Stimulating Creative Flow... with Toys

It may sound ironic that participants comprising of senior managment from various organisations expecting to glean some applications on how to improve organisational innovation in my recent China's 创新与创造力研讨会, ended up having most fun and learnings from playing with the toys.

Feedback to the seminar included the following:

- 通过发散性思维进行关联创新 Through brainstorming to make new connections

- Through experiential learning the success of seminar lies in "value creation"

- Creative association and case study

- 通过互动性的交流，能调动大家积极性 Able to dynamically stimulate and engage everyone

- 互动环节 (Interactive components) helps to market futurised concept game

With such a diverse group all with different learning needs, I thought that a good way to trigger creative thoughts would be through the use of simple stimulus so that everyone can share their varied experiences all leading to the same understanding of making new connections as a creative strategy. What I observed, however, was that through the function of the learning content, the context of such an event, the activity of the learners, and perhaps most importantly, the goals of individual learners, I noted that somehow, cognition was distributed.

Interestingly, the group's interaction with the toys led to a sort of "puzzlement" as being the stimulus for learning and this somewhat readily suggests both intellectual and pragmatic goals for learning for all. In a collaborative manner, the activity served as a mechanism for enriching, interweaving and expanding everyone's understanding of the particular issue I posed as the challenge. Just as Lebrow (1993) talked about shift in values when one takes a constructivist perspective, he noted that "the seven primary constructivist values of collaboration, personal autonomy, generativity, reflectivity, active engagement, personal relevance and pluralism (1993,p.5)."

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi questions the how creativity the place of creativity and highlighted that "creativity does not happen inside people's heads, but in the interaction between a person's thoughts and a sociocultural context (1996, p.23). " He also proposes that "centers of creativity tend to be at the intersection of different cultures, where beliefs, lifestyles, and knowledge mingle and allow individuals to see new combinations of ideas with a greater ease", the activity was in my view effective to arouse this creative cognitive distribution. Further, just as there was time to allow individuals to work on their problems by toying with the stimulus, the 'aha' was more visible after a period of immersing into "me and my toy" quiet moments. This was apparent as most participants settled down after the first few minutes of elation and puzzlement before their little creative exploration with their selected toys.

What was then observed was the 'flow' in which Csikszentmihalyi describes as the state of absorption in the creative process. He defines flow as “an automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness”, which results from stretching our abilities in the pursuit of a meaningful challenge. The elements of creative flow include: clear goals; a balance between challenges and skills; total absorption in the task; a distorted sense of time; and an absence of distractions, worry and selfconsciousness.

When the participants were invited to share on their new creative ideas, many spoke eloquently and spontaneously about their improved solutions. Almost effortlessly I must say, others around could easily sense the intrinsic rewards of their experience. If one of the objectives of the seminar was to achieve the following- 为了加强个人适合的创新和变革的能力，在实际业务挑战上学习，应用工具和流程；为了个人和组织的成功变革，学习如何灵活运用, I think the participants will agree with me that at least for the seminar most were able to revisit the simple joys and fun of playing with creativity.

Csikszenmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper Perennial.

Lebrow, D. (1993). Constructivist values for systems design: Five principles toward a new mindset. Educational Technology Research and Development, 41, 4-16.