About this Author
Gwen Smith Ishmael, Sr. Vice President of Insights and Innovation at Decision Analyst in Arlington, TX, has led marketing and new product development activities in the CPG and technology industries since 1986. She also conceived and developed ground-breaking Web-based promotional vehicles, two of which are patent pending. Gwen holds an MBA in Marketing and is a featured speaker on insights and innovation around the world. Her writings have been featured in international text books, most recently in Managing 4 Ps of Marketing FMCG Sector, and Product Innovation: A Strategic Tool for Growth, by ICFAI Publications, 2006 and 2007, respectively.
Founding Author
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is Director of Innovation Services at Decision Analyst in Arlington, Texas, is a former journalist who worked as an editor and reporter for The Dallas Morning News and the Nashville Tennessean, and was managing editor of D, the Dallas city magazine. She has a master's degree in rhetoric and has also taught college-level English and informal logic.
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Category Archives
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CPSI |
CPSI -- 2005
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Creativity
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July 7, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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.
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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.
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
June 30, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
 One of our team members, Mary Harvey, has come up with a couple of very funny, short videos explaining our team process lingo -- specifically, bins, floaters and speed-binning.
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
A few days ago Grant McCracken blogged about our ethnography project, and used the occasion to register a complaint about our use of the term "ethnography" to describe what we are doing here. His issue is this: "There are lots of people claiming to do ethnography who are, um, 'self trained' " and "For all I know, the CPSI 'ethnographer' is smart and variously gifted enough to do a great job leading the research and creating the 'immersion.' But it is not clear to me that the term 'ethnography' is properly used here."
At first this post annoyed me, but then I got to thinking about it. Later in the comments to the post, Grant clarified himself, saying he'd rather have "someone with real intelligence and great powers of observation" than a trained ethnographer. Our fearless leader Maren Elwood does qualify on those counts.
But is what we're doing *truly* ethnography? Probably not. All we are doing this week is data gathering and sorting, and some initial analysis. The heavy lifting of analysis will be taking place in the months following the conference.
And no, we are not going to be able to call ourselves ethnographers after this week. This is a taste and a flavor of a subset of an ethnography-like process, at best.
But what we are doing is useful and has value. The people who run this conference are going to be presented a great deal of information and many insights about what its participants value and don't value in it, and what their actual experience of the conference is.
And if it's a choice between being politically and academically correct, and being insightful and useful, I'm going with the latter.
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
June 29, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Today I heard a speech that neatly dovetailed with the concept of "apprentice mind" that I was posting about before CPSI started. Another CPSI keynote speech -- Mike Morrison, dean of the University of Toyota, spoke on "Playing The Inner Game of Leadership."
Morrison said that "our need to know is life's irrepressible force," and that "learning is the critical response to the need to know." Essentially, his conclusion was that learning is a way of being, not something we do. And "learning as a way of being [is a result of] changes we make to ourselves and the world in response to our need to know." He described this learning as a way of being as "systems thinking," the ability to see the whole problem.
Bringing this back around to apprentice mind, Morrison said that learning opportunities should be embedded -- "you catch people raising their hand and give them a just-in-time learning resource," moving away from the classroom experiences to real learning experiences on the job.
And on another subject -- it was pretty cool to hear the dean of the University of Toyota talk about "just in time learning" when Toyota was the company that pioneered just-in-time production.
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
In the midst of this CPSI coverage, I don't want to lose this creativity-related comment by Greg Burton on the last apprentice mind post: "It seems to me that when we talk about 'creativity,' we're dealing with a wide range of human activities, and that creativity can be applied to both innovation and invention.
If we make the functional differentiations on 'invention' and 'innovation' then we can see how apprentice mind applies to both activities. It also seems that 'invention' can be both social and personal, and thereby provides a bridge between the range of 'purely personal' (creativity) and 'purely social' (innovation).
I've talked about innovation vs. creativity before. It might sound like splitting hairs, but there's value in discussing distinctions among creativity, innovation, and invention. My addition to what Greg said is that each seems to be a different function, or to function at a different level. I'd place these chronologically in this order -- first, creativity, because creativity is a way of thinking. Then, invention -- making an individual creation. Then, innovation, which I see as more of a process, or a culture.
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| Category: Apprentice Mind | CPSI -- 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
June 26, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Now on the official Day 1 of the conference, we on the Ethnography Team are cooking. We've got a server and a network and everyone's individual laptop and camera working on the network. We've got a system for getting everyone's files off their cameras, onto the network, and backed up.
Today our core group spent a lot of time dicussing the actual "bins" or folders that we're setting up on the network. Each person who brings in photos and videos works with the group to determine which bins those should go into. The bins represent themes that are emerging that will then be analyzed further as more and more data -- in the form of images -- comes in.
Probably I haven't yet said what our final deliverables actually are. First, there's a slide show that's put together every day and run in the dining area and in the area known as the "CPSI Hub," for the other participants to see. Second, I am blogging our process and the conference in general, and using my own photos and photos from others on the team. We will make a multimedia show that will be presented at the closing ceremony on Friday. And in the months to come, Maren will do more analysis and present a report to the Creative Education Foundation.
The purpose of the report is to describe the CPSI "culture" and offer analysis about how the conference can adapt and change for the future. CPSI was started in 1954 by Alex Osborn (creator of the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process, father of brainstorming, and a founder of BBDO). The conference has been held continuously since then. How does a 51-year-old conference stay fresh, keep its core audience, and continue to build that audience? That's the question.
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
This morning the conference officially kicked off with an opening keynote by Mary Catherine Bateson. Fitting for me, since Bateson (daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson) is a noted cultural anthropologist and I am here participating on an ethnography team.
 Bateson, of Composing A Life fame, talked of how owe create our own lives, and how we should rethink our assumptions about a whole range of things, including work and the age at which we should stop working. Bateson noted that the age for Civil Service retirement was set at 65 at a time that, in terms of demographics and life expectation, people wouldn't have expected to live very much longer. She said that if you factored in advances in living conditions and life expectancy, the corresponding age now would be 92.
Said she: "We're trapped in the assumption that work is unpleasant and should be stopped at 65." She suggests that we all spend time thinking about how we can create our lives for the time when we are past "retirement" and before time when we might become incapacitated -- which, of course, won't happen to everyone.
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
June 25, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
So, how do you keep 30 people working together -- 25 of whom are new (to varying degrees) to the process you're working with? Our group process is coming together, and now our Ethno Team has a wiki set up so team members can share ideas, ask questions, and in general talk about what we are doing. The wiki will also serve as a creative space for the CPSI community as a whole (at least, those who can find Internet access here!).
Here's the link: http://cpsi_wiki.seedwiki.com/
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Today is officially opening day at CPSI, and that means there's a lot of the CPSI Hug going around. The CPSI hug isn't any particular kind of hug -- when people talk about that, they're just referring to the fact that a lot of CPSI attendees have been coming to this conference for years, if not decades (the conference is in its 51st year), and when they meet up each year, a lot of hugging goes on!
Ethnographer Maren Elwood produced a very short, fun video on the CPSI Hug, which you can view here.
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
If you believe (and actually, I do) that challenges lead to greater creativity, then there will be no more creative place the next week than CPSI. Our campus location is currently undergoing three different construction projects, which means that just walking from one unfamiliar building to the next is challenging. 
And, the university's wireless broadband network is not open to conference participants, which means that when most of the participants get here today, they'll be vying for space in the computer lab, or will be going on down to A Fine Grind like I have been doing.
As far as blogging's concerned, I'm set -- the Ethnographic Team has a mutimedia room available for our use, and On-Site Reseach's tech guru has managed to get a hub set up for us to connect to. So let the conference reports commence!
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
June 24, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
I've just arrived in St. Paul, on a beautiful sunny day that's thankfully about 10 to 15 degrees cooler than the weather I left behind in Texas. Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to connect to wireless access here at the University of St. Thomas, which is a major drag for blogging, but at least I can post from the computer lab. I haven't yet seen any of the other Ethno Team members, either, because we are not scheduled to get together until tonight at our kick-off dinner (about which more later).
I did post to Flickr some more photos of various Ethno Team members making preparations to come to CPSI, which you can see on the badge in the left sidebar (every time you refresh the page, the photos will change). You can go here to see the entire new set; go here to see the set posted earlier this week.
UPDATE: Found free wifi less than 10 minutes by foot from the University of St. Thomas dorm where I am staying....at a coffee house called A Fine Grind, 2038 Marshall Ave., which will undoutedly now be my home away from home for the next seven days....!
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
June 19, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Take a look over on the left-hand sidebar and you'll see image thumbnails that go to Flickr, where I'm posting all the images from the CPSI Ethno Team project. Travel plans have been made and now we're all trying to figure out how to get ourselves, a week's worth of clothes, and laptops, cameras, iPods, digital voice recorders, etc., off to St. Paul by Friday, when we're scheduled to start.
My main area of preparation has been to learn how to post video and images to this blog! so far, so good. Let me know if links aren't working!
 The other thing I'm doing is trying to straighten out the insurance details resulting from the accident I was involved in last Friday, when another driver failed to stop at a stop sign and t-boned my car. The hit was on the passenger side -- I wasn't hurt -- but oh, my poor car!
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
June 14, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
You'll notice IdeaFlow looking temporarily a little different over the next month or so. I'll be attending the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI, pronounced "sipsee") again June 24-July 1, and while there I'll be part of the Ethnographic Learning Journey Team headed by Maren Elwood of On-Site Research.
During the conference the Ethno Team will conduct ethnographic research into the CPSI culture. Ethno Team members will embed themselves within different aspects of CPSI and collect audio and video feeds, which will be part of the end report.
So until June 25, I'll be posting about the Ethno Team's reparations for CPSI as well as my usual posts on innovation and creativity. From June 25 to July 1, IdeaFlow will be devoted to CPSI and the Ethno Team. I'll be posting my own observations as well as Ethno Team video, photos, and audio multiple times a day.
NOTE: I will *not* be emailing each post to the mailing list during this time! That would be highly annoying to everyone! Instead, I will continue to email non-CPSI posts and a wrap-up post at the end. Email readers are welcome to come to www.corante.com/ideaflow anytime and see what's happening with the CPSI ethnographic project.
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
April 7, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
"Creativity Matters" is the theme of CPSI 2005, which will be held June 26 to July 1 at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. CPSI stands for Creative Problem-Solving Institute, and the event is put on by the Creative Education Foundation.
IdeaFlow is a sponsor of CPSI this year, and I will be blogging (text and video) real-time as part of a conference "Ethnographic Research Team" that will spend the week capturing the real-life experience of CPSI. (IdeaFlow posts on previous CPSIs can be found here.)
Among the keynote speakers is Richard Florida, whose new book, The Flight of the Creative Class, is released this month. Florida's keynote address is about the role of creativity in communities, cities and government.
Other keynote speakers of interest include educator and writer Mary Catherine Bateson (featured in the February 2005 Harvard Business Review's "Breakthrough Ideas for 2005"), Toyota's head of training Mike Morrison, and Intel anthropologist Genevieve Bell.
Also:
* In-depth, weeklong programs including "Springboard to Creative Problem Solving," offering a proven process for deliberately applying creative thinking and problem solving to real-world challenges, and "Applied Creativity: Hands-on Tools for Innovative Results in Organizations."
* Case-study breakout sessions from global organizations who apply creativity for innovation.
* A pre-conference workshop on "Creative Leadership: Applying Imagination to Jumpstart Your Organization's Innovation."
* Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent and whistel-blower, will speak on the role of imagination in ethical decision making.
You can save $150 if you register by April 30. Plus, since we're a sponsor, please enter this IdeaFlow VIP Code when you register: WS66425
If you don't see the banner on the right about the conference, use this link to register for CPSI:
http://www.cpsiconference.com/index.cfm?regcode=WS66425
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| Category: CPSI -- 2005
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Just announced today -- the 2006 CPSI will be in Chicago. And the 
