The Creative Skills Training Council, Asia Pacific is an on-line community of creative practitioneers made up of business executives, academics, designers, artists, behaviourial and cognitive scientists involved in advancing the practice of creative skills and capabilities development in business, organizations and government. Founded in August 2006, it was formed in response to international interest in the development of creativity as a prime driver in business, government policy and communities that are committed to researching, exploring, sharing and commenting on the concerns and opportunities experienced globally in the vital industry, the training of creative skills. It has grown rapidly and has 114 members globally with representatives from Canada, USA, Jamaica, UK, Portugal, Spain, Norway, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. As founder of the organisation, I felt we needed a global mentor and asked Dr Sidney J Parnes, the co-creator of the creative problem solving methodology if he would act in this capacity. To my delight he accepted!
Sidney J Parnes,at 85 is generally regarded as the god father of creativity sciences. A genuine living legend, he is a true pioneer in the development of creative education. A former shoe salesman Sidney J Parnes PhD became Professor Emeritus of Buffalo State College, New York State and is the Founding Director of the International Center for Studies in Creativity. He is still an active board member of the US Creative Education Foundation he co-founded in 1954. Sid along with friend Alex Osborn of the famous New York advertising agency BBDO (the O stands for Osborn) created what is known as the Creative Problem Solving Methodology.
Sid's early mentor was George Wallas. Wallas was a member of the inner circle of the Fabian Socialist along with H.G. Wells, a political theorist and psychologist and the first Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics. Wallas was concerned that the individual was at risk in modern industrial society and he argued strongly for the humanizing of modern life.
Wallas book The Art of Thought published in 1926 is generally considered one of the first models of the creative process. He proposed creative insight or illuminations could be explained in 5 stage
(i) preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions),
(ii) incubation (where the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening),
(iii) intimation (the creative person gets a 'feeling' that a solution is on its way),
(iv) illumination or insight (where the creative idea bursts forth from its preconscious processing into conscious awareness);
and
(v) verification (where the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied). </p> <p>
Sid has written that the message people received from Wallas's literature was that you work hard, gather and analyze data, sleep on it - get -a way from it- let it simmer - and hope for illumination, rising from the subconscious bombardment and resulting interconnections of memory data and/or the sensory input to the brain. Wallas though was referring to the genius - not your average person.
Sid concurred with the first part of this statement by Wallas. However, the second part of the statement that suggested these processes were the gifts of the artist or genius Sid vehemently opposed. Sid believed that every worker was capable of creativity and could be taught it. His life long work has been to find ways and means of demonstrating and proving this theory.
In 1994, Sid edited a collection of the best essays he had read over the last 50 years and published under the title the Source Book for Creative Problem Solving with the subtitle "a fifty year digest of proven innovation processes"
With essay headings such as Enduring Theoretical Foundations and Research Substantiations;Getting to the Heart of Creativity Development Processes;Applying Imagery/Intuition and Using Computers, it provides a veritable pot pouri of the diverse schools of thought on the systemic development of creative productivity.
In this epic work, Sid has written a forward on each article which provides a short biography of the author as Sid knew him or her and their place and contribution to the field of creativity development. He places each essay against the background of America' social history and the development of this movement and the vital role it played in the rise of post war American capitalism.
Sid calls the 40's the Cry in The Dark - the period where Osborn and his colleagues worked to exhort the populaces creative potential for the war effort. Alternatively, Sid suggests this theme could also be applied to the lack of research on and deliberate procedures for the purposeful development of creative talents. The 1950's is what Sid calls the hope and the hunch stage. It was during this period that the first formal and lasting programmes for deliberate creativity development were offered. They were the Osborn Parnes Creative Problems Solving Model and the Gordon and Price Synectics model of creative development.
Sid calls the 60's and early 70's the second-generation of creativity-development that stressed spontaneous imagery processes that saw the birth of the human potential development movement. Maraharishi's Transcendental Meditation, Win Wengers Psychogenesis, Masters and Houston's Mind Games and one might even consider Timothy Leary's mind altering drug movement the edge of the inventions, programs and processes that exhorted individual creativity development.
Sid Parnes book Visionizing - State of the Art for Encouraging Innovative Excellence published in the early 80's synthesized these new imagery and analogy processes with the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving method unintentionally providing a bridge of creative theory to one of the most important revolutions to emerge historically - the technological revolution. Sid Parnes refers to the 80's and 90's as the period of "mainstream application" of creativity. Creativity became a buzzword in nearly all areas of business, industry, education, government and life in general.
But in an ominous predication, he wrote about the abuses and misapplication of creativity that could occur. He was referring here mostly to creative accounting and financing and in particular huge government deficits, the US savings and loan debacle and the corporate frauds such as Enron and World On-Line.
And since the late 90 Sid's view is that the pendulum has swung back, albeit tentatively towards the humanist approach looking for answers that might emerge out of the dot.com disasters to provide some authentic meaning to the world we have created.
In the introduction to his Source Book of Creative Problem Solving, Sid refers to Paul E Torrance's seminal article on the Quiet Revolution - The Past 25 Years of Creativity Accomplishments to convey the ability of drastic change to occur without violence. Torrance cites the breaking down of the Berlin Wall and the revolution in Eastern Europe specifically.
Sid thinks this is pointing to something else though - a concept that he calls democratizing in other realms - realms such as business and industry.