The secret to great work is great play from Presentation Zen

Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen Blog is without doubt consistently the world's leading blog on creativity in presentation and design and here is his latest offering in full. The secret to great work is great play We were born to play. Play is how we learn and develop our minds and our bodies, and it's also how we express ourselves. Play comes naturally to us. I was reminded of this while listening to a cool little jazz gig near the beach in Maui a couple of months ago. I snapped this photo below of a little girl enjoying the simple beauty of that musical moment by dancing happily all by herself.I love this picture above because it shows both adults and a child at play. The adult musicians are expressing themselves through jazz, a complex form of play with rules and constraints but also great freedom, freedom that leads to tremendous creativity and enjoyment for the players and the listeners.

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To Reinvent, Recruit The Rebels and Retrain the Brain

History is rife with stories of how people bursting with creativity were forced to take traditional safe jobs in deadening organizations while they toiled at creative pursuits on the side. Early American writer Nathanial Hawthorne was a customs agent. The ultra creative Franz Kafka worked for insurance companies. I had a relative who became one of Holland’s greatest regional writers, but spent his entire life working as an office manager. He would get up at 4 am each day to write before he went to work. This imperative to take a safe but boring job popped into my head during a recent discussion with someone who was tasked with reinventing a business operation that has been running sleepily in well-grooved tracks for some time.

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Cultivating Innovation And Creativity, Not Managing It - Nussbaum on Design, BusinessWeek

Bruce Nussbaum gets my award as the most consistently correct journalist on the topic of creativity and innovation and although the design principles he outlines below are not new, he is one journalist who is well informed, good at information gathering and sharing his knowledge simply and articulately around this topic.. Here is his latest post. There is a big movement in B-Schools and Design Schools to generate a new liberal arts paradigm that goes beyond learning how to think critically about an individual’s role in society to learning how to build critically based on people’s connection to cultural context. Call it Pragmatic Liberal Arts or Practical Liberal Arts. I call it Innovation Arts or Design Arts because it focusses on the “as if…” prototyping and creating that goes on in serious play (and which our schools succeed in stamping out by grade 2). I’ll be discussing the idea of a new Innovation Arts paradigm at The Future of Design confab in Stanford next week.

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How We Think as We Work and How We Find Our Muses - Harvard Busines Review

I'm in Word. I write a sentence. I revise the second half. I delete it all. I try to recall the original. I think I've got it. I stare at the phrase "brought home to me." It starts to look funny. I google it. Minutes, sometimes hours, pass in this state of indecision. It's not how I'd like to work, but too often it is how I work. My only saving grace is that eventually my train of thought does find its focus, usually with nary a moment to spare. If I must make a 5:00 pm deadline, clarity shows up promptly at 4:47. It seems that as much as deadlines push me to action, the mounting pressure to make them sparks creativity. In a talk given for TEDIndia

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Does Process Stifle Creativity?

A couple Friday's ago, I was in a meeting and I reiterated my mantra, "Process stifles creativity." A friend, well, I think she still is, nearly jumped out of her chair. "I need to correct you," she barked, "Only poorly implemented process stifle creativity." The suddenness and passion in her response caused the gentleman sitting between us to slide his chair back quickly in order to avoid being tangled in any physical altercation. The room was full of jeers for us to settle the dispute in the parking lot. Realizing I had just stepped in a hornet's nest, I made a joke of it. However, her attack does not dissuade me. I should have added a little clarity, since the offended friend is a co-author of the Association of Business Process Management's (ABPMP), Business Process Management Common Body Of Knowledge. But, the truth of the situation is that we were both out of order in this strictly facilitated meeting

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