thekenshow's blog

Fifty sure-fire ways to derail a brainstorm. Includes such classics as "That's not our problem", "I'm not saying you're wrong but...", and, my personal favourite, "Has anyone else ever tried it?".

Ah, Brian Eno. I remember being totally captured by a chance listening to Taking Tiger Mountain in a Winnipeg record store. Yeah, record store. Think '75ish. Strange that I recall it as "Taking Tiger Mountain by Storm", but it turns out it's "...by Strategy". Are the tigers of wrath not wiser than the horses of instruction? Hmmm. Still, the point (if having a point is the point) is I've just come across Eno's Oblique Strategies (that date back to 1975) and they look interesting:

"Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking - to jog the mind."

Brian Eno seems to pop up in my life every 10 years with a fascinating and important approach to life and art.

Postscript: I just ordered a set.

Art of the Song is a one-hour syndicated radio show with music and interviews exploring inspiration and creativity through songwriting and other art forms.

Recommended if you're new to the idea of brain wave frequencies and how they relate to mental (and supramental?) states: High Performance Mind by Anna Wise. Sidebar: Does brain create mind or mind create brain? Correlation rather than cause.

Thanks to Jane, Janice and the rest of the Business Enterprise Centre gang for putting on the Bridges to Better Business seminar yesterday. Not only was informative and fun, but I made some interesting connections and won a free night at the Waterview on the Bay!

Given the shortage of funding for schools in Ontario these days, why not let the art department of a school design and print uniforms for the teams? Think of the fresh look that would give each school.

The persistence of the left-brain = logic/rationality, right-brain = art/creativity theory is amazing, given that the research hasn't supported this model for years. It's more likely that the complementary interaction of both sides accounts for a great deal of the achievement in these different domains of thought. If so, then meditation or entrainment technologies like Holosync will be much more effective that drawing with your left hand.

Howard Gardner introduced the idea of multiple intelligences to the world through his book of the same name. In Creating Minds, he looks at the phenomenon of creatvity in these different intelligences as embodied by extraordinary individuals such as Einstein, Picasso and Gandhi. Although it's an interesting read - you could hardly miss given the cast - I found his definition of creativity quite constrained (you not only have to revolutionize a worldview but also be recognized as having done so) and the overall approach devoid of a sense of mystery. Still, he highlights important aspects of the creative life, such as why creativity in the arts differs from that of the sciences in terms of the age at which an individual in most fertile as well as the longevity of their contributions to the field.

I first came across Peter Senge through The Fifth Discipline, a book that investigated how learning and growth occurs in organizations. It was a work that really resonated with me and it was my intruction to Bohmian dialogue. Senge's latest work, cowritten with three others, is Presence. This book finds me at exactly the right time, exploring the nature of thought and consciousness as they pertain to the emergence of new ideas, ways of thinking and ways of being. I highly recommend Presence to anyone interested in how they can cultivate creativity in themselves and in their organizations.