The answer is, somewhere really and bravely creative

Where would you rather be?

No matter who you are or where you live, you probably wish you had a somewhat different life or home. Or at least a vacation house. But the sad and unavoidable fact is that everybody and every place has problems, including the most glamorous.  You know? Even California’s broke — and the Riviera’s polluted and the wealthier-than-the-queen J.K. Rowling pays insanely high taxes. (And what a wo-mensch she is for doing so).

What makes one person or place happier than another is not  a lack of problems, but how imaginatively and effectively he, she or it solves those problems. And since even the most creative among us need a little coaching now and then, people keep finding the annual Creative Problem Solving Institute to be helpful.

The institute, a program of the Creative Education Foundation, presents a hands-on learning experience based on a system of thought that helps you come up with creative solutions even when you think you don’t have any.  It will be held  June 21-25 this year, in Buffalo, N.Y., and one of the speakers will be Disney Imagineer Tony Baxter, who’s worked on the Mouse Company’s entertainment projects for 40 years.

So if you’d like your drab, economically depressed town to be more like Paris  and your humble life to be more like Bono’s or Christiane Amanpour’s or Shen Wei’s, don’t get bummed — fame, wealth, achievement , or just a good way to lose 20 lbs. and get a  job may be only one inspiring idea away. Just unlock your brain.

A taste of CPSI and creative problem-solving

As mentioned in April here, the Creative Education Foundation will hold its annual Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) in Boston June 21-24.

CPSI teaches people how to be deliberately creative, to find more than one good solution to problems by exploring options and ideas through a particular process. If you’re curious about that process, you can get a sense of what it’s about and what the institute has in store by listening to a webinar CPSI leaders and teachers held Tuesday, June 2. You’ll get to hear them talk about how the foundation and the institute developed, who shows up at these annual  events and what good it all is.

To play the webinar, click here.

Creative thinking on demand

Most of us regard creativity as a free-thought experience, where our minds sail or scuttle where they will and happen on ideas mostly by chance, with a little help from our subconscious.

And that’s pretty much what happens when you don’t have to produce an idea – or when the idea you produce doesn’t have to be workable. But what do you do when you need to solve a real problem creatively and on deadline?  

If panicking is your answer, Jonathan Vehar has a better system for you. Vehar teaches at the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) held annually for about 400 students – this year, June 21-24 in Boston – by the Creative Education Foundation. CEF, a 55-year-old institution based in Amherst, Mass., promotes a results-based method of creative thinking devised by co-founder, Alex Osborn, who was also an advertising professional and co-founder of the agency BBDO. 

  Osborn observed that people’s thoughts tend to go through six phases when coping with a creative challenge, Vehar explains. These phases include:

•  Identifying the goal or need (“gathering wish”)
•  Researching data  
•  Clarifying the challenge (what specific problem blocks the path to the goal?)
•  Generating ideas for solutions
•  Selecting and strengthening the best solution
•  Planning for action   

 Random inspiration may be great for artists, but for those in corporate situations, these steps provide a “deliberate walk” through the needed mental process, Vehar says. 

“It’s a funny thing. It’s kind of counter-intuitive,” Vehar says of systematized creativity. But in work situations constrained by circumstances including limited time and money, he notes, most people can’t just sit around and blue-sky for days. They have to produce - and the Osborn process offers a reliable, efficient way of quickly coming up with good solutions to the problems they face. 

Coincidentally, Vehar also came to the CEF method by way of advertising. An Ithaca College alumnus, he was working for an agency and fearing he wasn’t creative enough for anything but strategy when a secretary there told him about a creativity class she was taking. That’s how Vehar discovered the Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State (SUNY) and the transformative idea that creativity applied to a lot of fields. As part of earning his master’s degree in creativity and innovation there, he was sent  to CPSI (pronounced SIP-see).

His immediate reaction? ” ‘These are my peeps!’ ” Vehar recalled with a laugh. “It was  just another one of those conversions.”

Actually, Vehar admits, part of that immediate reaction included thinking, “Geez, there’s a lot of wackos here,” because people attracted to CPSI’s creative mission range from hard-line business types to those “channeling beings from outer space,” he says. But he soon realized that the ones who seemed way out were, in fact, the ones helping him in his work by providing what he calls the “creative abrasion” that provokes insights.  

Vehar’s been working with CPSI ever since, teaching the Osborn method to students who tend to return to the conference again and again for ever-deepening instruction that emphasizes practice over theory in creative case studies of different kinds. He’s even started his own organizational-development firm, New & Improved,  to teach people how to work with one another to elicit new ideas.

Business people, researchers, educators, artists – no matter who the CPSI students are every year, it’s the experience of actually being creative, of writing, reading, moving, applying metaphor and not just listening to a lecture, that gives them results, Vehar says – “and “the reason that people come back here is that they’re getting results.”

Like Vehar, Mimi Sherlock is living proof of CPSI’s appeal – once a student there, she has become a conference teacher and creative-process practitioner who has recently started her own business, Sherlock Creative Thinking, to help corporate clients. 

CPSI and its program have “become a pretty important part of who I am and what I do,” she says.

Sherlock started out studying and working in food science. She became a CPSI disciple after her professor at the University of Nebraska introduced its creative-thinking principles to her and other staffers to improve their work in their cereals lab.  A few years later, the same prof encouraged her to apply to CPSI for a scholarship to the annual conference.

“I just had kind of a life-changing week” at the institute, she says. “CPSI gave me this whole other tool set. It was a really joyful process for me.” Eventually, she became an institute teacher. “I feel like I got so much out of it, I’m happy to give back some effort.”

The whole idea behind deliberate creativity is to increase the probability of arriving at usable ideas, Sherlock explains. But she’s also enjoyed  success with it, she says, because of the attitude the creative method instills: “It’s a very positive process – when you think things are possible, usually you can make them happen.”

It’s a fit: Creative-conference promotion gets Brand management

Stephen Brand believes in creativity. And what he believes about it  is that there’s little good in having an idea if you don’t do anything with it.

  Brand has found a place to work that’s all about both getting ideas and putting them to work. The first president of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio – who also served as Innovation Fellow at NorTech, Cleveland’s technology-based, economic-development association,  and earned an executive doctorate from Case Western Reserve University by studying the early childhood influences of successful inventors – has landed at the Creative Education Foundation in Amherst, Mass. 

CEF specializes in helping people learn creative and effective problem-solving techniques. As the foundation website explains, “Every day principles fostered by CEF programs are helping someone, somewhere in the world develop new products, make business operations run more profitably, restructure organization and agencies to become more effective and less encumbered, reinvigorate economies, make improvements in our schools, revitalize communities and replace ineffective methods and systems with new, more workable ones.”

Through the Journal of Creative Behavior, which it publishes; a youth-outreach program; awards (“Creative Class”  economic-development guru Richard Florida won CEF’s 2005 Sid Parnes Pioneer Award); and the annual International Creative Problem-Solving Institute, CEF has been trying to get people to innovate since the 1950s.  

Brand, who recently moved to western Massachussetts, was out driving one day about a year ago when he saw the CEF sign and thought to himself that he ought to be working there, he said. He’s currently helping the foundation promote its next CPSI conference, called the Revolution of Creativity, in Boston this coming June. And it sounds like man was matched to task by some Heavenly Headhunter, because CEF teaches what Brand has been practicing for years. 

Creative problem-solving is not so much like the flashes of inspiration that lead geniuses to make great art, he noted, as like a means of organizing your ideas, and following a process of deductive reasoning to a solution.  With regular mortals, Brand said, “All you need to do is lead them through a journey from A to B to Z.”

But  imagination is required and Brand thinks the times have never been better for putting it to use. Instead of being worried by the recession, he said, “I’m excited about it. This is a great opportunity for innovators.”

He also thinks it’s vital for businesses - nonprofit and for-profit alike – to keep innovating.  (“The traditional nonprofit model will not work into the future. Period.”) But most do it only when times are bad and their companies are in crisis. Instead,  they have to innovate even – and maybe especially – when times are good.

“They’re crazy to be happy when things are fine,” he said, pointing out that Starbucks, for instance, rested on its laurels and look what happened: Competitors such as McDonald’s got smart, took away customers who wanted fancy coffee without the groovy sit-down-coffeeshop experience and high prices, and by the time Starbucks woke up and smelled the,  er, you know, it had lost so much business, it had to close 600 stores. 

Education is crucial. “We have to teach the next generation of innovators and problem-solvers” instead of just training young people for assembly lines, Brand said.

That’s where CEF tries to help. And how exactly does it teach these skills? Stay tuned.