Ken, John and Friends,

I am drawn to both the "gallery of organizational and leadership metaphors - 
visual, aural, text, etc." and to something akin to the creation and 
direction of an opera-like opus.

Some years ago, I believe it was 1991-92, the Center for Creative Leadership 
in Greensboro, NC was hosting a gathering of the "International Creativity 
and Innovation Networking Conference" (ICINC) and my colleagues and I of 
Creative Leaps International had been drawn into the planning and creative 
team.  (At the time, we were a small non-profit arts and learning outfit 
that worked mostly with schools and universities.)  I attended monthly 
meetings with a dozen corporate and consulting experts on creativity and 
innovation and was ultimately commissioned by the group to create an 
"opera-like opus" on the theme of creativity to be premiered at their 
forthcoming international conference.  We were quickly drawn to an essay by 
the celebrated naturalist, Loren Eiseley, entitled "The Star Thrower".  It 
became our source work and over the next couple of months, I developed a 
libretto from the essay and my colleagues and I set about writing the music 
and transforming the essay into an opera which we premiered a few months 
later before a tremendously enthusiastic gathering in Greensboro.  That 
project convinced us (and apparently a couple of hundred others) that the 
arts had something to say to business leaders and innovators, and as word of 
our artful creation spread through the grapevine, our phone just started 
ringing -- GE, IBM, Pfizer, the World Bank and here we are some 16 years 
later still keen on that same seed idea.  We became "star throwers", one and 
all -- as you are as well.

Over the years, our Creative Leaps team has also worked in real time with 
corporate and conferencing groups to create an artful capture of 
participants take-home learnings.  We call these artful performances 
"Harvest of Learnings" or "Harvests of Ideas" and they are based on the 
performance framework we use for our keynote "Concerts of Ideas" (tm).   The 
Harvest, however, is built exclusively upon the ideas of the conference 
participants themselves, voiced by each of them personally and woven into an 
artful performance mounted in partnership with our Creative Leaps team (we 
are professional musical/theatrical performers, directors and learning 
consultants).  The conference participants have complete ownership of the 
content of the Harvest and as much creative participation as they can 
muster.  The Harvest performances are unfailingly joyful, intense in 
intellectual focus, and deeply personal in their expression.  One of the 
best ever, was created at a four day conference of the Organization Behavior 
Teaching Society comprised mostly of deans of business schools from around 
the globe.  Although this pre-dates AACORN by a bit, I wouldn't be surprised 
if a few of today's members were actually a part of that happy band.

Creating something together can be powerfully good medicine and a great way 
to grow a community of practitioners.  If I can support your ideas for a 
co-created opus on creativity or any other topic, I am more than happy to 
pitch in.  Being a practitioner rather than an academic, this may be how I 
can serve our community best.  I do think you're on to something!

Best to all, John


John J. Cimino, Jr., President & CEO
Creative Leaps International

In our world, the arts are no longer some parallel experience
you have along the way, but rather a powerful source of insight and 
transformation
feeding directly into the thinking, feeling and acting of daily life
-full of possibility, truth and optimism.    John Cimino



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ken Friedman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 10:53 AM
Subject: A gallery of organizational and leadership metaphors


Friends,

Been reading and thinking.

These ideas of John's suggest something we can't
do with the list. This sounds inspiring.

This one grabs me: "A gallery of organizational
and leadership metaphors - visual, aural, text,
etc."

Let's see what happens, either with this or one of the others.

Ken


John Churchley wrote:

What I'm suggesting here is that a wiki that is a
PRODUCT of our collaborative efforts might just
be something new that we want to make. The
question, then, is not about the process of
getting people to collaborate or the technical
means to do it.  The question should be WHAT do
we want to create? (in a Wiki that is separate
from our listserv communication as a community):

- A "Wikipedia" of organizational aesthetics?
(although, given the number of books on the
subject - many written by AACORN members, this
may be redundant or too big)

- A recipe book of artistic strategies/processes
for organizational development (although this
might infringe too much on the intellectual
property and livelihood of practitioners)

- A gallery of organizational and leadership
metaphors - visual, aural, text, etc.

- One giant multimedia collaborative
organizational/leadership metaphoric piece of art

-  The libretto, music, costumes, design, and
artistic direction of an opera about a waif-like
artist in an anaesthetic organizationS.sort of a
Puccini Scènes de l'organisation de Bohème We can
then produce it in Banff.   This is maybe too
silly an idea, but then again, maybe not.  My
point is that we, the "creativity people", need
to get creative and make some art together!

-        ??