown for a while - without knowing how it will look - and creating that as we go, like in an improv. And not needing or expecting it to look exactly like it was in the past. It won't be the same. If we can accept that, and not fight it, we're more empowered to create what's next.

I have faith in the creative life force in each of us, and the universal creative life force that animate all of life (why I created my business around that)...so I have faith in humans capacity to find or create ways of staying connected until we can gather again in person, and faith in those who feel called to create new ways of connecting we don't even know of yet. We're seeing that already. That doesn't mean it’s not hard to be these isolated now (or that there is not real suffering, fear, pain, and deep loss in the world right now - there is!), but it is just about switching our focus to what we CAN do within the constraints - looking beyond what is to what we imagine can be, and discovering what is ours to do in the process. That is an emergence process. If everyone did that, I think we’d see a modern creative renaissance during and after this situation.

Sometimes our deepest fears about what will be lost (as well as the reality of what IS being lost) can lead us to create something new to meet those needs. Historically, people have always used their creativity to move beyond even the most challenging situations. That's where I put my trust when in the unknown...in the creative alive spirit in each of us that is infinitely rich with alive potential for creating new ways of engaging. So, while we can’t know what’s next, we can meet the moment and ask what we are called to do or create, and help create what's next.

Michelle James ©2020

Story-hopping: Meaning Making is a Creative Act

Making meaning is a creative act. It takes us out of the static, binary thinking of good-bad/right-wrong/pass-fail and brings us into an upward dynamic growth spiral of more possibilities. It allows us to break old patterns and create new ones. Whatever we can find meaning in transforms it. Meaning making something we can do any time with conscious intention and attention...and it in turn creates a flowing, yet focused, channel for more purposeful creativity to emerge.

One of many ways to make meaning is through storytelling...telling a story of something (an event, a person, a vision, an object, a process, a situation... anything! - past, present, or future) can help extract the meaning from or about it. Then you can apply that meaning to your life, work, and business offerings...you can use it for deeper understanding, for releasing something that no longer works, for stepping up to something new to create...

And we can use it to move and level-up from one story context to another...Story-hopping to the next level. I.e., transforming what could seem like a victim story at one level into an empowerment story at the next level can happen by looking at it through a new, different, and more expansive context than we were seeing it.

When we combine storytelling with up-leveling - hopping into a larger, more generative framework from which to view the story (and create new parts to it) - the meaning we extract from it changes. It can transform the story we have held from being a creative energy drainer to a next-level creativity generator...among so many other possibilities.

Our creative source and imagination can create, or re-create at a new level, any situation or belief to better serve what is calling to emerge in our work and lives. We just need to play with engaging it, exploring, and experiementing until we land in the new stories, and the meaning, that feel alive and right for us. What stories about your work, or other areas of your life are you ready to release? Transform? Reframe? Hop into at a new level?

Michelle James ©2020

Creativity is Messy

So often in our emergence process, what emerges does not fit neatly into our pre-conceived expectations. That's because the creative unconscious - the which is below the surface - contains more wisdom and information and creativity than that which is consciously known to us at any given time. So what emerges can be surprising, disjointed, nonsensical, seemingly ridiculous, or messy as it is emerges.

But don't discard it just because it's not what you thought, or hoped, it would be, or should be. Engage it, play with it, learn from it, and cultivate it out until it starts to look like something. Instead of needing it to fit our vision, we're often called to expand who we are and how we think in order to be with the new emergence.

It can be messy and scary, but it is always more life-giving and generative - and more coherent when it is done emerging - than what we originally imagined, if we let it lead us and don't cut it off because it is not exactly what we planned. If we follow what's emerging, we start to make sense of it as we go, and often find it's something that that includes out original vision or idea, and far exceeds it.


#creativeemergence #creativeintelligence #creativityismessy

©2019 Michelle James

Yes And is a Doorway to Creative New Worlds

The improv principle, Yes And, is a doorway to creative new worlds.
Yes And is generative, divergent, expansive, and opening.
It’s accepting the reality that’s presented AND adding something new.
Newness upon newness creates unimagined new worlds, ideas, visions,
possibilities, option and choices - in our business and our life.
We can Yes And our own ideas and creative impulses
instead of Yes Butting them out of existence.

©2019 Michelle James

Emergence Focus

Emergence is a process found throughout the natural world where the new whole emerges as greater than the sum of its parts. In improv theory, there is the concept of "Yes And" which accepts and includes that which already is, and add then adds something new. Using an Emergence-centered approach in the workplace includes the acknowledgment of problems and the need to focus on desired outcomes...AND expands beyond that to include new ways of approaching the situation, generating new patterns of solution-finding, immersion in the discovery process, as well as engaging that which is not yet known as a source of new information. Our unique Creative Emergence Process™ includes various whole brain and creativity approaches to cultivate the new ideas, thought patterns, and states of being which lead to new (and often surprising) innovations and outcomes. Emergence accepts and uses what already is - and adds a new dimension.

Choosing Aliveness Over Habit

Michelle James @2019

Arts-based Engagement for More Creative Ideas and Solutions

Love this quote. It's one of the reasons I use arts/movement based appraiches in my work - it helps us bypass the habitual-linear-sequential, left-brain dominant conscious thinking to access more our ourselves, and our creativity, insight, and intuition. By going into the non-linear part of our consciousness first, we mine the fertile playing field of our 'right-brain' imagination to get novelty and the unpredictable, then after we spend some time there exploring and unearthing, we bring it back to the 'left-brain' to make sense out of it, organize it, structure it, and create actionable steps from it. And we can discover new and forgotten parts of ourselves and bring them to life.

We're socialized to start figuring out something first from left-brain thinking. Arts-based engagement brings an added dimension of creativity to it. By first diverging with in the "right brain" then converging with the 'left brain" (in quotes because it's not exactly that binary) we discover new options and choices for our work and lives that we previously couldn't have imagined. The creative process of taking something abstract and making it concrete generates novel ideas, solutions, and directions. #creativeemergence #miningtheinnerrichness

Expand Your Story: Improv for Creative Reinvention

This was a from an online talk I gave on Creative Reinvention using principles and story-based practices from improvisational theater...one of the ways to live into a larger story....

http://www.slideshare.net/mjames7770/improv-for-creative-reinvention

Expand Your Story: Improv for Reinvention from mjames7770

Wisdom from a Paradigm-Shifting Creative: Bucky Fuller

Last night I saw R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe at the Arena Stage in DC - written & directed by D.W. Jacobs - based on Fuller's life, work and writings - and awesomely performed by Rick Foucheux. It was FANTASTIC! A one-man show with integrating storytelling, multi-media, scientific theory and universal mystery, it, for me, was its own hybrid genre of theater - one where where engagement, education, inspiration, entertainment, resonance, audience interaction and evolutionary invitation converged.

Years ago, I had read his well known Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth and some of his articles and became enthralled with his ideas, vision and wisdom. But it wasn't until I took a design class that I really appreciated the power of physicalizing structure with those ideas - and "nature doing more with less." We were given toothpicks and glue and one egg. We had to create a structure for the egg by which we had to stand on a chair and drop the egg, encased in our toothpick structure, on to the ground...and the egg was not supposed to break. Long story short: only one person succeeded at not breaking the egg as he dropped it with nothing but a few toothpicks to protect it. His secret: he had created a geodesic dome around his egg. He used the least number of toothpicks, and he used them most coherently - just like nature creates. That was a powerful learning for me.

Last night I was reminded of Fuller's work and the magnificence of nature's creativity. I left inspired, re-invigorated and deeply grateful for the legacy of this brilliant, heart-centered pioneer who not only thought the great thoughts, but animated them with great actions and creations - and all is service of the good of "spaceship earth" for which he cared passionately.

A small piece of his story: Until 4.5 years old, when he got his first pair of glasses, he could barely see so he learned to live in and create from his imagination and internal experiences. In kindergarten, while other kids were putting together simple toothpick models based on everyday structures they observed (like box houses), he was designing triangles because they "stayed together - they made sense."

After diverse jobs, many hardships, and no particular direction, at age 32 he had a mystical experience that changed the course of his life while walking in the streets of NYC. He emerged from that experience committed to think for himself, discovering and speaking Truth. And in a way that is in integrity with nature. He wanted to find "the coordinate system that nature employs." Later on, in thinking about patterns, and especially "patterns in a mutable kind of way," he later discovered (what he had hints of intuitively at a young age) that "the triangle is the only stable structure" which eventually led to the development of the geodesic dome among his countless contributions. (More on him here).

Below are bits of his wisdom, as shared in the performance last night (in no particular order).
While some are not so cutting-edge anymore, they are still not universally accepted, let alone enacted or embodied. Other are still pushing at the edges. He was talking organic complexity, systems thinking, patterns, non-linearity, emergence, intuition, creativity, dynamic movement, biomimicry, sustainability and heart/mind/brain integration 60 years ago...steeped inside of a static, linear, dehumanizing, mechanistic world view and accompanying set of values. When I think about not only what he cultivated, but when - the context in which he, like all out-of-time visionaries before and since, emerged his insights - I'm inspired by his courage uncommon. The following is from the play:

•  It is only through feeling that you are truly yourself. Thinking and knowledge can be learned form others,
   but feelings can only from within you.

•  Change is the normal state, as opposed to the Newtonian view where rest was normal
   and motion was abnormal.

•  Out of information comes synchronized principles.

•  Nature is about doing more with less. Economists, on the other hand, have been about doing
   less with more.

•  I m not a re-former. I am a new-former.

•  We need to re-orient production away from weaponry - away from killing-ry to living-ry.

•  Behavior of the whole is unpredictable by the behavior of it parts.

•  Oppositeness re-generates life.

•  Each individual is a verb.

•  You as an individual must have courage to go by the truth or you will be swayed by the crowd. 
   Only the individual can let go of his fear and plunge into the design science revolution.
 
•  To reform the environment is the design responsibility of Spaceship Earth.

•  Selfishness made sense when humanity didn't know there was enough to go around.
   Now that we know there is, selfishness does not make sense anymore.

•  All is expanding and contracting.

•  We need idle time. It allows people to think, "What do I see that needs to be done?"

•  Intuition is the key to thinking - the contact between the conscious and the subconscious.
   The mystery is ever more entrancing and ever more beautiful.

•  You can deceive your brain self, but not your mind self. The mind deals only with the truth.

•  Everything is energy. Instead of seeing is as fixed - up or down - see it as inward or outward.

•  We have a choice: Utopia or Oblivion. If we make it, we'll make it because of truth and love.

In an age when "visionary" and "renaissance" is found in every other manifesto, I think we need a more discerning word or phrase to do justice to the Bucky Fullers. For now, I am feeling gratitude for the "verb" of who he was.

The image is of the geodesic dome donated to Expo '67 in Montreal.

50 Ways to Think Creatively

This morning I was reflecting on creative thinking for my newsletter and decided to make a list of what came to me as it emerged, stopping after the first 50 concepts:

1. Give your Creative Self space, time and attention
2. Be curious and aware - wonder about, ponder and reflect
   
3. Have more questions than answers
4. Challenge assumptions and norms - your own, others, societies
5. Get clarity about exactly what you are trying to solve or envision and why
6. Turn problem statements into vision statements
7. Record your thoughts and ideas
8. Have brainstorming buddies and a creativity support team
9. Break patterns and habits - consciously do something different
10. Use the body - walk, dance, move in non-habitual ways - as a creative resource
11. Surround yourself with diverse types of people and situations
    
12. Use reverse or opposites thinking
13. Look for the story behind or about something
14. Meditate - cultivate presence and mindfulness
15. Live in terms of exploration and discovery, not just solutions or right answers
16. See uncertainty as an invitation to discover
17. See mistakes as an invitation to create
18. Suspend judgment as you explore and experiment
19. Think in terms of "What if?" about seemingly obvious things
20. Surround yourself with life-giving and inspiring people, images and objects
21. Justify why something works even before you know why - make it up as you go along
22. Tell your own Creativity Story and identify the beliefs you have about yourself as a creative person. Make up a second version with you as the SuperCreative Hero
23. Experiment without needing it to work - let go of attachment to outcomes
24. Use visual, metaphorical and analogical thinking - not just analytical
25. Thinking terms of what works rather than the one right way
26. Develop positive beliefs about creativity and you as a creator
27. Self-creation - think of yourself as a Creator always recreating yourself
28. Engage all of the senses - sight, touch, taste, smell, sound
29. Use different types of music in the background while thinking
30. Think of your vision or challenge in terms of attributes: shape, size, color, texture
31. Use the S.C.A.M.P.E.R. technique with your ideas
32. Read up on creative thinking techniques and DO them to get practice
33. Learn to listen to your intuition to follow hunches and discern ideas
34. Be wiling to break rules, and then break them again
35. Cultivate your inner bon vivant - have fun, laugh, play
36. Embrace, rather than avoid, ambiguity as an essential part of the creative process
37. Allow time to stay immersed in the question
38. Take improv theater classes to feel more comfortable creating in real time
39. Animate concepts and ideas - endow them with human or other characteristics
40. Write out the unique ways you already are creative
41. Use, and value, the whole brain - including the visual, intuitive and kinesthetic
42. Draw or paint concepts
43. Create your own rituals
44. Adopt alternative views of reality
45. Pretend your are someone/thing else while problem solving or creating
46. Embrace being wrong as a worthwhile part of the creative process
47. Allow discomfort to be an acceptable part of the process
48. Give time for divergence as well as convergence - and before it
49. Value imagination as much as knowledge
50. Finally, there is no substitute for Passion - find what is alive for you and create from there
    
    Michelle James ©2008
    

Creative Genius Thinking

I came across an article on the Innovation Tools website about a creative thinking technique. It was written by Michael Michalko, author of ThinkerToys and Cracking Creativity, and creator of the ThinkPak. Here are some excerpts on what he had to say about how geniuses think. For the creativity technique and the full article click here. 

"The creative genius will always look for a multiplicity of ways to approach a subject. It is this willingness to entertain different perspectives and alternative approaches that broadens their thinking and opens them up to new information and the new possibilities that the rest of us don’t see. Einstein was once asked what the difference was between him and the average person. He said that if you asked the average person to find a needle in a haystack, the person would stop when he or she found a needle. He, on the other hand, would tear through the entire haystack looking for all possible needles.

"When Charles Darwin first set to solve the problem of evolution, he did not analytically settle on the most promising approach to natural selection and then process the information in a way that would exclude all other approaches. Instead, he initially organized his thinking around significant themes, principally eight, of the problem, which gave his thinking some order but with the themes connected loosely enough so that he could easily alter them singly or in groups. His themes helped him capture his thoughts about evolutionary change by allowing him to reach out in many alternative directions at once and pulling seemingly unrelated information into a coalescent body of thought.

"Darwin used his themes to work through many points that led to his theory of evolution by helping him to comprehend what is known and to guide in the search for what is not yet known.  He used them as a way of classifying the relation of different species to each other, as a way to represent the accident of life, the irregularity of nature, the explosiveness of growth, and of the necessity to keep the number of species constant...By adjusting and altering the number of themes and connections, Darwin was able  to keep his thought fluid and to bring about adaptive shifts in his thinking. He played the critic, surveying his own positions; the inventor, devising new solutions and ideas; and the learner, accumulating new facts not prominent before."

Blurb - another dimension of creative expression

Blurb is an amazing self-publishing tool for anyone who wants to create and publish a professional quality book. You can publish your own books on business, art, training, peotry,  inventions, even your blog posts - whatever you can imagine. There is a choice of professional layouts for images and text. I havn't done it yet, but it seems incredibly easy - and a great way to unleash and focus meaningful creativity. Check it out at www.blurb.com.

Precipice Improv and Emergence

I am in an improvisational theater performing group, Precipice Improv. (I'm pictured here with cast mates, from top left to bottom right, Dan Mont, Ric Anderson and Bob Adler).

We improvise full-length plays with nothing planned in advance. No structure. No outline. No character or plot development. Nothing, except for 2 locations we get from the audience at the beginning of the play. The play is then titled, "The Space Station and the Bathroom" or whatever locations we get from the audience. Two of us then run on stage and start interacting, and thus the play begins.

When the play goes well, the audience says, "That HAD to be scripted. At least some part of it had to be scripted. It looked too easy."  It was easy. When the performance does not go so well, the audience says, "That looked hard."  It was hard.

So what makes is hard sometimes, and easy others? What is the "magic formula" that allows a fully formed, coherent, organized play - with believable characters and a plot - to emerge before the audience’s (and our own) eyes?  And, what gets in the way?

What makes it work when it works?  We do not go our with a pre-formed notion of our characters or of a plot or of a conflict, challenge or situation. We just let them emerge based on our interactions, actions, and reactions. The "magic formula" is the adherence to improv principles. When we adhere to the principles of improvisation, an emergence occurs that is more intelligent and creative - and organized - than any one of us could have planned. As with any good emergence, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. By adhering to the principles, a play unfolds so original and unpredictable, that while in it, you have a sense of being entirely in flow - getting to fully experience the adventure as you create it.

The principles that allow this to happen are simple, yet profound. They seem easy, but in practice, they are almost the exactly opposite ways society navigates every day life and work situations. Thye take re-learning (I say that becuase we were born natural improvisers and then got "educated" and "civilized" out of the playful aspects of it). Below are 7 basic improv principles. There are others, but I have found these to be essential:

1. Yes And - fully accepting the reality that is presenting, and the adding a NEW piece of information - that is what allows it to move forward and stay generative.

2. Make everyone else look good - that means you do not have to be defending or justifying yourself or your position - you have a group of other who will do that for you. And you are comitted to doing that for others. Without the burden of defensiveness, everyone are free to create.

3. Allow yourself to be change by what is said and what happens - at each moment, new information in an invitation for you to have a new reaction, or for your character to experience a new aspect of them. Change inspires new ideas, and that naturally unfolds what's next.

4. Co-create a shared "agenda" - the recognition that even the best-laid plans are abandoned in the moment, and to serve the reality of what is right there in front of you. You are co-creating the agenda in real-time. In order to keep the play going, you respond to the moment and an "agenda" co-emerges.

5. Be fully present and engaged - by staying preset to each moment, getting out of planning and into being, you have a wellspring options and choices in each moment. To do so requires  engagement and attention. With engagement combined with presence and yes-anding, you can't do anything but be co-creative.

6. Keep the energy going - no matter what is given, or what happens, you accept it and keep the energy gong. Unlike in everyday life, where people stop to analyze, criticize or negate, in improv you keep moving. A mistake happens - let it go move on. The unexpected emerges - use it to move on. Someone forgot something important - justify it and move on. Just keep moving.

7. Seek the good of the whole - always carry the question, "How can I best serve this situation?" and then you have a better sense of when to run in and when to stay back, when to take focus and when to give it, how to best support your fellow performers and how to best support the scene. By focusing away from how you will look into serving the larger good, you have more creative impulses and resources available to you at any moment. And the choices you make are more in alignment with the higher levels of creative integration that form a coherent play.

So, what make it "look hard" when it is not working so well?  Simple, any violation of the principles. If one of us tries to orchestrate, or worse impose, our own agenda or plot on the piece.  If one of us tries to be the "star" and take too much focus. If even one of us is not present to what is unfolding, moment-by-moment. If one of us worries about the plot, and starts to figure out how to "save" it. If we expect someone to should respond in a certain way. In short, anything that gets out  of the moment and out of support - and into our controlling heads.

The truth is, in each performance we have some of each - some magic moments and some more effortful ones. By adhering to the improv principles, however, we significantly increase the magic and decrease the efforting. A creative, and suprisely logical, play can then emerge through that  fresh and alive energy. We, and the audience, then get to experience the real-time excitement of riding the flow of a creative emergence.

Creativity is naturally self-organizing system. We are meaning makers, and left to our own devices, our brains naturally seek order, coherence and meaning. Once you allow yourself the freedom to explore and play; set the guidelines of play -i.e., improv principles; and then get out of the way, creativity can develop and unify all kinds of things that otherwise would seem impossible.   

For me, the principles of improvisation serve a much larger purpose than creating a play - I see them as having the ability to create the life-giving container for cognitive, personal, organizational, social, political, cognitive, and spiritual transformation. I see them as rules of engagement for a more peaceful, co-generative, co-creative, sustainable world.

Cultures of Creativity Exhibit

The National University of Singapore is featuring Cultures of Creativity – the Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize. Singapore is the 12th destination in the 15-city world tour, a traveling showcase of the creative process. Not just a compilation of facts and information, this exhibition specifically focuses on the internal drives and the external environments that shaped the creative achievements of the Nobel Laureates: 

The “Cultures of Creativity” exhibition was launched in 2001 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize. There are two versions of this exhibition: a permanent exhibition at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Sweden and an international traveling exhibition. The contents of this Centennial exhibition reflect the history of the Nobel Prize, while focusing on the concept of creativity. The exhibition consists of four sections:

Alfred Nobel and His Times - Learn more about how Alfred Nobel's will led to establishment of the Nobel Prizes and why he was a man ahead of his time.
The Nobel System - See how Alfred Nobel's wishes were realised through the establishment of the Nobel Foundation and the six Nobel Prizes - Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace and Economics.
Individual Creativity - Discover the driving forces behind the work of Nobel Laureates, their creative processes and their groundbreaking achievements.
Creative Milieus - Learn more about the creative milieus that have been significant in shaping Nobel Laureates and environments that stimulate creative thinking.

Reinventing Capitalism

Thanks to Michael Strong's post on the FLOWidealism listserve for the link to Howard Bloom's new book, Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In The Machine. Even of you do not have time to read the book, I recommend checking out the web site (www.howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism) for the description. It beautifully articulates the inexorable link between invention, innovation, passion and prosperity - not in a mechanistic, limited way of seeing capitalism, but through a soul-centered, integrative, fully human lens. Here are a few excerpts from the review on the web page:

Reinventing Capitalism lets you in on a secret Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and today’s mainstream economists, eco-critics, and business pundits never dreamed—forget greed and dedicate yourself to your own passions, to your ideals, and to others’ needs and you’ll unleash the power hidden in our civilization, a power that can make you a shaper of meaning, a maker of warmth, a creator of new wonders and abilities, and can offer you a new way to succeed.

...what lessons can we learn, what can we invent, what can we upgrade and create? What new twists of culture, of technology, of insight and technique will help us leapfrog over our assailants and carry us forward toward new ways of being? How can we take the values of our Founding Fathers to even higher peaks? How can we loft the best that’s in us into the next two centuries?
The answer lies in giving capitalism a heart and a soul. More specifically it lies in giving all of us something only saints have previously been required to possess—something Bloom calls “tuned empathy.”

...There’s a new form of capitalism struggling to be born among us. In reality it’s been here all along, but we’ve failed to see it. It’s Emotional Capitalism, a capitalism vibrant with the power of something that has to seize the heart of every boardroom meeting—the power to care, the power to feel the emotions of the people you serve, and the power to feel your own emotions in new ways

...The true businessman is a seer and servant. He is not trafficking in inanimate goods sold to anonymous “consumers.” He nourishes human souls. When he helps those souls catch fire, money flows. Those who look deep into their passions can anticipate the needs of others. A bone-deep love for others’ needs is the secret to personal growth, to profits, and to prosperity.

...It’s time for all of us—for those in our offices and our homes, and for culture-leaders in boardrooms, universities, and editorial headquarters--to wake up and see that humans are nourished by perception, nourished by passion, nourished by feeling. It’s time for us to see the emotional substance in what we’ve mistakenly labeled with a dehumanized vocabulary, the language of clods, lumps, stones, and numbers—the language of “materialism,” “commodification,” “consumerism,” “derivatives,” “transfer agents,” “utility maximization,” “quarterly profits,” “products,” “markets,” and “supply and demand.”

...We desperately need a reinvention and a re-perception of the system that has given Western Civilization its long-term strength and its recent weaknesses. We need the Capitalism of Passion.

...Capital is stored imagination. Capital is stored stress, stored vision, stored diligence to persist, and stored ability to inspire others to complete a task that seems impossible or frivolous. Capital is stored passion!

...There is a soul, a passion, inside of the economic machine. Our most personal desires and schemes sometimes scare us with their strangeness, with their lunacy. But some dare make them public—just as the first stone-chipper, the first stone-wall builder, the first brick-maker, and the first brick-city-planner did....Some risk looking foolish with the tales, the songs, and the fantasies they share. Others stare with wonder—they see their own unspoken feelings, their chaotic longings, echoed in a mirror there. Then we and our allies recruit, we proselytize. We make the masses see what we have seen. We organize believers to throw themselves with idealism, passion, commitment, and deep faith, into creating something that this cosmos has never previously seen. We organize others so they can make a reality of what is now shared fantasy, shared lunacy, acommunal and a corporate dream.

Brilliant Thinkers: The 5th Annual Brilliant 10

The September issue of Popular Science features the most creative scientists of the year in The Fifth Annual Brilliant 10. In their search, they looked not for the seasoned experts, but for those who challenge established assumptions and transcend the limitations of the current paradigms - swimming beyond the edges of what is known: 

By “brilliant” we don’t mean smart. Or at least not just smart. Brilliance is marked by insight, creativity and tenacity. It’s the confidence to eschew established wisdom in order to develop your own. It’s the foolishness needed to set out for the edge of understanding and sail right past it, ignoring the signs reading “Thar be monsters” (not to mention “Turn back lest ye never be awarded a decent research grant again”).

That’s why, when we started the six-month-long process of selecting our Brilliant 10 awardees, we asked hundreds of respected scientists, university department heads and journal editors to name not the most established or well-known scientists in their fields. We asked for the mavericks. The young guns. The individuals who are changing not just what we know but the limits of what we think it’s possible to know. The eventual winners are young (average age: 34), and each is just beginning to be noticed in the world outside their respective fields. But among their peers, our winners’ oft-radical ideas are generating a rare degree of respect and admiration. Among us, as well. And for that, they deserve to be part of our Brilliant 10.

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.