Last April at the American Creativity Association conference I was impressed by a talk from futurist Paul Schumann, who will be speaking at a free seminar on "Building An Innovative Enterprise," from 9 a.m. to noon on July 26. Hosted by the Center for Community Based and Nonprofit Organizations at the Austin Community College Highland Business Center in Austin, Texas. Go here for more information and to register for this seminar (then click on "Learning Opportunities").

One of the last sessions I attended at CPSI was about "how to take the content of CPSI back to your organization." The answer: start small, and virally. "Viral facilitation" -- a new concept to me -- would be when, instead of setting up an official, day-long creative problem solving (CPS) session, you simply make a conversation with someone run along the CPS rails of fact-finding, problem-finding, solution-finding....divergence, convergence.

The main thing -- don't imply that people have been "doing it wrong" and that you have the answer. Find a group with a specific business need and offer to help solve their problems, or pick a place to start that you have some control over.

Another suggestion: Asking people what problems they need to solve implies that CPS and creativity should only be applied to problems, so instead we should ask "what opportunities are being missed?" and apply CPS there. It seems that's one place innovation could reliably be applied to within an organization -- finding opportunities for productive change.

I picked up an ugly sinus crud last week while at CPSI, and have been sick since returning from St. Paul. Things are looking better today, so I'll be able to make a couple of wrap-up posts on the CPSI experience.

Meanwhile, there've been a number of comments on the issue of whether what we were doing could be called ethnography or not. Someone recommended "ethnomedology," which I suppose could also work. Just for grins, if anyone's interested, I did find this guide to observational research methods. Kinda cool.