Image by Ariana Rose Taylor-Stanley*

In “More Creativity in the Classroom,” an opinion piece written for The Huffington Post, former North Carolina governor Jim Hunt expresses a vision for education with which I heartily agree. It is strikingly similar to that embodied in the imaginative learning model of Lincoln Center Institute. “Creative thinking fuels innovation,” Hunt asserts. It leads to new ideas, products, services, and jobs. So unless we “cultivat[e] creativity in our schools at the state and local levels,” the United States will soon find itself unable to compete economically with other nations who do. But, some readers may ask, what does it mean to “cultivate creativity” in public education?

According to Hunt, creativity in the classroom means more than exposing students to the fine arts. The more robust goal is to integrate creativity across the curriculum, to interweave 21^st-century skills like collaboration, problem solving, communication, and questioning with all academic subjects. While we cannot train young people “for jobs that do not even exist yet,” Hunt writes, referring to future technological advances, “we can provide them with the minds and tools they’ll need to adapt to our ever-changing set of circumstances.” In this view, imaginative teaching and learning is a kind of educational insurance; no matters how the global marketplace changes—and it will—this approach prepares students to be flexible, think on their feet, and not get locked into narrow modes of working and thinking. North Carolina’s 25^th Annual Emerging Issues Forum will address the very points made by Hunt in his blog post.

The Emerging Issues Forum, held at the Raleigh Convention Center in Raleigh, NC, from February 8-9, convenes “some of the brightest minds in the state to determine a clear strategy for cultivating [North Carolina]’s creative assets.” From this description, it seems as if the event will bear some strong similarities to the Imagination Conversations that LCI has been promoting around the country. And the connections don’t stop there: the line-up of speakers in NC includes Eric Liu, author (with me) of Imagination First, moderator of several Imagination Conversations, and one of our Imagination Now bloggers; Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness and member of the Imagination Conversations National Advisory Committee; and Daniel Pink, friend of LCI and fan of Imagination First.

Needless to say, it’s extremely encouraging to see a former U.S. governor passionately in favor of making imagination and creativity essential parts of our school systems. Furthermore, the Emerging Issues Forum sounds like an intelligently conceived and highly visible event that should give rise to relevant debate and exchange of ideas. We at LCI take our hats off to the Tar Heel State!

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Image by Diego Cupolo*

Our culture prizes neatness. We try our best to avoid clutter—in our homes, in our workplaces, and, most importantly, in our minds. We coin pejorative names for people who don’t toe the party line, labeling them “pack rats.” Many of us can’t even begin to work on a project until we feel that our office is sufficiently organized and free of excess stuff. These tendencies are perfectly legitimate—mental and physical tidiness do have their place—but would it be radical of me to suggest that clutter might, in fact, be a cornerstone of creativity and imagination?

Before I get to the larger principle I want to convey, I’ll offer a couple of illustrations from my own life. As a father and educator, I’ve become over the years an obsessive collector of not-so-rare artifacts: the questions and comments of children. One recent morning, one of my young sons asked, “Dad, do you know what my favorite stereotype is?” I was stumped. “Sony,” he responded, pleased with his own linguistic facility. This playful exchange with my son reminded me that language is slippery and deceptive, and must never be taken for granted; in other words, I learned something significant from the seemingly childish game.

In the natural order of things, it’s easy for adults to dismiss the words of kids; after all, we’re supposed to be their teachers—not the other way around! But I operate from the basic conviction that even though our sophistication grows as we get older, our basic misunderstandings are always those of children: we never stop struggling to get along with each other, to figure out the workings of the world, etc. So listening to children often means hearing honest, direct articulations of the very problems we still face as adults. This is one reason why I make it a point to take the thoughts of young people seriously; I store them away so that they can bubble to the surface whenever I’m in need of clear, simple wisdom.

One more brief illustration: as a former dancer and athlete, I am fascinated by kinesthetic meaning as well as linguistic meaning. I draw some of my understanding of movement, however, from an admittedly unusual source: a rich collection of mental images arising from my close observation of battery operated toys. Inventors of the mechanical dog whose simple movement connotes warmth and connection, for instance, have constructed a movement phraseology very clearly built around just one or two simple aspects of physiological motion. While some parents quickly hustle their children off to the food court when they see one of those mechanical toy “corrals” set up outside the toy store, I gravitate toward it and often have to be coaxed away.

My “treasure trove in the mind” (78), full of the statements and queries of children, and the flips and waddles of their toys, exemplifies the imaginative practice that Eric Liu and I call “Hoard Bits” in our book, Imagination First. “Bits” can be anything—objects, concepts, ideas. When Steve Martin was an up-and-coming comic, he collected in his mind all the things that worked and didn’t work at each night’s performance, and used them to improve his act. Innovative theater and film director Julie Taymor studied cultural anthropology, and accumulated diverse images and artifacts from her travels that she later incorporated into her own art. Following the Disney Imagineers’ mantra, “Gather, store, recombine” (76), Imagineer Owen Yoshino literally crowds his office with what others might perceive as junk: “old cartoons, propaganda posters, erector sets” (77). The point is that our brains like to put bits together and synthesize them, so it is our responsibility to provide as much raw material for this process as we can.

It’s all right for us to want to keep our lives orderly and uncluttered; having too much stuff, in our heads or in our physical spaces, can be overwhelming. But as long as we maintain a sense of perspective and sense of humor about it, hoarding can be fun and rewarding. Our bits may lead us in undreamed-of, imaginative directions.

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Image by John R. Hawk*

In a recent blog entry on graduate business schools, I mentioned “design thinking,” a term that may be unfamiliar to many readers. In a fascinating January 20 interview with Public School Insights, a blog of the Learning First Alliance, professor and business innovator David Kelley provides satisfying answers to anyone in the dark about what exactly “design thinking” is. In addition to founding the world-class design company IDEO, Kelley has been a professor at Stanford’s unique Institute of Design (nicknamed “d.school”) for over 30 years. Like LCI’s Imagination Conversations initiative, much of Kelley’s current work is dedicated to reshaping American public education—but how does he want to change it, and why?

Design thinking, Kelley explains, may be thought of as a counterpoint to analytical thinking, the kind usually taught in K-12 classrooms. It’s “more experimental … less step-by-step…. fuzzier…. intuitive…. empathic…. it’s integrative thinking … synthesis.” In other words, design thinking prepares people to think imaginatively and act creatively—and to exercise these capacities routinely. Combined with basic skills—in the domains of math and science, for example—it enables students to come up with bold, surprising ideas that the skills alone cannot produce; and for students who have trouble mastering the basics in the first place, design thinking offers projects and hands-on experiences that excite them and motivate them to learn.

Despite his energy and optimism, Kelley is realistic about the challenges facing him and other proponents of 21^st-century skills. Test-oriented school curricula—where emphasized to an overwhelming degree—may leave little room for design thinking, and persuading people of its worth is extremely difficult. “My opinion is that we have to get analytical about measuring the power of design thinking,” says Kelley, “so that we can convince the people who are running the world that it has value.” We at Lincoln Center Institute agree emphatically. And we look forward to hearing about the d.school’s progress in this regard!

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Image by Dan Nevill*

Adult human beings are chronic sense-makers. Surrounded by dizzying ideas and sensations, we work to make them manageable: we classify things so that when we encounter something new, we can drop it conveniently into a folder in our mental file cabinet. When we’re working on a project, we focus on that exclusively and block out all “distractions.” This narrowing and organizing is necessary, of course; without it, we’d too be confused to ever get anything done. But might such confusion also be an asset?

For years I was an avid spelunker—that is, I liked to explore caves. My experiences visiting them have taught me a valuable lesson about imagination. Let me explain. When you enter a cave, you turn off your everyday sensory expectations; you step into a dark, mysterious world different from the one to which you’re accustomed. But as you spend six, eight, ten hours underground, you adapt to your environment and acquire an alternate way of seeing. When you finally emerge, however, the real shock comes: after hours of blackness, the colorful aboveground world is more vivid than ever. It stimulates your visual receptors. But in that moment you’re too overwhelmed for your usual organizational mechanisms to kick in. Instead of defined objects, you see floating blurs of color and texture. This may be disorienting, but it’s also liberating and, literally, eye-opening!

The lesson of leaving the cave is that sometimes it’s worthwhile to take in the world all at once—and forget about imposing structure on it. When I come out of a cave, I remember how dazzlingly rich and complex my surroundings really are; I don’t try to fit them into my preconceived mental categories. Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik talks about the difference between states of consciousness experienced by adults and by infants as a difference between the illumination afforded by a spotlight—focused and directed, narrowed to the objects and ideas of immediate concern; and a lantern—a soft glow that diffuses and broadens the reach of attention. In Imagination First, Eric Liu and I draw from this idea to advocate an imaginative practice we call “Spotlight Off, Lantern On.” The spotlight represents how most of us live and work: we discern borders between things, we break stuff down into chunks we can handle, we deal with one thing at a time. The lantern, on the other hand, represents “full-field awareness” (124). To understand what this means, think of being in a foreign country: when you can’t rely on your tried-and-true habits of thought, you simply absorb everything. You’re actually more conscious than you are at home.

So what’s so great about “loosening the grip of the sense-making intellect and yielding to a more limbic form of awareness” (126)? Well, imagination is all about conceiving new possibilities, and it’s very hard to do that if one goes through life making tidy sense of whatever one perceives. Confronted with some new phenomenon, we might automatically classify it. “Oh, X is a Y, and Y’s are only good for such and such, so I know the potential of X.” No! Stop! Maybe X is a million other things besides Y! Maybe the potential of X is limitless! But to realize this—to see beyond the rigid conceptual limits that we devise in order to easily interpret the world—we must switch off our narrow spotlights and raise our luminous lanterns.

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Image by Sarah G*

The discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would be the greatest turning point in the history of humankind. Fire, the wheel, religion, organized government, the printing press, the computer—all of these breakthroughs, which have enabled us to advance in so many ways—would pale in comparison. Of course, the scenarios I’m imagining wouldn’t necessarily have to involve intelligence: mere microbes from other planets could help us cure diseases. But what does the Vatican, of all institutions, have to do with this?

In November, the Associated Press reported that “the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.” The Reverend José Gabriel Funes, director of the 120 year-old Vatican Observatory, held a weeklong conference that brought together thirty scientists—astronomers, physicists, biologists, and other experts—to discuss these issues. Obviously, the possibility of sentient beings existing beyond Earth raises many questions for adherents of all religions, but the conference centered on science rather than theology. This interests me most, however, as an illustration of imagination at work.

In Imagination First, Eric Liu and I define imagination as “the capacity to conceive of what is not—something that, as far as we know, does not exist; or something that may exist but we simply cannot perceive” (19). Extraterrestrial life falls under the latter heading. To me, then, the Vatican’s recent research constitutes an exemplary enactment of imaginative thinking. The Catholic Church is the world’s largest religious body, one associated with centuries of tradition. We expect constancy above all from the Vatican. And yet here it is, opening to possibilities that would vastly complicate—but not contradict—its doctrine. “How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes asked in the Vatican’s weekly newspaper in 2008.

The story of the Church’s investigation of alien life is not just one of an ancient organization “harnessing possibility,” as Eric and I might say. It also challenges the assumptions of those non-Catholics who perceive the Vatican as rigid or anachronistic. We recall that one of Lincoln Center Institute’s ten “Capacities for Imaginative Learning” is “exhibiting empathy,” which involves “respect[ing] the diverse perspectives of others in our community.” The truly imaginative thinker keeps his or her mind open, knowing that valuable intellectual work can be done anywhere, even by people with whom one fundamentally disagrees. Anyone interested in astronomy, in the secrets of other planets and galaxies, should therefore applaud Funes and his priestly colleagues, whose exploratory efforts embody another essential LCI capacity: “questioning.”

Click here to read an English translation of Father Funes’s 2008 interview.

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Image by Mark Kobayashi-Hillary*

One aim of Lincoln Center Institute’s Imagination Conversations is to demonstrate to audiences that imagination is not only the province of artists but, rather, is central to the fields of education, science, government, and business. A recent New York Times article by Lane Wallace, “Multicultural Critical Theory. At B-School?”, reveals that some thought leaders in the business world share our perspective. The piece focuses mainly on Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, whose guiding principle is that business students need to learn more than number-crunching if they are to succeed in the 21^st century—they must also be able to think critically and creatively.

Martin’s idea, Wallace explains, is to weave skills traditionally associated with the liberal arts—for instance, the ability “to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives”—into the business school curriculum. Other institutions besides Toronto that have expanded the scope of their M.B.A. programs in the last few years include Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and the Yale School of Management. Many of these programs are now offering “design thinking” classes that send students into the field to find problems, to which they then propose solutions. Martin and his like-minded peers are wisely responding to one of the lessons of the current financial crisis: businesspeople with basic knowhow aren’t enough to keep our economy thriving. The new era demands workers who can “think … nimbly across multiple frameworks, cultures and disciplines.”

Developing the minds of M.B.A. students holistically is an exciting step in the right—that is, the imaginative—direction.

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Image by Craig Cloutier**

To say that I am an avid walker is an understatement. It is perhaps one of the things I love the most about living in New York City. For me walking is about much more than exercise or fresh air—it’s about exploration, experience, and reflection. But it wasn’t until I came across Alexei Sayle’s* article from this past Sunday’s Observer of London that I became cognizant of how wonderfully this activity also fuels my imagination.

It was really a single line from Sayle’s article that has started me thinking about this: “The act of walking itself can be, if you tread with your eyes and brain open, fantastic for the imagination,” he writes. This seems deceptively obvious, perhaps, and it is certainly something I readily recognize as I reflect, now, on my own experience. Stepping out for a lunchtime turn around the block during a busy work day isn’t just about releasing tension, it’s about re-starting my brain, revving up those gears, generating sparks. Yet I had not previously conceived of walking as a part of my own imagination practice.

Not only is New York an eminently walkable city, but I am certainly not alone in my passion for exploring this fascinating place on foot. The population encountered striding through Central Park, Riverside Park, or along the sidewalks of the Upper West Side (or in myriad other corners of the five boroughs, I presume), is gratifyingly diverse and often unexpectedly fascinating. What and who you encounter during a particular foray makes the experience valuable, but I wonder whether simply being “outside” or “abroad” in both a conceptual and physical sense doesn’t also exercise the imagination in a certain way?

Thinking about stepping out to reignite? Caleb Smith documented his two-year project to walk every street in Manhattan. Shore Walkers is a year-round walking club based in NYC and lower New York State, perhaps best known for The Great Saunter, an annual 32-mile hike around the perimeter of Manhattan. (A bit crazy on the face of it, I know, but I have actually completed this walk more than once!) I don’t mean to seem completely NYC-centric, though! Check out www.startwalkingnow.org from the American Heart Association. And consider browsing the Internet for information about walking your own community.

*Sayle is not terribly well-known in the U.S. Readers might most likely remember this British author, actor, and comedian for his recurring role as the landlord Jerzy Balowski on the 1980s import, The Young Ones.

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Image by Ladonite / Brendan*

As a dancer and someone who frequently experiences works of art in many disciplines, I’ve come to see over the years that constraints are often more conducive to artists’ imaginations than so-called “freedom.” Let’s say you’re a choreographer working on a commission. If you know that the area of the stage is only so many square feet, the piece must last no longer than twenty minutes, and the budget will allow for just four dancers, then you are able to focus on one thing alone: how can you make the most complex and beautiful dance possible within these limitations? But does this suggest that embracing boundaries is also a valuable strategy for business, government, and other institutions?

In addition to being an artist and a lover of the arts, I am the executive director of Lincoln Center Institute, a position that has taught me a lot about fostering imagination within a structured organization. Since it’s impossible for me to be aware of everything going on at LCI at any given time, I focus on keeping our mission—to develop young people’s imaginations through encounters with the arts—front and center. People work harder and think bigger when they understand what they’re doing and know that it’s worthwhile. Also, I hire employees whose character and judgment I trust, and then empower them to critique and improve the Institute; I try to cultivate an atmosphere where ideas are never dismissed. This isn’t to say that what I’m describing is always easy.

Lincoln Center is an important and much admired cultural entity, a designation that comes with its own set of customs and protocols. One major question I challenge myself with is: how do we at LCI benefit from this rich history while always focusing on the goal, namely, to help students by engaging them with the arts? This is where my original point about constraints comes in. As Eric Liu and I write in Imagination First, “there’s no need to rail against the existence of silos, walls, hives. Just nurture the spaces between: that’s where the true secrets of imagination are to be found” (156). Indeed, my task is to maintain a balance—to acknowledge and respect the “silos, walls, hives” while creating “spaces” where my employees can think imaginatively about how to do their jobs even better.

The 22^nd imagination practice described in the book is called “Design for the Hallway.” Writing of our experiences presenting and participating in professional conferences, Eric and I note that “The breaks, not the sessions, are where palpable connections often are formed among … earnest changemakers” (155). In offices, too, the best ideas frequently emerge from hallways rather than cubicles and board rooms. When people in an organization have a common goal in mind, it’s sometimes enough just to get them motivated to talk, to share good ideas; good things will surely happen. So at LCI, I don’t let the structured nature of the environment get me down (“There is no informal without the formal” (155).) I attempt to lead the Institute in a way that invites employees to run into one another and chat, to think critically, and to dream up new responses to challenges. I subscribe wholeheartedly to the belief that nothing is more exciting than what goes on when the boss appropriately and constructively gets out of the way.

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Image by CCK Mom*

Sometime between childhood and adulthood, we become afraid of failure. As kids, whether we’re wrestling with watercolors to create a coherent painting or struggling to ride a bicycle or getting the hang of rope climbing in phys ed, we understand intuitively that failure is inevitable and acceptable and that we can learn from it. But as we grow up, all too often we become conditioned to see only “right” and “wrong” answers where we once saw infinite possibilities. Disapproving glares and snickers—wherever they come from—drive us to fear failure, to cover it up, to toe the line. Fortunately for me, an early mentor offered a much different philosophy.

My first job out of college was teaching dance at a wonderful community arts center in Ohio; the position also brought me into local schools—rather intimidating work for a wet-behind-the-ears young dancer and educator. Aware of my anxiety, my supervisor at the arts center took me aside one day and issued an unusual directive: “Scott,” she said in her caring, no-nonsense manner, “take pride in and account for the (at least) three mistakes you make every day. ‘Cause you know what? You’ll make ‘em anyway.” In other words: We’re all going to commit errors on a daily basis—that’s unavoidable. So we might as well assume ownership of them and make use of them. This was my boss’ credo; she was a woman motivated by things that didn’t work, and her purposeful embrace of failure made my experience at the arts center an extremely instructive one. (By the way, I had no problem making at least three mistakes daily!)

In our book, Imagination First, Eric Liu and I include “Fail Well” as our 28^th and final imaginative practice, which should give you some sense of how strongly we feel about it. To imagine is to conceive of new possibilities, and more often than not these possibilities need further fine-tuning before they can become realities; they don’t emerge from our minds in perfect, finished form. So learning to fail in large and small ways, with dignity and intelligence, is essential if one is to become a successful, practice-oriented imaginative thinker. As the estimable Sir Ken Robinson explained at a recent TED conference, “Being wrong is not the same thing as being creative, but if you’re not prepared to be wrong you’ll never try and come up with something original.”

Indeed, when you find yourself worrying about slipping up—in work, in school, in life—remember my former boss’ advice: fail well!

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In her bold article for Education Week, “Schools Need a Culture Shift,” Betty J. Sternberg identifies “the skills and competencies needed to thrive in today’s world—teamwork, collaboration, creativity, and innovation,” and refers to “the culture of thriving, cutting-edge business environments.” So here’s the question: is the United States currently preparing its students to take on roles in the 21^st-century workforce, positions that rely on what Eric Liu and I call the ICI Continuum (Imagination-Creativity-Innovation)? Sternberg, a former commissioner of education and superintendent of schools in Connecticut, doesn’t think so. In her view, the No Child Left Behind Act has focused the attention of too many American administrators and teachers on tests and the “progress” they measure, to the exclusion of other, richer aspects of learning.

At Lincoln Center Institute, we believe that holding teachers and school leaders accountable for their students’ learning—and measuring this growth—requires multiple measurement tools. We believe in clear and focused standards, but reject standardization. We embrace accountability, but reject teaching to the test as the sole means toward that end. The goal is to make connections between methods, based on the needs of students. Let’s be bold enough to do this.

The core of Sternberg’s argument is her belief that drilling kids to perform well on state tests is a shortsighted practice because it fails to foster the qualities that really make them successful students, workers, and citizens: love of learning, the ability to work with others, the desire to solve difficult problems, and so on. “They all deserve to grow into extraordinary individuals,” she writes, “not just a record of test scores.” As a commissioner, Sternberg did help develop methods of K-12 assessment, so she knows that measurement of knowledge is necessary and can be implemented “in authentic and meaningful ways.” But, according to her, we’re moving farther away from this ideal each day.

We at LCI have our own idea of what imaginative learning looks like; for more information, visit our Web site at www.lcinstitute.org. What is your vision of imaginative learning? And how do you think we can spread it throughout our schools in order to produce both happier, more engaged students and a stronger, more competitive America?