All the World's a Frame

I have been teaching courses at Stanford University on creativity for the past decade, and gained great insights from this experience. Over the past two years, I decided to capture what I learned in a new book, called, inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity. The process of thinking and writing about creativity led me to a surprising collection of new insights, most important of which is that we all tend to look at creativity through different lenses and each of these lenses leads to a different set of conclusions about what is needed to unleash creativity. Some people study creativity in individuals, some focus on building creative teams, some are interested in innovation in organizations, and others frame the problem much more broadly by looking at creativity across entire communities. To really understand creativity we need to consider each of these frames and how they are related to one another.

Here is a short video clip from a talk I gave for Stanford Parent's Weekend last year about the impact of framing problems on the types of solutions we find.