2008 Directions and 2007 Year in Review

2008 Direction: Group Genius - The Creative Power of Collaboration Our theme for 2008 is based on a new book of the same name by Keith Sawyer, Associate Professor of Education and Psychology, Washington University, St Louis USA. It is a book I would have written!! It looks at collaboration from three perspectives - team, mind, organization. Sawyer claims creativity is the driver of to-day's global economy and contends that all the conventional wisdom around creativity and innovation is false. When he writes collaborative organizations need to embrace "equivocality, improvised innovation and constant conversation", he may be stating the obvious

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The Very Incomplete Science of Cognitve Behaviourial Measuring Tools

As a rule I am not a big believer in the use of cognitive instruments to determine people's personal styles or preferences. There is no real science or truth to the process. The methodology behind it is nearly always based on statistics and mean averages defined by some mystical language that attaches some archetypical behaviour that statisticians and researchers think they have observed. Change one of the variables and the whole deck of supposed realities will come tumbling down. The only good component of cognitive behaviourial measuring tools is their inventors naming of the archetypical characters their mathematics supposedly represent. So the reason I might choose to work with a particular tool is because its authors creative use of metaphors to describe their mean average characters has some resonance with me and seems at least clever.

Listen to this podcast with Dr Gerard Petrucio, the designer of Foursight, a creative thinking preference tool that I do use,  and learn about the methodology behind the tool. And then...make your own mind up!!

The Blind Optimism of Planning

In the New South Wales Knowledge Management Chat room this week, an interesting topic on project managers emerged. A senior executive had observed project managers coming off projects where they had experienced a variety of major issues, challenges and where turning around for their next assignment with a view that 'it will never happen again' only to find out they have the same or similar experiences on the next project. The senior executive was curious about this phenomena and suggested the project managers operated under a sense of optimism. His project managers believed that things would always get better and that the same concerns they had on the last project could never happen again. The senior executive suggested they needn't be pessimistic, better to be more realistic and he asked what did the network think about his position and what had others experienced. Having spent the last 30 years working with project managers in theatre and live entertainment, I had also been

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Creativity in Business from a Scottish Perspective

I sense a mirror reflection in Australia when I read a summary of Sir George Cox's presentation to delegates at the Scottish Institute of Directors Conference at St. Andrews this week. According to Sir George, Scottish business must stop thinking of creativity as an add-on if it is to compete globally. In his keynote speech, Sir George, chairman of the Design Council of the UK and author of the Cox Report on Creativity, commissioned in 2005 by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor, praised Scotland's record of innovation. "China simply aspires to be

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Creativity Should Be The New Mantra for Business Schools

This article is an excellent article from the Wall Street Journal on the problem of how universities and in particular business schools teach or worse, fail to teach creativity or innovation as part of business methodology.This problem is not new. Dr Sidney J Parnes, the co-creator of the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Methodology has been actively advocating globally for the inclusion of creative thinking and innovation methodologies in business school curricula since 1948 and at 85 is still actively involved in doing that to-day. What is promising is that there is a discussion emerging that is gathering pace within business schools globally around the issue of how creativity (in whatever form) might be meaningfully included in business school curricula.

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