Transcript Diversity and the Roots of Creativity

Creativity, Diversity, and other
Conundrums
TGIF Apr 20/06
On Stage and Off








Connected
Visual world
Partnerships
Accountable
Complexity
Rate of change
High expectations
Cultural diversity








Non-linear
Quantum literacy shift
Multilingual
Synthesis
Instant communication
Volatile
Performance accent
Global Ecology
ISSUES AND TECHNOLOGY







POVERTY
POLLUTION
POPULATION
AGING/HEALTH
ENERGY
KT BOUNDARY
EQUILIBRIUM







GENOMICS
INFORMATICS
NANOTECHNOLOGY
MATERIALS
CITY OF CANADA
EQUITY
CULTURAL CLASH
Problem Solving/Human Capital
• the health/ wealth of organizations,
cultures, cities, provinces, nations
is embodied in human capital and
idea generation
LEARNING IS THE KEY
Knowledge is the key factor in production, innovation, amelioration,
social and political development . Learning is as essential to capital
formation in the knowledge age as steel making was in the industrial age.
Declining productivity ( or the wrong kind of learning )in education is a
serious brake and barrier to growth in all other areas.
CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION
Creativity Involves cognitive activity that results in a new way
of viewing some problem or situation, and which is not necessarily
restricted to practicality.
Creativity = Idea + Action
Innovation is the successful exploitation of new ideas.
Innovation = Creativity + Productivity
=
Ideas, Ways, Values
Productivity
Balance / Optimize
“Transforming Culture”

FACTORY OF EDUCATION Á LA
MODE 2005
Consumerism/fashionable
 Utilitarianism/P.O.U. (personnel office)
 Specialization ( experts on less)
 Dumb down: Intellectual welfare
 The Myth and Reality of Technology
 Lacking esthetic/art/mavericity
 Honing Creative Thinking Tools NOT
THERE ARE FOUR EDUCATIONS:
ONE SHOULD TEACH YOU HOW
TO KNOW, ONE TO TEACH YOU HOW
TO LIVE WELL, ANOTHER HOW TO
MAKE A LIVING AND THE OTHER, HOW
TO LIVE WITH OTHERS .
Creative Thinking Tools






Observing
Imaging
Abstracting
Recognizing patterns
Analogizing
Transforming






Body Thinking
Empathizing
Dimensional thinking
Modeling
Playing and copying
Synthesizing
Impact years

O-5

K-8
The Tools
9-12
Hormonal Tribes
University/College
Tool refinement /How to Know
On the Job
Applied Life R
Organized/homogenized/Diet regime




THE time of your life
0-8, Ms Miller’s Creativity Soup
Painting
Drawing
Recitation
Time Alone
“Contemplo”
Story Time
The Green
Hornet
Poetry
Cutouts and
Putty
Dreaming
Reading and
Figuring out
Singing
Newspapers
Musical
Instruments
Ball Games
Choir
History
Truths
Einstein didn’t use flash cards
Less not more is useful
Listening is job 1.
Being alone and fending for oneself
“Practica” in the world
Value Chain
Data information
knowledge
 understanding
 wisdom
Technology Driven Shift @
Ways of Knowing
VISUAL/ICONONIC
GRAPHIC/ANIMATE/
SIMULATION
BRAIN/MIND
RESONATING
TEXT/VERBAL
(GUTENBERG)
PAST
1980s
2020
“To envision information and what bright and splendid
visions can result is to work at the intersection of image,
word, number, and art.”
Edward R. Tufte
Creativity
Future creativity requires a complete literacy
- Numeracy
- Literacy
- Document/Graphical/Sensory Integration
literate/
innumerate
Lateracy
?
To 3K
Leibnitz
illiterate/
numerate
Creativity Assumes a Diverse Literacy
A complete new literacy includes competence in:
- Language
- Mathematical analysis
- Spatial representation
- Thinking musically
- Kinesthetic skills
- Understanding others
- Understanding self
- Document/Graphical/
Sensory Integration
literate/
innumerate
illiterate/
numerate
To 3K
Leibnitz
Something from Nothing Not
Ideas to Profit: Paul Romer’s “Endogenous Growth Theory”
i.e. BIOTECHNOLOGY
Creativity assumes a fundamental knowledge content.
You can’t get from nothing to something. Hence the
importance of a broad general education across
“the Language Divide”…..sharpening the 9 pillars
of intelligence.
Unification of Knowledge/
Consilience
Subjects are dealt with by a specialist here, a specialist
there, who can't talk to each other, and so we need
really to deepen knowledge, and as we deepen knowledge of these
subjects, find a way of connecting them up so that when you or
I debate these subjects, we can link them up in a sensible,
meaningful way in order to arrive at wise judgments.
This is consilience at work.
Goal is Organic Integration?
Integration of Knowledge: memory, knowledge, imagination,
Feeling……..this unified understanding linking, mind, and
body, sense and sensibility is called SYNOSIA.
“To the extent that languages, music, the visual arts, and mathematics
may represent different views of some shared deep structure, it can be said
that each represents a distinct interpretation of that deep structure.
Each language medium is different. It expresses aspects that cannot be captured
in other interpretations. As a result, none of them achieve absolute truth.”
Steven R. Holtzman, in Digital Mantras, 1996
Creative Canadians

A survey of 2000 adult Canadians
found that forty-five percent of
respondents said that there was too
much dependence on science and not
enough on faith. Another twenty-two
percent felt it wasn’t important for
them to know about science, while
forty-one percent considered that
scientists have powers that make them
dangerous.







Engineering digest, 1990
25 percent believe lasers are focused by sound
waves
86 percent believe that the greenhouse effect is
caused by air pollution
33 percent believe that the earliest humans lived at
the same time as the dinosaurs (20 percent don’t
know)
15 percent believe that the sun revolves around the
earth (6 percent don’t know)
18 percent know that the earth goes around the
sun, but think that this occurs once a day (13
percent don’t know how long it takes)
25 percent do not agree that human beings
developed from earlier groups of animals (17
percent don’t know)
9.6 percent think that radioactive milk can be made
safe by boiling (29 percent don’t know
HOPE

Pathways, plasticity
 np 3 X 109 ( 5700)
 100 X 1012 nd
 dynamic environmental change

accelerates as a function of
complexity. rate of change . and
rising expectations.
Adaptation and DIVERSITY
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new
landscapes, but in having new eyes and looking at the world from
diverse viewpoints.” LPV
Meaning and Language
The path to understanding is constructed / found / discovered using human
tools and intelligences.
Feeling
Textual / Graphical / Sensory Integration
Creativity/Innovation/Genius

Correlation of
creativity/innovation/genius:
mavericity, the tendency to think
and do the unexpected: original and
useful but not obvious