The four types of creativity show up in a juicy Open Space

Prince George, BC

Peter Lindberg blogs Elliot Eisner’s types of creativity:/eisner

Over the past couple of days I have been working here in Prince George conducting a 1.5 day Open Space meeting with literally hundreds of people from the Prince George urban Aboriginal community. We have had upwards of 275 people coming and going over two days and all four of these forms of creativity have shown up.

The theme of this event is “Planting the Seeds of Change” and the idea is to invite the community to create the projects that are needed here right now. With a pretty good media campaign behind them, the organizing committee attracted 275 folks to help be part of the answer.

The process began yesterday as we opened space and 55 topics were posted. From there, 42 groups met and produced reports on a huge range of topics. There were agencies, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal here, tons of regular citizens and a couple of dozen Elders. The dialogues were spirited and engaging and the proceedings book, written by the participants themselves, was 80 pages long. Topics covered ranged from holistic healing, media presence of Aboriginal people and stories, recreation, political struggles and community safety. The conversations were spread all over these four types.

Today, in the morning, the group reconvened and we invited people to come forward to turn their dialogue into action and to take an hour and half to find their mates and create project teams. Twenty one action groups emerged, led mostly be regular citizens with the support of some of the service agencies in town. Most of these project teams have action plans that involve at least one meeting in the next two weeks. I’ll be back here again on the 15th of February to work with the project champions to find an emergent way of coordinating all of this work and holding open a container of conversation so that the projects, agencies and funders can continue to talk to each other.

The great response we got was due largely to the fact that federal government is putting up $250,000 a year for two years to support this process as the Urban Aboriginal Strategy. Because that funding is largely to be used at the discretion and direction of the community and also because there was very little naysaying here, the four types of creativity bloomed in the dialogues and project planning conversations.

It’s all about loosening up I think. People freed themselves up to connect with others, to extend existing projects into new areas, to reconfigure partnerships to serve better, to bring together previously unmet companions around an issue of passion. I think a healthy and vibrant community or organization has these forms of creativity thriving because they grow out of nutrient ground of passion and responsibility and no one saying “you can’t do that.” The creativity that flowed created all kinds of work arounds for existing constraints and helped to bring together conversations that will leave a lasting and robust set of relationships that can deal with barriers and obstacles and challenges as they arise.

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