Creating Your Own Best Practices

1. Creating Your Own Best Practices Rosemary O�Leary Distinguished Professor and Phanstiel Endowed Chair Co-Director, Collaborative Governance Initiative The Maxwell School of Syracuse University, USA May 28, 2010

2. The Creativity of the DC Central Kitchen Robert Eggers, Night Club Owner, walked home past restaurants and hotels every morning. "I kept thinking there must be a better, more creative use of the food that restaurants and hotels throw away.�� His idea: Food recycling

3. The Answer from Government Officials �It can�t be done.�

4. The Creativity of the DC Central Kitchen Today, DC Central Kitchen utilizes more than one ton of surplus food each day that would otherwise go to waste, prepares more than 4,000 meals, and provides job training to many who were considered unemployable.

5. His ideas �Quit using lack of money as an excuse� The solution is right in front of you. �See what no one else is seeing� �Connect the unconnected� Eggers created (with government officials) his own �best practices� for recycling food.

6. History 1899: Charles Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office calls for its closing because �everything that could be invented has been invented� 1923: Robert Millikan, winner of Nobel Prize, says atomic energy is impossible.

7. History 1861: Phillip Reiss convinced by �experts� to drop his idea of the telephone. 1938: Chester Carlson invented xerography. IBM and Kodak scoffed at him. Fred Smith, student at Yale, invents Fed Ex. Delivery experts predicted failure.

8. What�s Holding You Back? Why do we think we can�t be creative? Why do we think we can�t create our own best practices?

9. Myths About Creativity It�s Rare Only Artists Have It Only High IQ�s Have It You Need to Hire Experts to Get It It�s in Your Right Brain It�s Mysterious

10. Truths About Creativity We Are Capable of Being Creative Every Day We All Have It You Don�t Have to Have a High IQ You Don�t Need to Hire It

11. Da Vinci and �Lateral Thinking� Creativity that stems from taking knowledge from one substantive context or discipline and seeing how useful it is in an entirely different context.

12. Theory Everything new is just an addition to or modification of something that already exists. (Michalko, SCAMPER)

13. How to Develop Your Own Best Practices: Take an Idea and . . . Substitute something Combine it with something else Adapt something to it Modify or Magnify it Put it to some other use Eliminate something Reverse or Rearrange it