The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions for growth.
If you’re running an engineering or finance company, all companies depend on ideas and ingenuity. I think the principles of creative leadership apply everywhere, whether it’s an advertising company or whether you’re running a hospital.
Creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy, and I actually think people understand that creativity is important – they just don’t understand what it is.
These powers of imagination and creativity are among the few things that set us apart from the rest of life on Earth. But they make all the difference.
I believe this passionately: that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.
We think about the world in all ways we experience it ; we think visually, we think in sign, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract term, we think in movement. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.
Humans are born curious, creative, and intuitive.
Far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth.
Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination.
You can’t just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them.
To realize our true creative potential – in our organizations, in our schools and in our communities – we need to think differently about ourselves and towards each other. We must learn to be creative.
Finding your element is essential to your wellbeing and ultimate success and, by implication to the health of our organisations and the effectiveness of our educational systems.
Being wrong doesn’t mean being creative – but if you aren’t afraid of being wrong, you can’t be creative.
It is difficult to feel accomplished when you’re not accomplishing something that matters to you. Doing something ‘for your own good’ is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you really are.
Education doesn’t need to be reformed- it needs to be transformed.
Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it’s produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.
Transforming education is not easy but the price of failure is more than we can afford, while the benefits of success are more than we can imagine.
The Element is about discovering your self, and you can’t do this if you’re trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can’t be yourself in a swarm.
Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability. and at the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and intelligence.
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity.