[event] Creativity World Forum - day 2 - Ideas are the easy part

The Creativity World Forum 2011 has ended, and you can watch recordings of the live streams on the site.

The second day brought us:

• Scott Belsky (BTW, below is a picture taken from the Flickr collection of the event, can you spot me in the audience?) who reminds us that creativity and ideas are just not enough. Ideas are easy. You need to make them happen. He describes the creative class as suffering from 'idea to idea' syndrome, always passioned about the next idea but never seeing the previous one thru. He thinks the creative community is probably the worst organized one in the world. He calls for a bias towards action in what we do and wrote a book and started the behance and actionmethod websites to help us do so. The first one is a linked-in lookalike for creative people to put their portfolio while the latter helps to be more organised and action focused (quote: "Organisation is a competitive advantage in the creative world."). Interestingly, his formula for success includes leadership and he went into some tips on that (eg leaders talk last, value the team's immune system, tolerate failure). His description of creative communities contains three kind of people: the dreamers, the doers and the incrementals. This actually relates back pretty well to Malcolm Gladwell's keynote on day 1 stating that you don't want to be first, you want to be third (he calls it the 'tweakers' that with small incremental improvements actually unlock the true value of an implemented idea). Scott gave a PDF summarizing his points and it is posted on the Flanders DC blog. Scott ended his inspirational keynote with "Nothing extraordinary is ever achieved through ordinary means."

• Patti Maes from the MIT Media Labs gave an interesting 20 minutes to let us think outside of the box of the computer. If you have never seen the 'sixth sense' project videos, do it now, I included one below. The current work at the labs also includes projects to use the body as a storage device (copy paste with your fingers), etc.

• Jamie Anderson talked about the fine art of success, basically a tribute to Lady Gaga and how she build her mass intimacy. We also found out that creativity is most often found in people with mental disabilities! Enough said.
• The naked presentor Garr Reynolds gave a top performance on how to present. He wrote Prezentation Zen and The Naked Presenter. A note on that last one: I know naked (believe me), and that was not naked :-) . He gave a fully dressed insightful keynote on how his work with Apple and migration to Japan have influenced his presentation skills. In a world with more communication via more channels, we need clarity and simplicity. Did you know there was life before powerpoint? And there is hope for all of us, even Bill Gates went on from his 'death by powerpoint' keynotes in his Microsoft time to deliver much better ones as CEO of his foundation. Garr's workshop left me somewhat unsatisfied, but at least he gave the great tip to watch Jill Boylte Taylor's TED talk 'stroke of insight'

This wonderful day ended with a 1 hour interview with director Oliver Stone on his successes, failures and creative works from idea to implementation.


So, what does it all mean?
Some themes have come up over the past days:

• Failure : we only remember the success of great inventors, we forget the many failures that are equally part of the process. How do we look at failure? How do we make it part of the system? If it is such an integral part, should we aim to fail faster or cheaper, and learn from it faster?
• Insight : we think creativity is about a stroke of genius by one individual. Turns out it is a long process (usually 10 years) between at least 3 kind of people : the dreamers, the doers and the tweakers. Innovation is a very incremental process where lots of people contribute in little steps. Should we rethink our patent systems to match this reality? Should we balance our teams to include all three types of environments?
• Implementation: Ideas are the easy part, it is the organisation and implementation that is hard. So many ideas just remain ideas. 
• White chocolate mousse with lavendel taste and a violet flower on top is really, really yammy. 

I won't be there in Rio for the next edition because - well - it is in Rio for crying out loud. The tag line of the event did work for me : blow my mind.