NOTICED:CREATIVITY CULT

It’s early Saturday morning, and instead of lounging in bed with a stack of newspapers, I’m in a meeting room with a bunch of strangers with sticker dots on our foreheads.  The stickers come in blue, yellow, red and green – but since there are no mirrors, we don’t know which colour we’ve been given. And yet, when we’re told that the room has been divided into different coloured corners and asked to go to where we think we belong, I for some reason make a beeline for the green corner.

Awaiting me is a group of mostly middle-aged professional types clad in casual wear and looking as serious as people who have dots on their heads can. When I approach, they look right at me and, almost in unison, shake their heads. My dot is not green after all.

All this may sound like a figment of my imagination, and in a way it is. For this is the sort of thing that happens at Mindcamp, an annual, three-day creativity retreat — a sort of boot camp for the brain that draws people from as far away as Italy and Australia to a site north of Toronto.

Many describe themselves as creativity conference “junkies” – last weekend, some were in Georgia for the “season opener”, the Atlanta Creativity Exchange. This week, they’re in Italy for the annual CREA conference for “creative problem solving, creativity and innovation.” On April 18^th, they might pop in for Mindcamp’s “Idea Tasting” in Toronto, and in late June, they will be in Boston for the grand-daddy of them all, the Creative Problem Solving Institute.

It is no surprise that the European Union has declared 2009 its year of creativity. With business and government both desperate for new ways to combat the economic downturn, inspiration has become big business. Of course, innovation and change are major components of the aura surrounding U.S. President Barack Obama. And last week, the government of embattled Ontario, which recently commissioned a report from creativity guru Richard Florida on the province’s opportunities in the Creative Age, unveiled a budget with enhanced tax credits for an array of creative ventures.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that “brain raves” designed to help the average citizen stir the creative beast within are becoming popular – so popular that a lively cottage industry of facilitators, coaches and “ideators” is springing up to meet the global demand to rev up our thinking caps.

Which is why, apparently, at Mindcamp, we’re all standing here with dots on our heads.

 Six years ago, Tim Hurson, author of the bestselling Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking, and Kristen Peterson, also a founding partner in a Toronto-based company called thinkx intellectual capital, came up with the idea of offering workshops to share their ideas about creativity and innovation.

 Now, says Ms. Peterson, “creativity is a new movement.” Since 2002, April 15-21^st has been designated as World Creativity and Innovation Week—an event that’s now celebrated in over 46 countries. There are sister Mindcamps in London and Seattle—the Seattle community now stays connected via Mindcamp twitter. While the annual Toronto Mindcamp attracts participants as diverse as the  director of a Mexico City consulting firm employed by Nike and Coke, to strategic marketers from Proctor and Gamble and professional “idea generators” who have flown in from the offices of the Walt Disney Company on both coasts, who have shelled out $550 apiece for the privilege of sleeping in bunkbeds at an old YCMA summer camp.  

“I think there’s a desperation out there,” says Mr. Hurson, “a growing sense that everything is changing and that we can’t keep simply doing the same things we’ve done in the same patterns over and over.

“Companies are struggling, because people are asking for change. And so they’re beginning to tap into some stuff they never might have before.”

Indeed, feeding your head appears to have taken on a new significance and urgency. From the mass popularity of book clubs and the spread of the salon movement to invitation-only celebrity think-tanks such as the Davos and TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences, and heavily promoted geek-guru events like Idea City, the creativity fest is threatening to become a regular stop for the eagerly self-improving.

Why creativity now? A significant piece of the puzzle may lie in the fact that creativity—formerly too uncomfortably art-school a subject for business types– is emerging as a new business imperative. There was a time when thinking outside the box really was outside the box. Now, of course, it’s atop the business agenda, and the word “innovation” is being thermo-engraved on the brass plates of corporate mandates.

Now you can get a Master’s degree in Creativity from Buffalo State University. And even classically left-brain business schools are starting to teach creative thinking and innovative decision making. At the forefront of this trend is the pioneering Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, which is so far out of the box that  it is actually pairing its  students with creative types in a pilot project called Designworks.

“Back in the seventies, a company could come up with an idea, like the IBM 360, and it could ride on that for the next 20 years”, explains Roger Martin, its dean. “Now you have to have great ideas over and over again.”

Another factor is globalization. “In the old days, Ford and Chrysler were both in Detroit,” he says. “They were in the same town, staffed by people who came from the same milieu, who took the same approach, staring at each other from their offices across the street.

“The likelihood that you were going be hit by something new coming from somewhere else, thought up by someone with different constraints, a different way of looking at things and a different cost structure was extremely low. Now, of course, that is no longer the case.”

At Disney, where chief executive officer Bob Iger has cited creativity as one of three key factors critical to the company’s sustained growth and success, (and, come to think of it, in-house “imagineers” have been a part of the corporate culture ever since ‘ol Walt went off to that merchandising house up in the sky), the pressures of globalization have only upped the ante. “If you’re thinking of it, there’s a good chance that right now, somebody else in India is on it already,” says Jayson Aquilanti, Disney’s manager of creative development,.

“The old ways just don’t work any more,” he adds , which is why he and his creative team must “constantly dwell in the possibilities and think about things in a different way.”

Which is not a bad description of being at Mindcamp. Despite the name’s unfortunate similarity to Mein Kampf  there is nothing rigid or militaristic to the experience. Mornings begin with 20 minutes of qi gong – a “meditation espresso” designed to help bleary-eyed early risers shake off their self-consciousness, concentrate on their breathing and move really, really slowly. Then it’s off to breakfast (mini-Danish, scrambled eggs, sub-par bagels and packets of Philly) during which announcements are introduced with the shake of a tambourine, followed by a group brain teaser or “creative jolt” that finds everyone, say, trying to pat their heads with their left hands while hopping on their right feet, and whistling the theme from Love Boat.

With three or four simultaneous choices of 90-minute workshops on the daily schedule, table talk tends to focus on whether Innovation Theatre, Idea Noise, Graphic Boot Camp or Living in the Now are the ones not to miss. Between classes, people hang out in groups on the central lawn, just like high school, except with BlackBerrys. At night, everyone gathers round a campfire with their new friends to sip wine, trade business cards and whirl trippy LED light strips around in the gathering dark as a flamenco guitarist plays.

Some have brought their kids; some are sleeping outside in canvas yurts. Everybody wears crazy nametags on lanyards around their necks that they’ve personalized with stickers and markers. Looking around, I realize that its like summer camp for aging hippies.

Not everyone is a mid-lifer but it’s hard to stop thinking about Mr. Hurson’s reference to “refirement,  not retirement” –  the boomer yearning for re-invention of the self another root cause for the sudden trendiness of inspiration. Certainly “ideators” have a thing for catchphrases. At the first workshop, I learn that, when making a decision, I should look at my hand because each finger represents a question to be answered in the determination: What’s the itch? (Index finger) What’s the impact? (Middle finger) What is all the information that’s needed? (Ring finger) Who’s involved? (Baby finger) and What’s the vision? (Thumb, apparently).

The next workshop, called Idea Noise, sees us broken into groups to brainstorm a hypothetical advertising campaign. Mine has some very clever people, including  real-life creative directors. But in the end, camp is just like the real world: Everybody listens to the cutest, most assured guy in the group while those who are less attractive or missing a Y chromosome might as well be wallpaper. So much for the endless possibilities of the imagination.

At lunch (three pastas that all taste the same plus salad), I sit with my new BFF, a woman from Disney’s Orlando office who likes to dress with a theme in mind (today’s: black and white polka dots) and is clearly having a lot more fun than I am. “Usually I am the only nutbar,” she says. “But here, I really feel like I’ve found my peeps.”

After jumping about on a large parachute like the one kids use at Gymboree, I discover that (surprise, surprise) I have very little in common with people who are good with numbers and science. In a seminar called Open to the Source, the leader, a thoughtful Brit named Richard Lang, reminds us that we cannot see our own heads. Not a particularly novel observation until you witness firsthand 70 people peering at each other through tiny picture frames. Afterward, I find that the strange, whale-like noises I’d heard the whole time were in fact people blowing into “hydrolophones,” which looked like oversized kazoos, and spouted water on the lawn outside.

During a session called Serendipity Soup, leader Mary Harvey, a high-energy improv comedienne with a lot of teeth and dangly earrings, asked us all to “go stupid,” because “it’s in the stupid, silly things where all the richness is. Stop editing your life. The more you expose yourself to what’s out there, the more inspiration you’re going to get!”

First she had us quickly draw a cartoon visualizing a current dilemma, pin it on our chests, then walk around the room giving entirely random “advice” to each other. Then she handed out some magazine clippings and tiny objects to each of us and gave us ten minutes to create a visual representation of our earlier dilemma. In minutes, I had surprised myself by assembling something from a couple of random photographs of a balancing elephant, a desert canyon, some fuzzy wire and Monopoly men and, strangely, was starting to make a lot of sense. I felt inordinately pleased by my brilliant creativity—until she asked us to pass our favourite object to the person on our left.

That night around the campfire, after a couple of glasses of wine, I ask some fellow mind campers whether it’s really possible to “teach” creativity.

Diane Eastham, an artist and educator turned creativity coach, and her fellow artist and educator friend Virginia Stephen, now director of the liberal studies program at the University of Alberta, vigorously asserted that creativity isn’t just something that some of us are born with.

“Some of us may be more comfortable with expressing their creativity than others, but I firmly believe that everyone is inherently creative,” says Ms. Eastham, who now mentors her clients’ creative development using her own four-step process, the stages of which she has precisely identified as preparation, incubation, illumination and implementation.

Disney’s Mr. Aquilanti says that our problem with creativity begins at school. “If you were to ask a room full of kindergarten kids, ‘Who in this room is creative?’ 99 per cent of them would raise their hands. By the time they are in junior high, that number would drop to 50 per cent, and by the time they are adults, it would dwindle to about three who would raise their hands.”

In his opinion, this is largely due to how and what is being taught. “It starts in kindergarten that the teacher says the trees are green, and the bark is brown,” he explains.

Roger Martin of the Rotman agrees. “So much of what we are doing now is un-teaching – un-teaching the notion that the existing data-based process is where all the great value is created, validating the idea that this more creative kind of thinking is actually useful and helpful, and helping students get over the idea that, if they are not doing something that is immediately productive, what they are doing is something wrong or bad.”

Which makes a person wonder just what creativity is – merely permission to let your mind wander? But is a refreshed mindset really the same thing as creativity? Certainly the word “create” implies some sort of end result.

As for my three-day pit stop “dwelling in the possibility”,  I learned that it didn’t take much to re-connect with your inner creative child.

But the real revelation was just how many people are out there searching for inspiration – and just how inspired it is to come up with something like Mindcamp to give them the opportunity they seek.