Creativity is a fascinating topic that seems made for bogus hucksterism. Nevertheless, when I see something about it, I almost always slow down to read it.
This morning, I came across a comment from a woman named Bev Stein -- she's president of Public Strategies Group, in, I think, Portland, Oregon -- about an article relative to the growth of consultancies that deal in metathinking -- helping corporations think about the way that they think, the way that they approach -- and even just recognize -- problems and opportunities. (They hate the word 'consultant', by the way. Tomato, tomahto.) Reading about the methods used by one of them, I thought about a comment that my daughter made the other night to the effect that when she's writing a paper -- which she really does not enjoy -- she finds that she can't do it on the laptop. Too constraining. She needs to write something, then cross it out, move it around, put comments in the margin -- none of which is easily done on the laptop. I thought for a moment about tablets like the iPad, and then just about the classic 'yellow tablet', and how you can scribble and scrawl to your hearts content, tearing sheets out and laying them on the table, moving them around. Which brought me to thinking about the Microsoft Surface product, that's essentially a coffee-table sized touch screen (more than that, but that's the gist) where you can summon up files, move them around, stack them. And then I thought about how you can't just do that, you need to have the infrastructure that can build such a thing, which means not only the physical plant, but the environment that can generate the thought - something like this would be useful, how can we make it, what should it look like?
Thinking about thinking made me think about the quality movement, where a basically decent idea got organized and codified to death, till it became a parody of its former vibrant self. Even now, remembering that makes me grit my teeth. You can do too much navel gazing.
But initially, it's fun.
2 comments:
navel gazing ... I have never heard that term.
The desk sounds cool to me.
I also like to just write. On a white board works for me.
Oh, gosh, navel-gazing comes from the sixties. Perhaps you're just not old enough...
The whole concept of brain-storming and collabarative thinking is rife with charlatans. But some of the participants really do seem to know what they're talking about. Communicating it is another story.
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