whatever reason you are using this book, I encourage you to contact me. I’d like to hear about your breakthroughs, suggestions, complaints, and ideas.
1Ken Wilber, “The Integral Operating System: An Integral or Comprehensive Map,” (February 19, 2012), retrieved from http://integrallife.com/integral-post/integral-operating-system, 1.
2Ken Wilber, “The Integral Operating System: How It All Fits Together: The Four Quadrants,” (February 19, 2012), retrieved from http://integrallife.com/integral-post/integral-operating-system, 6.
3Ken Wilber, “The Integral Operating System, What Type?” (February 19, 2012), retrieved from http://integrallife.com/integral-post/integral-operating-system, 4.
4Richard Ogle’s term as explained in his book Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007).
Introduction
“Imagination is more important
than knowledge.”
—Albert Einstein5
Why Study Creativity?
The International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State, State University of New York, lists “12 solid reasons.”6 Here they are, in bold. (The explanations are mine.)
1.Development of “Your Potential”
The Human Potential Movement, which blossomed in the 1960s, has taught us that being fully human is not just about eliminating pathology but also about reaching our highest potential. As the old army recruiting poster said, “Be the Best that You Can Be.” According to Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy, we fulfill our needs in this order: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. We must first have air, water, and food; then we need to have a safe place to live; then we need to have friends and/or a group; next we need to feel good about our accomplishments; and at last we need to experience actualization of our full potential. In his later years Maslow added an even higher need: “transcendence,” the need to transcend our narrow identities and expand our awareness. It is with these last two needs in mind that I wanted to write this book. In order to achieve self-actualization and transcendence, we need to maximize our creativity.
2.“Rapid Growth of Competition in Business and Industry”
Thomas L. Friedman sums up this idea succinctly:
If Americans and Europeans want to benefit from the flattening of the world and the interconnecting of all the markets and knowledge centers, they will all have to run at least as fast as the fastest lion—and I suspect that lion will be China, and I suspect that will be pretty darn fast.7
Friedman calls our new world “flat” because technology has connected us and eliminated many hierarchies. Bloggers are competing with standard news outlets. Megacorporations are now competing all over the world, and one entrepreneur with a computer and an idea can compete as well. Friedman says that since the demolition of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the mid-nineties proliferation of the Windows PC, followed by the explosion of the World Wide Web, we are all in competition with one another, and the best ideas will win. (This idea is developed further in Chapter 14, Conclusion.)
3.“Effective Use of Human Resources”
Because of the “flat world” mentioned above, we will have to learn to use our human resources wisely. Outsourcing and offshoring mean that jobs in the developed world are moving—to India, to Indonesia, and anywhere that the same job can be done more cheaply and efficiently. How can we compete in the new global economy?
Peter D. Hart Research Associates asked this question of US employers. In 2006 the firm interviewed 305 employers with a staff of at least twenty-five and conducted focus groups with executives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Fairfax, Virginia; and Atlanta, Georgia. Overwhelmingly, these employers said that they wanted to hire new workers who had the “soft skills” provided by a liberal education: among them, teamwork (76%), oral and written communication skills (73%), critical thinking and analytical skills (70%), the ability to be innovative and think creatively (70%), and the ability to solve complex problems (64%). In addition, employers felt that colleges did not place enough emphasis on the same above-mentioned skills.8 [Author’s emphasis] I got a similar message from the industry advisory board of Cal State Maritime in January 2001. Using the material in this book in a classroom or workshop setting will access all of these skills; simply reading the book will, obviously, help with creativity skills.
4.Discovery of “New and Better Ways to Solve Problems”
See the survey listed above. With critical thinking you can break problems into parts and critique them; with creative thinking you can synthesize ideas and have the “aha” moment that leaps beyond logic. Richard Ogle says that imagination isn’t just another form of thinking. It is a discontinuous leap based upon what he calls “idea-spaces”—nodes of influence where “the extended mind” shares ideas with others. For more, see Chapters 7-8 and 12-13.
5.“Development of Society”
Here’s what Daniel Pink has to say:
For nearly a century, Western society in general, and American society in particular, has been dominated by a form of thinking and an approach to life that is narrowly reductive and deeply analytical . . . But that is changing. Thanks to an array of forces—material abundance that is deepening our nonmaterial yearnings, globalization that is shipping white-collar work overseas, and powerful technologies that are eliminating certain kinds of work altogether—we are entering a new age . . . [While] “left-brain” capabilities powered the Information Age . . . the capabilities we once thought of as frivolous—the “right-brain” qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning—increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders.9
In other words, the new global culture demands creativity. Walter Isaacson says that in this new global economy, “A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic table, but from how well they stimulated imagination and creativity.”10
6.Enhancement of your “Knowledge” Base
Some of the chapters in this book are heavily philosophical and will expose you to ideas from many disciplines. When you study the notebooks