Creative Leaps comes to CBR

Tonight I feel immensely privileged to have been invited to attend a QUT Alumni meeting at the Canberra office of the School of Business.

At this meeting was a performance/presentation by Creative Leaps a non-profit organisation from the USA. Their multi-disciplinary team focus on using the arts to generate ways of thinking creatively to support better leadership and management. The presentation, called a Concert of Ideas, is described on the website as:

music, poetry, theater, storytelling, virtuosic performance and imaginative dialogue across the footlights. It is Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”, Bernstein’s Finale to CANDIDE, Broadway classics and original compositions performed live and weaving through ideas and stories from Einstein, Picasso, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Margaret Mead, James Baldwin, Richard Feynman, Langston Hughes and more — all blended and sequenced to set the mind in motion and help participants access multiple creative connections, deeper personal insights and rich new solutions to the challenges at hand.

One exercise which I found very thought-provoking was ‘snippets’, where a piece of music would be played and then members of the audience were asked to describe it in one word. There was also another exercise where music would be played and the audience were asked to describe what they could see. It was interesting to hear the broad range of responses which demonstrated the point that we all see things and respond to things differently. For me personally, I was equally taken with the magnificent sunset outside the window to fix myself on any one thought or vision. Well, it was Monday evening after all.

It was a brilliant presentation, which built on so many ideas that were still sparking from going to the KM Australia Congress last week; particularly around the themes of creativity, leadership and management.

Creative Leaps also custom design more detailed workshops after presenting a Concert of Ideas, to build on their creative cross-disciplinary approach. Some of the areas they focus on include:

“Leading Creative Responses to Change”, “Creative Leaps: Thinking Across Boundaries”, and “Inner Balance: Stress Management and Peak Performance”. Our areas of specialty include: dimensions of creativity, flexing perceptual processes, interdisciplinary thinking, leadership and change, diversity within learning communities, stress management, wellness and peak performance.

Now I have signed up for their newsletter, I am looking forward to seeing what this amazing group do next.