“What counts is your level of engagement, not your level of accomplishment,” Sheila Hicks, internationally known fiber artist.

This is a counter-cultural statement. Our culture values and rewards accomplishments, not engagement. But engagement is a requisite for great work. We produce little if what we produce does not stem from engagement: engagement in what we are doing, engagement with others, and encouraging others to engage with us and our work.

Engagement is complete immersion and involvement in what we are doing without a view to what we may or may not accomplish. A high level of engagement is accompanied with an equally low level of concern about a final product.

Engagement is obsession with process. When you lose yourself in a conversation or a project you are fully engaged.

Here’s the irony: it’s by losing yourself in the process that you create products of the greatest value.

I’m writing a new book about engagement. I’m completely immersed in the creative process. The book is taking directions I couldn’t have ever predicted and never would have experienced if I had predetermined what this product would become.

What projects are you involved with right now? What’s your level of engagement with these projects? Are you lost in the projects or just trying to accomplish something?

I find it helpful to answer these questions for each of my projects. It helps me leave the shallows of a mind focussed on product and dive into process’ deep-end. It’s there, where I’m fully engaged, that I know I’ll surface with things of value.

Tags: creative process, creativity, engagement

We’re halfway through 2011. It’s a great time to muster some resolutions that can take us through to 2012. Here are some that I’m putting into practice to make sure I’m creative, productive, and grounded in life and work:

1. Listen to entire albums

I’ve become a serial user of sites like Pandora and Grooveshark. Albums contain entire stories. Songs are just the chapters. I’m get started I have sitting next to me Beck’s Modern Guilt, Radiohead’s, The Bends, Sinatra’s, September of My Years, and Van Morrison’s, Astral Weeks.

2. Check my email inbox about as often as I check my mailbox

If you’re trying to do work that is creative and contributes value to the lives of other people, multi-tasking is a myth (recent research is pretty conclusive about this one). Good work comes from deeply focusing on one project at a time. Email inhibits this kind of focus.

3. Draw one picture each day with my non-dominant hand

For many of us, our left brain (the logical, rational, and rather uninventive side of the brain) is like a cushy couch we can’t crawl out of. To wrest myself from its grasp I’m going to solicit help from my right brain. So I went to the university bookstore yesterday and purchased a drawing pad and nice black Copic pen. These drawings are horrid to look at and so fun to make, especially knowing I can’t erase.

4. Read better books

Good books make skimming impossible. You have to completely immerse yourself in the text. I’m a third of the way through The Brothers Karamazov. I’d say it qualifies.

5. Complete my next book

I’m near the completion of my first short ebook on how to engage people with important messages. This will be the first portion of a larger book on engagement that I plan to publish by January 2012. If you’ve ever taken on a project like this, you know it is like trying to wrestle Andre the Giant while wearing a blindfold. But I plan to see it through.

I better stop there. I hope you find this interesting, perhaps even inspiring. Make your own list. It’s nice to have a handful of things to tether to which you can tether your daily schedule.

Tags: creativity, engagement, productivity

Gardens and factories, for all of their conspicuous differences, are similar in that they produce things and do so with high degree of predictability. Factories produce finished products. Gardens are places where fruits, vegetables, flowers, and plants mature.

In the marketplace, companies like Google and Ideo are more like gardens than factories. These companies thrive because they are full of fertile compost, permitting employees to be more creative, engaged, and productive.

Tragic is how pandemic the industrial factory sensibility is in many educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and corporations.

Fortunately places like Gutenberg College and St. Johns College serve as gardens that cultivate creative, collaborative learners and thinkers. These skills have become the x-factor in the 21st century marketplace.

Here’s an activity for you and people you work with. Feel free to print it out. Just click on the image and save it to your computer.

Tags: creativity, divergent learning, engagement