Stirring up Live Creativity

During the past few weeks, I've had the honor and challenge and pleasure of stirring up creativity with large groups in a range of settings.  Check it out:

A few minutes before "Who's Got the Biggest Fed Head?"

Last week, I designed and hosted a game show for a 100 Federal Reserve employees, which we called "Who's Got the Biggest Fed Head?" (email me for an audio clip of our theme song!),  testing the knowledge and collaborative abilities of teams in an interactive format.  As I've written previously, most people would be shocked to learn that our too-often maligned Federal Reserve embraces creative thinking and new approaches in service of innovation, learning and improving.  For the game show, I brought a percussionist, and we couldn't help wink at the irony of walking through the crowd of Chicago protesters, beating on their little drums, as we carted in two large congas to play for the actual Fed employees, most of whom, from what I can tell and from what Bernanke himself said recently, sympathize with the protesters.  By the way, that's a $100 bill tie I'm wearing (left).

I just got back from West Virginia, where I facilitated an innovation session for an energy consulting firm (Leonardo Technologies; check out the cool stuff they're working on).  In addition to exploring innovation and creativity through interactive exercises, we also discussed the importance of passion--how to empower employees to pursue their own creative talents and interests--and brainstormed possibilities for new clients and areas to expand their worthwhile work of shifting the energy paradigm in our country.

Stirring it up with kids and parents

I also had a chance to stir it up with younger groups recently, as a speaker for 750 kids at a middle school assembly and as part of the Malaise County Fair project I've been developing with a creative cast this past year. For Malaise, we had our first public performance with families as part of a fall festival here in Chicago, where we tested out new ways for an audience to participate musically and otherwise.  As those of you who know me know, I'm dedicated to helping all of us be creators and not just spectators, and Malaise County Fair continues to experiment with breaking down the wall between performers and audiences in new ways.

Next week, I'll be at it with another innovative program for kids, Poetry Pals, which brings together children of different faiths (in this case, kids from Muslim, Catholic and Jewish schools) to learn from each other and write poetry together.  We're always looking for volunteers to help us with this program, so please email me if you're interested in fostering interfaith relations with us.

Malaise County Fair performs

Stressed out childhood and squelched out imaginations

Students are so overscheduled they can't think straight in Race to Nowhere, a recent documentary I screened with a community group of questioning parents and frustrated educators this weekend. Between the pressure for kids, earlier-than-ever, to compete to get into the "right" college and on educators to teach to the tests that may or may not measure "achievement," we now have an education culture that more often than not squelches the imagination of its best students--the ones whose creativity we need more than ever.

The film examines mostly high-achieving communities, and uncovers what Stanford professor Denise Pope captured almost a decade ago in a study turned book called Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students. The way we are doing school and the cost to our students, she revealed, is out of wack from our real goals of education. Race to Nowhere (click for trailer here if you don't see it below) reveals what too many parents know--the demands on our kids to succeed have led to grueling routines, sacrificed sleep, cheating and stress, depression and anxiety. The result is that students "do school," chase grades and college application impressiveness, going from one activity, homework assignment and memorized-before-forgotten information gulp to another. The question is, what are our students actually "learning" about how to live their lives? "Things that actually get our students to think are pushed aside," says one dedicated teacher from the film, who left her job as a teacher because she could no longer abide by her own district's test-taking demands.



This last week has seen related conversations percolate about how parents and kids deal with competition, discipline and being the best, thanks to Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which makes the case that our "weak-willed" and "indulgent" culture, compared perhaps to China or at least the demands of some Chinese-American moms like Chua, has our kids growing up ill equipped to compete in a fierce global marketplace. While Chua's arguments for "tenacious practice" and no excuses are worth being reminded of, Race to Nowhere shows how out of balance we've become. And keep in mind, as this week's TIME cover story about Tiger Moms points out, that many educated Chinese are seeking out the more "relaxed" American style of education--wanting to move away from rote memorization to more right-brained learning "because they know they must produce more creative and innovative graduates to power the high-end economy they want to develop."

Just like our too-busy adult culture today, a too-busy, overscheduled, and digitally addicted childhood ends up squelching creativity, indviduality and passion. We need an education system that inspires and engages and allows families to spend time together. Kids need downtime and free time to process and to imagine and to play, for social and emotional health, as well as the creative future of our culture.

Right now it's a race that is running us. It reminds me of the time I was in Japan and met up with a top English teacher there. She laboriously tutored kids into the night, almost every night, after their full day of classes. Turns out she could not communicate with me in English at all! Japanese kids were memorizing and studying a faux-English language that didn't really exist just so they could pass a test! More and more American kids are doing six hours of homework a night and forgetting everything they learn by the next week.

Every teacher and administrator I know is overwhelmed with standards and testing. Every parent fears their kid isn't doing enough to make it to the next school or threshold. Watch Race to Nowhere to remind you of other truths: that elementary kids don't need to do homework to thrive, that there is honor and smarts in kids who don't excel academically, and you can be successful if you don't go to the best college. The filmmakers describe the film as a call "to mobilize families, educators, and policy makers to challenge current assumptions on how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens." I call it a sanity check.

Making Time for Think Time and Passion Time, even at Work

"There is never a day we come in and there are only a few things we need to do," explains an Obama staffer in Newsweek's current cover story about how overwhelming presidential responsibilities have become. The story makes clear that, for the President and people working with him, there is not enough "bandwidth," not enough "time to catch your breath" during the day. "Lincoln had time to think," explains one history professor. "That kind of downtime just doesn't exist any more."

Sound familiar? We are all our own president today--each of us the President of what every 21st century career counselor will refer to as the Brand called You--more than ever stretching our personal bandwidth to meet unceasing demands to get it all done. Time to think or downtime at work have become luxuries for most, and even much of what many of us consider free time is spent just trying to keep current: Checking our email, catching up with Facebook, gulping down some news, reading a blog like this (p.s. Thanks).

But for creativity to thrive in our lives--and for innovation to reign in any organization--we need that think time and downtime, that free time and play time, even at work. More than ever at work.

"We need to reinvent free time," writes Nancy Gibbs, in her excellent essay about invention for Time Magazine this week. Read it here. In the same issue, Time features the Best Inventions of 2010, celebrating the latest innovations of the year, ranging from jetpacks to spray-on hair, highlighting the very technological breakthroughs that require the time, experimentation and play that are too often in short supply. "One thing technology can't give us," writes Gibbs, "is time for serendipitous discovery." Here's more from Gibbs:

Many of us are too busy keeping up to pause for tinkering, conceiving, concocting or devising. Technology, that bullying child of progress and prosperity, gives us ever finer tools of invention even as it denies us the time to use them. We are so wired, so networked and so well equipped that one person now does the job five people used to, thus hoisting productivity while precluding creativity.

It seems we're on the verge of getting our jet packs--but no one has yet managed the time machine. Or better yet, the time expander. So we've got to play tricks on ourselves: schedule free time, however counterintuitive that may seem. Deep immersion in a task--no distractions, no interruptions--can give the illusion that time itself is receding. We feel lighter, braver, our brains more nimble; we free ourselves to try and fail and try again. I've always envied the Google engineers their "20% time": the one day a week they are told to allocate to a kind of intellectual R&D, working on projects that aren't part of their normal job description. This speaks to one of the ironies of innovation: too much freedom makes it harder, too little makes it impossible. But if we were ordered by our bosses to spend even one hour a week brainstorming, blue-skying, free-associating, I imagine the rest of the week would become more creative as well.

Dan Pink, the ever-insightful author who just spoke at the Creativity World Forum in Oklahoma last week, tackles the issue of play in this wide-ranging Blogtalkradio segment. Having time to play, to do things for their own sake on your own time, he says (start interview at 10:58), is essential both to human motivation and to creativity itself. "People are creative in situations where they have freedom and autonomy to explore," he explains, referring to Google's "20% Time," where unofficial projects became highly profitable innovations such as GoogleNews and Gmail. This is what I call "Passion Time," where employees are empowered to pursue passions during the workday along side their other work. Pink refers to this as a "form of recess from work," like a "Spring break," which is how he describes Twitter's recent "Hack Week," which allowed employees to work on whatever they wanted. He tells the story of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics invention of graphene, which came outside of regular work time research during "Friday night experiments," which was more of a play time.

As Pink explains, this idea of more autonomy, having the "passion time" to pursue creative ideas at work, is an "idea that is really spreading." Think Time, Free Time, Play time or Recess--whatever you want to call it--is becoming more common in the most innovative organizations, where leaders know their most creative resource comes from the unique brains and passions of their employees.

In these days of overload, we now need to be proactive about how we spend our time, actually scheduling it into our days. So give yourself--and/or your employees and collaborators--the gift of time set aside just to think, scheme, tinker and play. Give it a name, put it on your to-do list and see what happens.