World Creativity and Innovation Week (April 15-21, 2017): Everyday Creativity

This week (April 15-21, 2017) has been identified as World Creativity and Innovation Week by the United Nations.

Some of you will have participated in the sessions I have lead at KnowledgeCamp or at the Berlin Regional KM meeting in March of 2016, or maybe you heard Dirk Dobiey speak at KnowledgeCamp 2016, so the idea of creativity in everyday life is not a new concept for you.

To be creative, you don’t need to be an artist, creativity isn’t about painting or drawing or art at all, that is just one manifestation of it. Creativity is about doing things differently, looking for alternatives, keeping an open mind, asking questions, having new experiences, continuing to learn.

As Marci Segal says in this interview, http://www.mountainfm.ca/2017/04/17/world-creativity-innovation-week-2/, everyone has creative capacity. We all have the ability to create new ideas, make new decisions, do something new, have a different outcome.

On April 5, 2017, a few of us in Berlin got to experience Lego Serious Play (you can read about it here https://www.gfwm.de/partnerveranstaltung-mit-gfwm-regional-berlin-wissensarbeit-in-deutschland-2027/) it allowed us to consider the question of, “what will KM look like in 10 years?”. We didn’t just write on flip charts and whiteboards to describe our vision of the future, we got to use Lego to depict our representation of it. Using Lego helped us think about the question differently, and how the things we thought would exist should be represented in the scenes we created with the Lego.

In our jobs we can introduce creativity in small ways, just asking questions in a meeting, or sitting down with someone new at lunch. For those of you who have attended my sessions, you will know that I like to do scribble drawings as part of the process of workshops that I facilitate. They help people to relax and participate in the sessions in a more productive way. The scribble drawings loosen them up and help them think about things differently.

Want to know more? Feel free to get in touch with me, read some of my other blog posts (http://missingpuzzlepiececonsulting.com/category/creativity), the interviews on the Age of Artists site (http://www.ageofartists.org/insights/), or  http://www.artofinnovation.net/ just as a start.