[ Readers' Reactions ]

Our future societies are in desperate need of renewed creativity. The impending Breakpoint - or Tipping Point as recent publications call it - will demand, a child-like creativity that must be nurtured and unleashed in adults, no less than preserved in our children. The sense of humanity needs to be re-established in adults as much as it needs to be nurtured and protected in our children.

Reacting to last month's article, creativity and innovation coach Sylvie Labelle put to C4C readers, "What makes [you] creative?" For myself, I know what brought me to rediscover and nurture my creative side.

Mid '96 found me reassessing my present point in life; twice divorced, financially incapacitated and in need of meaningful work when Ph.D's were flipping hamburgers. Like delicate, weightless flakes of snow, my life-choices added to those of others, shaping an avalache's destructive force. The future now seemingly held in store for me what it held in store for hundreds-of-millions like myself. And following the avalanche's aftermath, our children and grandchildren will have inherited a very hollow legacy.

As Tom Heuerman of A More Natural Way stated in his reaction to last month's article, entering into this age of getting to know my inner-self was certainly of prime importance. Accepting my past responsibilities helped me decide where to place my future ones. Just as David (last name withheld) came to realize by reflecting upon the 'Growth' article, I had begun to write a very different story. I wanted a story wherein my newly gained awareness and insights would play influential roles in societal change.

And that Sylvie, is what has made me creative.

With that avalanche about to alter every aspect of daily living for countless millions, my concerns for North American societies' current destiny became my C4C (catalyst for change).

Unless innovatingly inclusive socioeconomic cultures soon emerged, our children's, and grandchildren's daily lives would be stressed far more than our's ever were. By definition, economics deals with the availability and distribution of resources. As a recognized cultural creative, I cannot separate failing economies from the declining state of our social systems - nor our distain for either. As a futurist of some repute, I tend to focus on socioeconomics, expecting the term to soon become commonplace.

In last month's Fast Company magazine, Peter G. Peterson, author of Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America -- and the World hammered home a powerful catalyst for societal change;

"Trouble on the horizon -- such as the imminent retirement of the huge baby-boomer generation and the $15 trillion or so of unfunded liabilities for social security and medicare -- isn't going away. And severely reducing the country's revenue base through tax cuts could, over the long term, make an already unsustainable problem even more so." ~ Unit of One: The Voice of Experience

In the light of such harsh realities, a dire urgency exists for raising creativity levels within individuals; not so much that we cultivate a generation of artists and writers but a generation of social inventors and innovators. Such aspirations as these are shared within the fast growing demographics revealed in Paul Ray's and Sherry Ruth Anderson's book, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. According to their book published in late 2000, 26 percent of adult Americans alone, are shifting their worldviews, values and way of life.

Nurturing and applying my own cultural creativity resulted in drawing John Sedgwick, founder and Executive Director of the Canadian Creativity Network into my (now closed) storefront Community Building and Resource Centre. Taken by my newly gained organizational skills, John nominated me to CCN's Board of Directors - of which I should mention, Sylvie Labelle was already a board member. My own aspirations for seeing renewed creativity brought out of the ivory towers and into mainstream society saw CCN's newly fashioned mission statement to include; "identify and serve societal needs through the application of creativity and innovation".

Although CCN currently simmers on the back burner, my connection saw the quotes at the top of this article published last year in Creating Creativity: 101 Definitions (What Webster Never Told You). A snipet of John Sedgwick's contribution as well as others from recognized experts and facilitators in the creativity field, appear at Northwood University's webpage promoting the book.

Creativity, from which innovation springs forth, is still very much an untapped human resource that needs to be mined and refined. 'Creating Creativity' was expressly compiled because everyone's understanding of what creativity is, varies. One thing creativity experts do agree upon however, is that in essence creativity is not innovation! Creativity is innovation's catalyst.

Even though it has always been as important to daily living as breathing, only recently has creativity been given serious attention where general education is concerned. Creativity's potential is without limitations yet, what usually comes to your mind when you think of it? Writing? Art? Product invention? Even creative problem-solving is a relatively new concept, one which I learned through John, is copyrighted by the Creative Education Foundation and Creative Problem Solving Institute of Buffalo, New York!

For those of you setting your sights on future horizons, here are some catalysts for change pushing the creativity and innovation envelopes to well beyond where few have dared to tread.

According to The Cultural Creatives:, "these creative, optimistic millions are at the leading edge of several kinds of cultural change, deeply affecting not only their own lives but our larger society as well." They are referred to as "Cultural Creatives because, innovation by innovation, they are shaping a new kind of American culture for the 21st century."

The Cultural Creatives website lists the traits defining what makes for a Cultural Creative. Perhaps you might be one of us?

For the most part, becoming a cultural creative starts with reframing questions and challenging status-quo assumptions that have disconnected us as individuals from the world in which we must all take sustenance and survive. Confronted with the magnitude of challenges that the impending Breakpoint presents for societies' future, we are rising up to find sustainable solutions by which to refill that hollow legacy. We know from our past experiences what does not work. We know from deep within ourselves, the values we no long wish to compromise.

Now we are setting sails on a vast sea of change. In search of bold new futures, our hearts and souls are filled with excited anticipation that our social inventions will be forged by the searing heat of our passions.

Like any invention devised to ease or enhance daily living in some way, a social invention would be the creation of something that never before existed, though not in any tangible form you can put your hands on.

The Internet is an example of a social invention. Through and within electronic environments, it both instantly and asynchronously brings people together regardless of geographic location. Unlike the telephone, you can not touch the Internet. This intangibility makes understanding social invention as hard to grasp as it can be in defining it.

The fine lines that exist between creativity and innovation, also exist between social invention and social innovation. What I stated earlier holds just as true. Cultural creativity is social invention's catalyst, which is the catalyst to social innovation.

Innovation is an improvement upon anything that already exists. Social innovation would then be any improvement within an established social structure. If the Internet is the social invention, then the programs that enable, facilitate and ease the interconnections and communications within, might be considered to be forms of social innovation.

An excellent, real-world example of a social innovation is a school - the particulars of which I can't seem to make available here - which opened its after-hour doors to the homeless and needy. The benefits to all involved, and the local economy, proved boundless. It is an example of the most efficient use of all available resources. It truly espouses the life-long lessons and supreme values that organized religions have been preaching for generations.

Anyone interested in the concept of social invention and innovation, will find The Institute For Social Invention's Global Ideas Bank and Sharing L.A.'s Global Perspectives to be valuable resources. Last year, Roger Eaton of Sharing L.A. entered into his Global Prespectives database, an Ethnography paper written by Silvia Austerlic. Both Silvia and Roger belonged to my now dormant Gaian Doers listserv. The link to her paper below, provides a backdoor entrance into the Global Perspectives' database. In both of the Ideas Bank and Global Perspectives databases, you are invited to rate any of the ideas that you read.

Here is an exciting, relevent development I caught wind off while still completing this article:

Against All Odds first introduced the C4C department to Seen readers using Margaret Mead's quote, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has." In Visionary Business: An Ethnography of a Virtual Community in the Age of Internet, Silvia makes mention of a few interconnected people. One of them is William Ellis, a cultural creative steward leader dedicated to two listservs - CCL-LLCs and Learning Communities - which deals with emerging forms of alternative education. Eventually they called themselves A Coalition For Self-Learning. Out of the burning passions of this small group of people interconnecting on and offline, The Coalition produced the Internet's first online, collaboratively written book entitled Creating Learning Communities. In June 2000, selected chapters from the Coalition's online version were published into hardcopy by Coalition member, Ron Miller of the Foundation for Educational Renewal, Inc.

As a member of the Coalition For Self-Learning with an online chapter ( An Enterprising Reform: Harnessing Individuality At Its Finest Hour), I am proud to announce the Coalition's nomination for the Mead2001 Award. As a small group of less than 100 people from around the world, we have indeed been working "to change the world; [in ways] that has cross-connected issues such as intergenerational learning, child rearing, race, environment and gender understanding; that has developed an organization [and] series of tools that others can learn from; and that takes a long view of cultural understanding."

What keeps me so optimistic about our future are the unprecidented opportunities that societal transformations offer for replacing obsolescing technologies, industries and the self-serving attitudes which historically accompanied them. This sudden movement of cultural creativity keeps me positive despite the impending Breakpoint's avalanche. It means that an increasing number of culturally creative IONs - Individuals, Organizations and Networks - are becoming the catalysts to social inventions and innovations. More and more of us are not just showing our concern for the well-being of future generations, we are actually doing something about it!

The key to innovation in the networked world, is maintaining a fine balance between awareness and sharing. It is that old paradox between reach and richness revisited; to make connections, get the news, stay on-top and increase your chances of exposure; to make the contacts you need to build and sustain a network of weak ties. To discover, uncover (from within), validate and experiment, you need strong ties, deep dialog, trust and sharing. It is a fine line.

Excellent strategies are given in the book Achieving Success Through Social Capital: Tapping The Hidden Resources In Your Personal and Business Networks by Wayne Baker, 2000. (Click here for a free download of Chapter One)

Social networking is a key piece of innovation and creativity along with localized and shared spaces.

Hope this helps.
Denham Grey: dgrey@iquest.net
www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?DenhamGrey

Individual creativity as a conversation is well covered in David Whyte's book Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work As a Pilgrimage of Identity. Here is an excerpt:

" ... Our corporate identities of the fifties and sixties were made in the image of those military organizations which fought the good fight, and in the west, finally prevailed. Our organizations and our approach to work has necessarily been a product of military mobilization. But the forces that are now shaping our future are being mobilized by the individual imagination. Perhaps, more accurately, our future will come from the individual imagination in conversation with all other individual imaginations. A mobilization that exists at the edges between things. A sea not formed from a general's command, but from the flow and turn of a thousand creative conversational elements."

This conversation is the making of knowledge explicit through the creative act of making art. However, in this world we must not run away from the the surface images but embrace them as a key to understanding. Getting bogged down in old ideas of the social by applying a new language is counter-intuitive. All notions must be merged together to include what constitutes a social act. If the homeless are in the school, that is nice, but then the very outdated idea of school still rules. Why?!?

(Readers take note! The above reaction was contributed by someone unknown to me. It was left at the Champions For Change Panel, an open-source environment wherein anyone was free to drop in, edit whatever was on the page to leave their comments.)

http://www.for-legacies-sake.ca