Mindcamp Creativity Weekend

Just 35 Days until the next Mindcamp!
Toronto's Sixth Creativity Weekend
Thursday to Sunday Sept 11 to 14, 2008
Cedar Glen Discovery Campus
(45 minutes NW of Toronto)

Come to The Hub! The Hub for Productive Thinking is a social network for people interested in creativity, productive thinking, problem solving, Mindcamp, thinkx, or Facilitators Without Borders. Or just an interesting exchange of ideas. Click here to check it out.

Mindcamp is a four-day micro-university for personal, professional, and organizational creativity — a feast of 90-minute concurrent sessions presented by the best creativity leaders in North America and world-wide.

Mindcamp exposes more than 100 creative people to a wide range of perspectives on the research and practice of deliberate creativity. And on top of our scheduled programs, there are evening salons, dialog sessions, music, dancing, campfires, and just plain fun.

Important note: All income from Mindcamp is distributed to charity (our favourite is Facilitators Without Borders), and of course we retain a little for planning next year's Mindcamp.

The text below was posted by Tom Beakbane on October 2, 2005:

"I was expecting Mindcamp to be dedicated to the process of coming up with novel ideas; whacky ideas; quirky ideas, zany ideas; unorthodox ideas and the unpolished; the esoteric, and the self-indulgent.

"Russ Schoen, a facilitator, speaker and trainer in creative thinking from Chicago, moderated the opening session. He led everyone through a method of determining his or her strengths in four different aspects of the creative process. These were: clarifying, ideating, developing and implementing.

"Right away I could see that he was not using the word creativity in a simplistic sense of creating novelty. The brainstorming, or ideating -- was just one part of the process. The other necessary aspect of effective creativity included clarifying, or asking questions, listening and determining the precise nature of the problem that needed to be solved. Developing was the process of fleshing out the ideas, and implementation required the skills of getting people to act differently than before.

"Over the next three days, the biggest revelation for me was to observe how the session moderators were able to harness the talents of the participants. The moderators were skilled because of what they were able to accomplish, rather than what they professed to know. Too often when we encounter 'experts' in the marketing industry they are intent on defining terms and judging the ideas of others.

"The experts at Mindcamp had the all-to-rare ability to suspend their judgment. That meant they would listen intently each time someone said something. They would attempt to see beyond what was said, to try and understand what was meant. They had the maturity to keep an open mind and not try to shoehorn whatever they heard into the categories that were already established in their own mind.

"Creativity is a word that can be used to cover a huge diversity of approaches, situations and skills. In the context of Mindcamp the term was used to describe the skills required to help people solve problems in whatever way that fitted their situation.

"In order to understand each situation it is necessary to observe and listen -- and suspend judgment.

"Non-believer at the start, I soon realized that this group of experts was exhibiting skills that are in short supply in the marketing industry. When a discipline is threatened, as marketing is these days, its practitioners tend to hide behind jargon, rather than ask hard-to-answer questions about the meaning of well-established concepts while all the time keeping an open mind.

"For marketers to become useful to corporations we need to develop the skills needed to lead, facilitate and communicate. During Mindcamp the depth of the discussions was astonishing -- and creative. And my o my, was that ever refreshing.

"Thanks to the organizers: Tim Hurson, Kristen Peterson and John Sedgwick -- and all the other session leaders who donated their skills and time."