Humainologie creative dialogue Wed Dec 1- Highly Innovative Approaches to Complex Societal problem

“Write down ten things you would do in your life if you had absolutely no fear. Then pick one of them and do it.” – Steve Chandler, Reinventing Yourself: How to Become the Person You’ve Always Wanted to Be

“Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them." - Michael Michalko, author of Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques

“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

Suppose Calgary became famous for a Christmas tradition in which groups of Calgarians would get together on December 1 every year, and each group would independently decide on a project to do over the following year that would address a complex societal problem. That would be their Christmas present to the city the following year. Each year, Calgary would receive many such Christmas presents from groups of Calgarians all over the city.

You are familiar with the work of Dr. Bill Thomas, whose creativity took as its focus improving the late-life experiences of many elderly people. His Green House initiative and other projects he initiated are the stuff of legend. What if your own creative work between now and mortality became the stuff of legend? Does that scare you?

Our dialogue this coming Wednesday December 1 will connect your creativity with challenges that people in Calgary (and human beings elsewhere) are facing. The topic is Highly Innovative Approaches to Complex Societal Problems. I will ask you first to identify a specific problem; then generate at least three ideas for a solution to the problem; and then write a “short story” with yourself as the hero, in which you have (like Dr. Bill Thomas) implemented a brilliant idea that solves the problem. (The short story could be less than 100 words and certainly should be less than 500 words.)

As Steve Chandler once said, “Do it badly; do it slowly; do it fearfully; do it any way you have to, but do it.”

Here are the detailed instructions for those three steps to the take-off point of your legendary creativity:

1. Describe in 100 words or fewer a major problem or challenge we human beings face currently, preferably a problem that will probably get worse unless we find innovative solutions to counteract it. Your description could refer to a very large problem such as the climate crisis, or to one specific part of it such as people driving their fossil-fuel-powered vehicles too much. Also keep in mind that two problems usually thought of as distinct can be related. For example, the climate crisis can be related to our difficulty talking to strangers.

2. Now come up with at least three innovative ideas for possible solutions to the problem (or some part of the problem).

3. Pick one of the three possible solutions and make up a story about how you have brilliantly implemented that solution. The outcome of this (totally fabricated) story is that an important part of the original problem you had described seems to be improving very quickly where you implemented your solution. In effect you are writing a piece of short fiction. Try to give it substantive details about how you did it, rather than aiming for entertainment or a beautiful prose style. You are the main character, and you are describing (perhaps as in a TED talk or as in a step-by-step guide to help someone in another part of the world replicate what you have accomplished) exactly how you achieved this extraordinary success.

And here is the link for our playing field next Wednesday December 1, provided by Shinobu:

Topic: Humainologie Dialogue Session Time: December 1, 2021 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Dec 29, 2021, 9 occurrence(s) Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89600374916?pwd=OXg2dkF4NEtsMmNzSkdRdW1kdUV5UT09 Meeting ID: 896 0037 4916 Passcode: 12345

Below this message, I have appended a few ideas taken from the book Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques by Michael Michalko; and then a few ideas from the book 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever by Steve Chandler. Before our dialogue on December 1, I hope to send you a synopsis of another book very much on topic, The Social Labs Revolution: A New Approach to Solving Our Most Complex Challenges by Zaid Hassan. (Note: If I haven’t heard from you in a long time, you may not be receiving the synopses, so let me know if you wish to receive them.)

At our dialogue last night, I introduced a game structure to score our team’s creativity each Wednesday. The purpose is to encourage all of us to enhance our dialogue skills still further. There were seven dialogue participants last night, and as a team, we achieved the maximum possible score last night (100 points), the first night we had played the game. I will explain the scoring system again at our dialogue on December 1.

Toot sweet,

Arthur

Here I provide just a few ideas I have lifted from each of two good books. I have embellished them with my own commentary and tried to keep each of the bullet points reasonably succinct.

Ideas I found in the book Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques by Michael Michalko (Second edition, 2006):

· Keep an Idea Log (from page 20). Keep a notebook in which you jot down an inspiring idea whenever it occurs to you. For example, the idea that it might be fun to try to reach an old friend by telephone whom you have not seen in years or even decades. Or you might think it would be fun to try something new for a couple of weeks that you’ve never done before. You might even make a “quest” of it, as described in Chris Guillebeau’s book The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest that Will Bring Purpose to Your Life.

· Deliberately program changes into your daily life (from page 15). “Dukes of Habit must always do things the same way, must have everything in its place, are at a loss if something violates their routines. …Deliberately program changes into your daily life. Make a list of things you do by habit. …Next, take the listed habits, one by one, and consciously try to change them for a day, a week, a month, or whatever.”

· Practice mind mapping (from pages 67-68 of Chapter 8, “Think Bubbles”) This involves using a “board” – a piece of paper or whiteboard or blackboard or other surface - to create a graphic representation of your ideas on how to approach a particular challenge. You can put it up in your kitchen, add ideas to it as they come to you. Use only key words, so that each “bubble” is very succinct. Dedicate several interludes of time to the process. Add bubbles with ideas that might seem unrelated but have just come to you as you are thinking about it. Connect the dots, in other words, move the bubbles around to associate elements that might spark an epiphany.

Ideas I found in the book 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever by Steve Chandler (Revised edition, 2004):

· “Get on your deathbed.” (From pages 19-21) A psychotherapist had asked Chandler to go through the “deathbed” exercise. Imagine you are in the last days of your life and one by one the people most meaningful to you come to say good-bye. You say to each of them what you want them to know as you are dying. The exercise made Chandler extremely emotional, and later gave him a sense of clarity and urgency about telling each person what they had meant to him. “Confronting our own death doesn’t have to wait until we run out of life. In fact, being able to vividly imagine our last hours on our deathbed creates a paradoxical sensation: the feeling of being born all over again – the first step to fearless self-motivation.”

· “Tell yourself a true lie.” (From pages 23-24) The author’s 12-year-old daughter was in a school exercise where the students were asked to write a “lie poem,” which would describe how great they were. This exercise encouraged each student to imagine their real potential. “Most of us are unable to see the truth of who we could be. …If it’s hard for you to imagine the potential in yourself, then you might want to begin by expressing it as a fantasy…. Soon you will begin to create the necessary blueprint for stretching your accomplishments. Without a picture of your highest self, you can’t live into that self. Fake it till you make it. The lie will become the truth.”

· Make a game out of anything you have to do, or as Chandler expresses it, “Run your own plays.” (From pages 58-59) Instead of putting Chandler’s words in bold font, I have substituted what my mother taught me when I was about ten years old, a motivational tool I use every day of my life these days. Chandler writes, “Design your own life’s game plan. Let the game respond to you rather than the other way around.” He contrasts this approach with simply reacting to what comes up. He refers to Bill Walsh, former head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, and writes, “Plan your day the way Bill Walsh planned his football games. See the tasks ahead as plays you’re going to run. You’ll feel involved in your life at its very essence, because you’ll be encouraging the world to respond to you. If you don’t choose to do that, the life you get won’t be an accident. As an old Jewish folk saying puts it, ‘A person who does not make a choice makes a choice.’”