Creativity in academia

As founding Director of the Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice at City University London, I proposed to my boss that we start a programme to offer to academic staff across the institution an opportunity to think both about their own creative skills and how they might develop them systematically.

In the months that I had been there, it had struck me forcibly that the most important contribution to the growth and development of the university the new Centre could make would be internal.   

My boss, a senior professor, was absolutely appalled by my proposal. Pressed for a reason why, he declared: “It’s what we do.”

So we taught creativity skills only to a few paid-up students on our newly-launched Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership ‒ and left the academics well alone.

 

Creativity and the Inner Child

He lived most of his adult life as a rather well-organised trader in, amongst other things, coffee and guns in the Middle East and Africa. He kept neat books.

Yet between the ages of fifteen (in 1870) and twenty, he had written a series of extraordinary poems that led him to be regarded by many as the founding father of modern poetry. And then no more.

He was Arthur Rimbaud.

His poems can still disturb, even shock. “Je est un autre,” he wrote. “I is someone else”.

In his later life he went so far as to describe his own poetic creations as “absurd, ridiculous, disgusting”. Endeavouring to make sense of the change in Rimbaud, his former friend and lover, Paul Verlaine, said: “One big reason, perhaps obvious, is that the child in him died.”

His work has gripped so many – not least the composer, Benjamin Britten, who made an electrifying setting of parts of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. That opens:

J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.

I alone have the key to this savage show.

Truth and Reconciliation in the City

When we launched the Centre for Creativity at City University London we held a “Big City Brainstorm” which pulled together a very diverse group of clever people – including several from the financial community in the City of London.

We were searching for ways to address issues emerging from the global financial melt-down and in particular the “addictive behaviour” (as one of our participants, a psychiatrist, put it) of people in the banks so badly hit.

There were a number of interesting and exciting ideas put forward, prominent amongst them the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission along the lines of post-apartheid South Africa.

On the day, there seemed to be quite a groundswell in favour of the concept. But in the days following, it seemed as though all the City of London folk had had second thoughts.

Apparently we just didn’t understand…

I still think it could be enormously helpful. How about you?

Anyway, the video about it all was a pleasure to make. See what you think: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N83vCg7q36c