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Darrell's avatar

I completely agree with the creativity and kids perspective. We actually teach creativity OUT of kids and then later try to stuff it back in. Sort of like the food industry that strips nutrients away during processing and then “fortifies” cereals and other products. It was naturally fortified to begin with!

Storytelling is great. Pixar even has a narrative framework to write a story. A common line in the formula is “because of that _________.”

1. Once upon a time, there was …

2. Every day …

3. One day …

4. Because of that …

5. Because of that …

6. Because of that …

7. Until finally …

8. Ever since then …

Sadly, some people simply are not and never will be creative. That’s OK because those people have things, like execution, relationship building, and influencing talents that other people may not have. And often people simply “want” to be creative like people “want” to be good at sports or music. They can learn to play a piano but never understand how to play a piano musically. That is basically a description of talent diversity: one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. There is more complexity to diversity than how we typically think from a social perspective.

I personally liked to use what I call “conceptual creativity” with work groups, focusing on the concept rather than an idea. For example, you can tell people to design a really good umbrella but the concept is to actually stay dry. The umbrella is just one idea based on something you already know that can lock us into a way of thinking.

From my perspective, part of the concept of today’s column is that kids have less in their brain to draw upon for ideas so they focus more on the concept in fun and unpredictable ways - until we begin eliminating fun time as we teach them to be adults. Tech at least had it partly right: have fun at work!

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David Feiser's avatar

This is perhaps one of the greatest, most terrible deficiencies in our modern/post-modern age. We think we’ve “evolved” and “progressed” beyond our pre-modern forebears, but in fact, in spite of the technological breakthroughs and innovations we enjoy (I enjoy!), our lack of imagination has led us to the point of thinking we are the end-all, be-all point of life, circumventing both our true purpose and our Creator.

I’m sure some (many?) will disagree with me. I love America. But I think a great many of our personal and cultural problems stem from this turn to the dialectic and absolute logic over-against the story of who we truly are and where we really come from, and it’s not a pool of primordial sludge and a family tree with primates — again, surely a point of contention for some. This gets back to the point of Robert Fulghum’s “Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.” There, and along the way, we all both learned and enjoyed the power of story. There’s a true story that makes sense of the world, of life, our own brokenness and that of the world’s, as well as our only hope.

Enjoy, and have a great day!

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