Paradoxical, but true: Great improvisation requires extensive practice and expertise. My own studies of jazz and improv theater groups shows this to be true, as I describe in my 2007 book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. Most people find this to be surprising, because our mythical image of the great improviser is someone… Read More The Key to Spontaneity is Practice
Bob Mankoff has been drawing cartoons for the New Yorker magazine since 1977, and he’s been the magazine’s cartoon editor for years. We’ve had some great conversations about the creative process of cartooning; he was a fan of my 2007 book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, and I’m a huge fan of his work,… Read More Bob Mankoff’s Life in Cartoons
IDEO, the well-known Palo Alto design firm, in recent years has increasingly moved into service design and organizational design, branching out from their original work designing objects like the first Apple computer mouse, or the shopping cart shown on TV on a Nightline special in 1999, to design processes and systems. Now, IDEO is starting… Read More IDEO Reimagines the Classroom
I just read this English-language translation of an old Russian text by the psychologist Lev Vygotsky, and it surprisingly foreshadows contemporary scientific understandings of creativity and innovation: Our everyday understanding of creativity does not fully conform to the scientific understanding of this word. According to everyday understanding, creativity is the realm of a few selected… Read More Vygotsky on Collective Creativity
The Creativity Guru 