Imagine That!

I love the article. There is also a lovely passage in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, describing this process of increased structure promoting creativity. I must find it for you.

As a Drama teacher I have found that "still images" are a very powerful creativity generator, in situations where improvisation has proven diluted and uninspired.

At the end of lessons, I ask students to sum up their experiences in a limited number of words.

Frank Zappa is the Mothers of Invention

:)

Steve

Steve,

Thanks. We'd forgotten that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance mentioned structure enhancing creativity -- probably helped form our own views many years ago!

Tell us more about how you use the "still images." Sounds like something that Michele has been doing in her dance-writing workshops. Let's share and see how other people are doing similar things!

Bob R-B

How thrilling to be in touch with you, as I love your work and have quoted you over the years in my classes!

While now back in the US, I worked for over 12 years in UK business, public sector and education teaching applied thinking and creativity. I worked intensively with Dr. Edward DeBono's methods, Tony Buzan's Mind Mapping and Robert Fritz's structural tension. You wouldn't believe the push-back from very smart people who had bought into the notion that creativity means 'let it all hang out', and initial resistance to learning structured tools, techniques and mental frameworks. The AHA! came when they were able to get far more productive results, even with adversarial colleagues, in much less time. What's the secret? I suspect it's contextualized focus, which allows our harnessed mental energy to pierce the veil of infinite possibility.

Two new projects I'm working on are:
-combining creativity and movement based on the chakras as part of the process of accessing our soul's expression (so I'd love to hear more about Michelle;s dance work)
- taking the analogy of Tai chi for physical discipline and applying it to mental discipline through Mind Chi, based on a new work of that name by my colleaues North and Israel (www.MindChi.com)This fits with my overall work on Mental Resilience, of which structured creative skill building is a major part.

I look forward to hearing more from you!

I think the authors make a very good point and I would like to add the following comment. In contemporary art and architecture, creativity and imagination are associated with traits like successful, forward looking, intelligent, desirable. If one reads architectural reviews, creativity is highly rewarded in terms of design even if that creative expression produces sterile, hard to relate with, unfriendly buildings. My point is that creativity and imagination are overrated in the sense that they are neutral, they are tools, like a knife, and can either be life enhancing or life diminishing. As a society we have a hard time identifying self destructive creativity and imagination.

As a child it used to drive me crazy when people, especially teachers, wouldn't give me specifics. I deal with a lot of problems in my head and it still drives me nuts some even as an adult.

I call imagination the first step upon the path of enlightenment because it is what drives our curiosity. It is what allows us to be creative and to think beyond that which we already know.

Children need it explained, a little nudge to help get their imagination stirred up. Its the reason I've started doing some inspirational posters based on my art to inspire kids to learn their math and science. Since my artworks are most often illusions of space created with fractals they inspire both with their beauty and in the manner by which they were created, with mathematics.

Michele and Robert, thank you for highlighting the counterintuitive point that “the creative imagination works best when faced with explicitly understood constraints.”

“Blue-sky thinking”—that is, open-ended, utterly free brainstorming—is an attractive and picturesque concept that isn’t necessarily a practicable strategy. Particularly in the workplace, where the profit motive and the finite nature of the workday are sources of pressure, constraints facilitate imaginative thinking by defining both the problem at hand and the tools available to solve it; one’s imagination can then mold these raw materials.

Eric Liu and I include “Think Inside the Box” as one of the 28 practices that constitute our new book, Imagination First. One key notion that we mention and that I would like to add to your rich discussion is “intention.” Even when we’re not receiving an assignment of some kind, the fact is that our daily lives are “boxed in by limitations, material and attitudinal, that we inherit or create” (73); as social beings in a world of scarcity, we cannot escape this. So our success or failure as creators and innovators—as humans, perhaps—hinges on our ability to intentionally view these limitations as jumping-off points rather than obstacles. When we make a conscious decision to see things this way, to acquire this habit of mind, the road to innovation suddenly appears much clearer.

– Scott Noppe-Brandon, Executive Director, Lincoln Center Institute
http://www.lcinstitute.org
http://imaginationnow.wordpress.com/

What a great post. And I've enjoyed reading the comments tremendously. As a creative strategist at one of the world's largest public relations and communications firms, I spend a large part of my time working with teams to develop creatively exciting, but strategicall sound programs for our clients. There's not an assignment in the business world today that doesn't come with constraints, and that's not only OK, it's great. In my training sessions I make the distinction between constraints and a deficit of knowledge, however.

I wrote about constraints in an essay on my blog called "The Sound of One Hand Creating" (http://www.thinkinside.biz/blog/2007/1/14/the-sound-of-one-hand-creating...). For those who, like I, were reminded quickly of Robert Pirsig's college professor giving a writing assignment, you can find my retelling of that story in this essay.

I wrote about lack of information in an essay called "The NINO Principle: Nothing In, Nothing Out" (http://www.thinkinside.biz/blog/2007/2/11/the-nino-principle-nothing-in-...)

Thanks for a great piece.

-- John Armato

I thought the research showed constraints improved creativity but only to a limit. Too many constraints, say the building code or nuclear physics, reduced creativity .