From September 14-17, 2011, the Portuguese Creativity and Innovation Association – APGICO is hosting he 12th Conference on Creativity & Innovation with the purpose of providing an environment where participants learn with each other ways of developing collaborative activities which promote innovation.

The conference is promoted by the European Association for Creativity & Innovation (EACI) (http://www.eaci.net ) that, since 1987, co-organizes the bi-annual European Conference on Creativity & Innovation (ECCI), together with a local creativity and innovation association in Europe, with the intention of providing a platform for practitioners and academics in the field of creativity and innovation.

ECCI XII features more than sixty of the best world experts in the field, presenting more than 45 workshops, 24 keynote presentations and 6 expert panels.  Participant from 30 countries have already enrolled. The Conference will include contacts with local people, live performances, festivals, multimedia installations, and food tasting. A full program and a vision of a congress in which the participant is acting as a character, chosen from a fairy tale list.

I dusted off my Funk & Wagnalls (circa 1973) to find a definition of community from the “olden days.” A time before the big bang of computer-aided media. That last-century definition required community to be a group of people living together in one locality sharing common interests, characteristics, and laws. Communication technology has certainly liberated “community” from geographical chains, but other aspects of the definition still apply.

What nags me about the role of communication technology in evolution of the concept of community is new media’s ability to exacerbate shrill and polarizing polemics helping create isolated islands of like-minded people who don’t deal well with opposing points-of-view. For all its potential for facilitating idea exchange, the very proliferation of media could be toxic to collaboration and honest debate if island of like-minded people reach critical mass, and group think further reinforces majority points-of-view. This type of community behavior has happened without computer-aided communication. New technology dramatically accelerates the dynamics of group, and the speeds with which they form and find community.

These communities provide a kind of comfort in the face of outrageous events. However, if I am not careful, I can effectively gate myself from diversity and different opinions that could broaden perspective and foster learning and creativity. I along with my community can be tempted to nurse our biases in a way that is qualitatively different from for example the 1970s when the public debate was also polarizing, scary, and in the streets.

I shudder at those little blank spaces that social media sites use to invite me to share what’s on my mind. As soon as I see the query, anything that I was thinking dissolves into a vat of internal gibberish. While I have friends whose humor, wit and sense of life enable them to tweet and indeed entertain their readers with what appears to be effortless abandon, my poor brain freezes up at the sight of invitation to share what I’m thinking.

As a student of creativity, this reaction intrigues me. I know the guidelines for brainstorming and can defer judgment with the best of them…or can I?

Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo, etc. even this blog all have an element of self promotion. So I instantaneously think of and evaluate the comments I could make in response to those little open invitations against a long list of internal and professional criteria. As quick as I can think of something to write, I can snipe it off. Leaving me with a pile of half-thought expressions. So I am in fact judging so rapidly that I don’t leave one thought standing.

Perhaps our digital world further highlights differences in creative styles and expressions that we already know about. Some creative styles may serve a glib fluency that sparks ideas using social media as its medium. For other social media almost seems as if its an extension of thinking out loud. Still others are internal processors — only ready to share information when it’s articulate and clear in their own heads. In those cases social media can become a forum or a place to pilot an idea. So while social media and the Internet may increases the diversity of sources for ideas, individual style may still factor into how one taps and uses it.

While, I’m not sure how I’ll respond to the next invitation to share “what I’m doing.” But I will try to take a breath and…improvise.

Not only does culture influence creative output, it creates our definitions of what creativity is. The Western conception of creativity is deeply rooted in an individualistic culture. At the same time they tried to explain knowledge using individual experience as their focus, philosophers such as Hume, Kant and many others contributed to developing the idea of creative imagination. (See The Creative Imagination by James Engell for more context.) Both the Romantic notion that creativity results from an inner essence and the mechanistic-reductionist contention that it results from unique and useful associations places the individual at the center of creativity.

Yet, today teams and workgroups are charted with being innovative and creative – collectively. To the Western mind, this almost seems like a contradiction. This may be one reason why a simple creative process model like divergent-convergent thinking can help teams work creatively. The model’s simple structure and guidelines for behavior helps individuals play well together. It also helps balance individual contribution with collective output. While a solution that’s implemented may be a group effort, individuals had an opportunity to contribute to its development based on personal experience and knowledge. When a group develops and implements a creative solution the process of working together is reinforced.

This year’s Creative Problem Solving Institute will be held in Danvers, Mass on June 21-24. This eclectic meeting of minds and hearts will appeal to anybody who believes that we have the imagination to solve problems and create opportunity. CPSI provides workshops, training and inspiration to become undaunted. There’s also thought provoking keynotes, opportunity for great discussions with brilliant people, drumming and dancing.

Like no other conference, it provides hands-on learning experiences that enable you to think differently and stretch your beliefs about what is possible.

http://www.cpsiconference.com/

“Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions – who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans….they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when IMAGINATION is joined to COMMON PURPOSE and necessity to COURAGE.” Barack Obama, Inaugural Address. 1/20/2009

Certainly the word imagination in President Obama’s inaugural address got my attention. But it was the combination of imagination with “common purpose” and “courage” that resonated. To me, it is a recipe for leadership, and a rallying call to thought-based action with an implied link to values and accountability.

(To see, the phrase in contaxt go to the 9:45 mark in the C-Span Video.)

Check out TED. TED = Technology, Entertainment and Design

This sight features a series of 15 minutes talks from TED conferences on the process of innovation in technology and design, the role of collaboration in creativity, where designers find inspiration, the nature of the universe and. Fabulous for getting different perspectives and sparking your own ideas, it’s a salon for our times.

It’s customary to greet each New Year with renewed vision, new business plans and resolve. However, as I work on mine, I need to resist disillusionment fostered by the business climate that 2009 inherited. Ideas from two classic organizational development texts redoubt my efforts.

Senge’s (1989) description of creative tension as the relationship between the vision of what one wants and a clear picture of current reality reminds me that the gap between vision and reality is the source of creative energy. So, there will be plenty of opportunity in 2009 for creative thinking and problem solving.

Bellman’s (1993) comment that “commitment is taking responsibility for creating the life that we want” (p. 30), reminds me that an actor in the above creative tension is me. Real commitment translates to action and is manifest when in the willingness to expend the 90% perspiration that Thomas Edison claimed as necessary to implement an idea.

With these notions in mind, ideas, plans and action emerge more important than ever in making 2009 a great year.

Bellman, G. (1993). Getting things done when you are not in charge. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Senge, P. (1989). The fifth discipline. New York: Currency/Doubleday.