creativity – Page 8 – The Consulting Artist

In Transition

Illinois SHRM 2014 has come to a close.

I’m in the airport lounge at O’Hare waiting for my flight to be called. I’ve spent a stack of my air miles on a business class upgrade although I’m so tired I feel like I could sleep even if they threw me in the luggage hold.

I had high hopes for this trip and they’ve been comfortably exceeded. After a Friday night sitting in a downtown bar enjoying the baseball on the TV and the local beer and pizza, the following day I visited the wonderful Art Institute of Chicago again, this time with Joe Gerstandt.

Joe and I then got to fulfil a long held ambition to work together, when we opened the conference on Sunday with an opportunity for people to explore how they might bring the artist in them, to work. It was an ambitious, emergent collaboration of 100 people.

The experimentation was bold and energetic and enjoyable – I will reflect on it further and maybe write a little more soon.

Sunday night saw a reprise of last year’s fireside unplugged karaoke and a gentle brush with the law after the hotel manager decided to call the cops in order to get us to go to bed around 1am. Why he didn’t just ask us – I’ll never know, but when I suggested to the police officer that this was not a good use of his time, he simply told me the decision to send us to be was ‘unrebuttable’. So I learned a new word, which was nice.

Monday morning came around and I gave a talk on collaboration – an evolution of my ‘We Are Better Together‘ session, which also drew on some of what I learned when I worked with Neil Morrison at Louisiana SHRM earlier this year. The talk was scheduled to take place in the main theatre – and it was a very odd experience being on a stage typically used by the acting profession.

The bright lights made it almost impossible to see the audience and I need eye contact, it’s one of the things that helps me relax, so once I got started, I hopped on and off the stage and wandered about a lot. The response was great – thanks to everyone who came along.

Monday evening we went bowling for fun and to raise money for the No Kid Hungry charity. The bowling was really enjoyable – I managed a score of 153 in one game, take that! John Hudson offered to top the donation up if anyone got a strike in the closing game, by which time I’d gone off the boil – but the incentive briefly reignited me and he had to put his hand in his pocket 😉 Back from the bowling Dwane kindly invited a few of us to his room for a sneaky beer or two.

Tuesday morning was spent listening to Jennifer McClure give her session, and then came bag packing and many lovely goodbyes.

The crowd at Illinois SHRM are fantastic. I’ve been thanked more times than I can remember in the past couple of days, the motivation and encouragement are heartfelt, humbling, and gratefully received. Thank you to everyone who has helped me have such a thoroughly exhausting, fantastic time.

I’m in transition. I don’t want to leave and I can’t wait to get home.

Creative Leadership – Essential Reading – #1

A brief review of 101 Things to Learn at Art School – by Kit White.

What’s black and white and red all over?

A newspaper? A sunburnt penguin?

Or maybe…it’s this lot.

These four books which I have been reading and rereading for the last few months have each proved to be outstanding. Rarely do I discover such a rich vein of reading form, and I’d like to share it with you in the form of a brief review of each book, in the order they arrived in my hands.

101 Things to Learn in Art School – Kit White

Carole gave me a copy of this book as a birthday present last year. It’s a thing of wonder, oozing with creativity, simplicity and ideas. Each double page has an illustration on the left, and a thought, idea, practice or provocation on the right. Whilst at first glance this book feels like it’s squarely aimed at the aspiring artist, it’s full of ideas that cross borders into other disciplines too. When applying the book to my practice, I often find myself replacing the word art with the word work, after all – I do believe our art is our work and vice versa. For example:

Making (work) art is an act of discovery. If you are dealing only with what you know, you may not be doing your job. When you discover something new, or surprise yourself, you are engaging in the process of discovery.

Clear sight makes clear (work) art. Observation lies at the heart of the (work) art process. Whether your art derives from mimicking nature or extrapolating a mental construct, your powers of observation are critical. Unless you can see what lies before you, you cannot describe it. Train yourself to eliminate preconceptions and received understandings when observing anything. Try to see what is before you, not what you think you see or want to see.

I have the hard cover edition of the book. It’s a solid, rubber clad, square shaped thing of beauty. I can’t imagine enjoying this volume nearly so much on a Kindle. On the creative leadership dial it points more towards the creative, and I think your work will be all the better for reading it, enjoying it and practicing it. So much has it resonated with me, I have bought several copies of this book for other people as gifts.

Have a great day, next up it’s the turn of The Year Without Pants.

The Art of Leadership

Slides and notes from my talk and workshop at Learning Skills Group 2014. This deck includes links to research on why we find creativity hard, how to work through that difficulty, and some practical applications for creativity at work.

Here are the annotated slides from my talk and workshop at Learning Skills Group 2014. This deck includes links to research on why we find creativity hard, how to work through that difficulty, and some practical applications for creativity at work. There were about 100 of us in the room and I was impressed by how keenly people took part and got stuck into the visual challenges we cocreated. The feedback I received after the event was lovely too – thanks. Even though I’ve been playing with Art meets Work ideas for some time now, it’s always a pleasure to know that this often slightly risky work is landing usefully and enjoyably for people.

In addition to these slides, here is the link to the Visualising Your Work gallery from the same session that I put up earlier in the week. I hope you find something useful in here that you can apply to your own work. If you have any questions about the material – please drop me a line in the comments and I’ll help as best I can. The deck is on Slideshare for you to download and use, and like all my Slideshare stuff – it’s available under a Creative Commons attribution licence.