CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

I’m in Bangalore speaking about design thinking, creativity and startups in India. The whole country is tuning into Prime Minister Modi talking with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in Silicon Valley about–startups and Startup India. 

I’ve been doing workshops with Spread, an amazing Indian design and innovation firm headed by Sonia Manchanda, training people to raise their creative capacities. The Spread folks are amazing and they had groups of people getting into Personas, connecting dots of behaviors and values to come up with fresh new business models. All in the space of an hour and all with great fun (each teach had to come on stage and play out how people would use their new product–my favorite was the “diggie dog” collar that enabled doggies to communicate with their owners but a close second was CHARGE, a female Uber-type car service by women–who drive Teslas–for women). The thing is, people walked in believing THEY weren’t creative and Spread showed them that they really were.

As for me, I talked about the Five Creative Competences of my book, Creative Intelligence–Mining for Meaning, Reframing, Serious Play, Making and Scaling. Getting into Personas allows them to understand what is meaningful to people. This is one big message that the Indian engineers of Startup India have to understand. Digital tech alone won’t get you a successful, profitable startup. You have to first mine for what is meaningful to people, then apply your technology to satisfy that aspiration, that dream.

“On a cold winter night at a safe house in Manhattan some- where near Bloomingdale’s, CIA Director William Casey told me about the CIA’s methods for recruiting spies in World War II. It was 1983, and I had received a call the week before from a woman claiming to be the assistant to William Casey, the chief of the CIA. Thinking it was a joke by a friend, I laughed and laughed, until Casey cut in with “Hiya, Bruce….”

Thus begins a section in Chapter 2, The Search for the Secrets of Creativity, that takes us from the OSS in World War 11 through Csikzentmihalyi’s work on social flow in Florence, Design Thinking, VUCA and the Five Competencies of Creative Intelligence.

Check it out

ow.ly/hptXQ

And you can preorder at–

http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Intelligence-Harnessing-Connect-Inspire/dp/0062088424