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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! - ??