The Forces Of Collaborative Creativity

Collaborative Creativity is a powerful methodology for groups that uses short bursts of creative challenges to help people go beyond rational/conscious thinking and uncover, with constructive consequences, the emotional/irrational sphere that influences behaviour. It was developed by Peter Comber specifically for the complex environment of the healthcare industry, and this how-to manual for managers of healthcare companies offers practical advice on how to employ creative processes in their sector.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.

Unlock the creative power of collaborative teams Imagine telling your group their next task will be building a life-size model of a humpback whale in the foyer. Would they gaze at you with blank stares, or would their eyes light up as they turn to each other to get busy? Written by a team of five educators, the Collaborative Creativity Idea Book is designed to grow a culture of collaborative creativity in educational and professional environments. This idea book helps educators venture out from Robert Kelly’s seminal Collaborative Creativity: Educating for Creative Development, Innovation and Entrepreneurship to discover a wealth of practical learning activities educators can start using today. The Collaborative Creativity Idea Book goes beyond team-building exercises and icebreakers to walk you through five stages to establish a culture of collaborative creativity: - Getting to Know Each Other: build trust and identify strengths among individuals when they first form a group - Learning to Listen: enhance group interactivity through the development of deep and active listening, allowing ideas to multiply - The Design Process: prepare as a group to tackle larger-scale initiatives that move into real-world contexts - Growing the Collaborative Culture of Creativity: establish sophisticated group norms to take on creative-design initiatives of greater complexity - Collaborative Creativity for Real-World Audiences: tap into the creative power of the group to engage in real-world problems for real-world audiences Whether as a support for the Collaborative Creativity textbook or as a standalone resource, the Collaborative Creativity Idea Book for Educators empowers groups to exponentially increase their creative potential to accomplish amazing results.

Collaborative creativity in education: from theory to practice As the world undergoes massive change, education systems need to prepare students to work collaboratively for innovative solutions that benefit everyone. This preparation means fostering a culture of collaborative creativity from early childhood to postsecondary education. Robert Kelly shows exactly what collaborative creativity in educational practice looks like. He clarifies the conceptual architecture of collaborative creativity, and then delves into how this new educational ecosystem can take root. He invites us into his own program in teacher education, where graduate students come to grips with, and talk about, a project whose success depends on collaborative creativity. Between chapters, Kelly presents conversations with experts in collaborative creativity and related fields from around the world.

The contributors to this volume adopt a socio-cultural approach to understanding collaborative creativity across a wide range of domains such as music composition, business, school-based creative writing and art, fashion design, theatre production and web-based academic collaborations. Central to the socio-cultural approach to creativity is the recognition that it is a fundamentally social process. It thus follows that, if we are to understand and characterize human creativity, we need to examine the cultural, institutional and interpersonal contexts that support and sustain such activity. We also need to understand how cultural tools and technologies resource collaborative creativity. The volume offers a distinctive and valuable contribution to this growing field of scholarship by presenting new empirical findings, reviews and critiques of existing literature together with suggestions for how this field should develop.

The notion of the individual creator, a product in part of the Western romantic ideal, is now troubled by accounts and explanations of creativity as a social construct. While in collectivist cultures the assimilation (but not the denial) of individual authorship into the complexities of group production and benefit has been a feature, the notion of the lone individual creator has been persistent. Systems theories acknowledge the role of others, yet at heart these are still individual views of creativity - focusing on the creative individual drawing upon the work of others rather than recognizing the mutually constitutive elements of social interactions across time and space. Focusing on the domain of music, the approach taken in this book falls into three sections: investigations of the people, processes, products, and places of collaborative creativity in compositional thought and practice; explorations of the ways in which creative collaboration provides a means of crossing boundaries between disciplines such as music performance and musicology; and studies of the emergence of creative thought and practice in educational contexts including that of the composer and the classroom. The volume concludes with an extended chapter that reflects on the ways in which the studies reported advance understandings of creative thought and practice. The book provides new perspectives to our understandings of the role of collaborative thought and processes in creative work across the domain of music including: composition, musicology, performance, music education and music psychology.

Collaborative Creativity is a collection of 72 essays that form a collage of practical guidelines and inspiring examples for being creative together. Drawing from business, the arts, and sciences, Collaborative Creativity demonstrates how our best ideas are harvested in the garden of shared minds. Here are just a few of the questions you'll explore: What makes creative people creative? Is creativity a skill anyone can develop? Why does collaborative creativity outperform individual creativity? What are some of the best practices of creative teams? Why do creative organizations outperform others? What kind of organizational design best supports collaborative creativity?

What is the true nature of thinking? Can it best be understood as a solitary activity of a lone individual? This book suggests that our grasp of creativity is impoverished because we fail to recognise the vital roles that partnerships, collaborations, friendships, and communities play in our thinking, learning, and understanding.