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Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things that are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.
-Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

Yesterday I read that human creativity is at least 25,000 years older than we previously thought. This made me think of one of my favorite fiction books about creativity, The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Auel. I don't know that Auel thought that her book was about creativity; rather she was telling an incredible story of survival and emergence of a young Homo sapiens girl being raised by a Neanderthal clan. Her story was rebuked by many scientists and anthropologists and then, with more discovery, Auel's story became quite plausible and many of the ficticious parts in her stories have proven to be fact.

I have heard that 80% of inventions come from the beginner's mind.

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The Power of Play

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“If science always insists that a new order must be immediately fruitful, or that it has some new predictive power, then creativity will be blocked. New thoughts generally arise with a play of the mind, and the failure to appreciate this is actually one of the major blocks to creativity.

Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself.
Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.”
-David Bohm

Last evening I watched a PBS special on the Power of Play and was fascinated for an hour with the way animals (including humans) use play...

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The Next One

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During a Sponsor Session for a recent event, a Sponsor challenged us to make ‘this one’—the one for his organization—'the best.'

The comment provoked Matt to recall something Frank Lloyd Wright said a half-century ago. Matt shared the memory this way:

“It was in an interview in the mid 50s with Hugh Downs, I believe. Asked which was his best building, Wright said, ‘my dear boy (anyone under 60 was a boy to FLW), the NEXT one.’"

Wright’s comment captures the essence of why both collecting and using feedback is of such importance. From a design sense, feedback is what links the past to the future in a meaningful way. Yet, it seems all too rare that we treat the collection and offering of feedback seriously, let alone systemically.

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