Creativity

Yet another creative presenter at this weekend’s Integral Institute Integral Healthcare Training Showcase was Kathleen Jones. Kathleen is a veteran in training resident physicians. Kathleen’s presentation was entitled “Strengthening Self-Awareness through Art,” and, for my money, was one of the most engaging of the weekend.

Location(s)

See map: Google Maps

WE ARE MEETING, NOTWITHSTANDING THE WEATHER!

It's not as bad as you may think! See you there!

William James said "Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way." The converse of that might be to say that creativity is stifled by our tendencies to routinize our thinking into cognitive ruts. One of most comprehensive ways in which the ruts of modern thought have been explosed and disrupted is Integral Theory. First elucidated by Jean Gebser and more fully fleshed-out by many others, including Ken Wilber, Integral Theory weaves together a tapestry of eastern and western developmental psychology, a radical understanding of taking multiple perspectives, the emergent wisdom of multiple intelligences, a revolutionary view of ordinary and nonordinary states, and an appreciation of the various typologies found in tantra, eneagrams, Myers-Briggs, and the like. The resultant rich tapestry leaves those who understand its basic principals with a drastically expanded canvas on which to paint our lives, our work, our world.

Location(s)

See map: Google Maps

Among my guilty pleasures is to celebrate Sunday morning with the New York Times. No, not the online version -- I read that most mornings. No, Sunday morning is for the behemouth, the real deal, the newspaper. Nearly every Sunday, a visitor to my house on a Sunday morning will find me in a bathrobe, huge mug of coffee at hand, and the Times spread across my dining room table. I don't claim to read every word. Who'd want to do that? But I do scan nearly evey page, and savor every minute of it. What I don't usually finish on Sunday, though, is the Times Magazine. There's nearly always something worth enjoying throughout the week, not to mention the famous crossword puzzle. Among my favorite issues of the Magazine each year is "Year In Ideas". This issue, which usually comes out in December, is packed with inventions, developing social trends, and miscellaneous ideas -- some quite odd, and nearly all quite interesting. This issue is so good I often hold onto it long after the recyclers have removed the rest of the 5-pound stack of paper. The last few days, probably out of anticipation for the mid-December release of the 6th Annual edition, I have been perusing the 5th Annual edition, from December 11, 2005. What a year in ideas was 2005! But I'm not going to summarize them, but highlight those few that seem bound by a common theme:

Let's do that again!

That's my reaction to yesterday's "Integral Leadership in an Emergent World" one-day workshop. We had a perfectly sized group (16) of spectacular participants and, by all accounts, the first-ever (according to Ken Wilber) workshop dedicated to the integration of Integral Theory and Creative Emergence was a success.

As I've mentioned in earlier blogs, this workshop was an exploration of how the broad framework of Integral Theory and the Principles of Creative Emergence can be used by leaders to create breakthroughs in the workplace.

My co-facilitator, Michelle James, CEO of the Center for Creative Emergence, is a veteran facilitator and an expert in creative emergence. While I've led more than my share of Integral Theory-based workshops, seminars, and Intensives, it was Michelle's expert infusion of emergent principles and processes into this jam-packed workshop that set this workshop apart from other Integral Theory educational experiences.

A crash course on brain waves and brain states, combined with some pretty wild improvised role-playing, mirroring, and some colorful IBVA graphs showing showing various brain states marked the August gathering of the Capitol Creativity Network.