Melt Them Down - Introduction

Melt Them Down - Introduction

working cover design and title:

In the early 70s I came across the book NEW THINK written by Edward de Bono that began to change my thinking.  I followed that with his book LATERAL THINKING and then I came across his entire teaching program that he designed for teaching THINKING in classrooms around the world that he called the CoRT System.

Those books and materials began my journey towards the teaching of creative thinking.

From 1976 to 1984 I worked on 5 degrees in education and completed two of them with my studies focused on the teaching, coaching, counseling, guidance of creative thinking.

While running my VENTURES UNLIMITED one day a week program at Plumosa Elementary for 23 K to 5th grade students I began to swallow up articles and books about teaching, learning, gifted education which led me to traveling to Orlando, Florida to attend a Gifted Education workshop where I met the first two creative thinking consultants of the literally thousands I have met since.

Dr. Dorothy Sisk, then National Director of the Gifted Education office in Washington and professor at South Florida University.

Dr. Bob Eberle, classroom teacher, creativity consultant for education and creator of the most used creative idea generating tool he called: S.C.A.M.P.E.R.

Through their insistence I traveled to Buffalo to attend the first of over 40 CEF sponsored Creative Problem Solving Institutes held in Buffalo, San Diego or Houston from 1978 to 2015.

In 1978 I began giving public workshops on creative thinking in adult education programs in the evening and in West Palm Beach.  When Merry and I moved to Athens for me to work on my doctorate with Dr. E. Paul Torrance in 1979 we also tried doing public workshops in Athens that we held at the Georgia Botanical Gardens outside of Athens and at Christmas break when we return to Palm Beach to see my sons and friends we held a weekend workshop through the West Palm Beach Unity Church.

Since those early attempts I have given hundreds of 
Keynote speeches
Dinner speeches
Breakout or Concurrent sessions
1/2 day to 4 day long workshops on
Developing Creative Thinking

As I mentioned in the preface thanks to a young salesman from Kendall-Hunt Publishing I published my book BROKEN CRAYONS in 1995.  This book has been written to go much further based on a combination of what I learned from 1976 to 1995 with what I have learned since 1995 traveling around the world to participate in and present at nearly 200 creativity conferences on 6 continents in 18 separate countries.

The content of BC was focused on three things

1. helping ALL people accept that they were born able to think creatively

2. helping ALL people accept that we can continually improve our creative thinking traits, skills, abilities through training through books, audio tapes, cds, dvds, articles, workshops, training programs in person or on line through podcasts or webinars all of our lives

3. help train people who lead others or parents how to train their employees or their children to think more creatively.

MELT THEM DOWN has been written to go beyond basics to help push towards EUREKA!, spontaneous creative AHA!s and BEYOND.

Since I became aware of Bob Eberle's S.C.A.M.P.E.R. tool and Dorothy Fisk's many WARM-UP exercises for sparking creative thinking in individuals, teams and groups in March of 1976 in Orlando I became obsessed with collecting, creating, teaching and when possible using many such tools.

In 1979 I created my system for collecting and storing them

S.T.A.M.P.S.

SYSTEMS
TOOLS/TECHNIQUES
ATTITUDES/APPROACHES
METHODS
PROCESSES
STRATEGIES

and I have collected over 1,000 in my personal files on paper or electronically and have connections with websites from around the globe that have thousands more.  MYCOTED is only one.  Charles Cave from Sydney created one of the first when the www was barely available to the public.

Over the past nearly 40 years I have focused on trying to help teams, departments, small companies to divisions of major Fortune 500 companies develop or establish their own system for Developing Cre8ng Communities throughout from their front doors to their CEOs offices.

Unfortunately little progress has been made by myself or hundreds of other creativity colleagues around the world on a large scale.  Some programs like the OZ Group at duPoint that my long time friend Dr. David Tanner developed and ran at the company for years have been successful in departments or divisions but never across entire corporations.

At least not that I am aware of so far.

Many have started.

Most died within 2 years or less from my knowledge base, first-hand and through reading or interviewing people.

Around 1998 I created a working model to help teams, groups, departments, entire offices, plants or corporations to start their own internal Creative Thinking Development program with the intent of turning them into C,r,E,8, N, G ! Communities throughout.

C,r,E,8,N,G!

Is my Possible to Potential Creative Solution Generating Process

C - Collect your Challenges and Choose one at a time to work on
r - Read and Reap everything you can about the Chosen Challenge
E - Examine the Challenge thoroughly to discover the main or sub-problems
8 - Ideate (using at least 8 different idea generating STAMPS) long lists of ideas and organize them
N - Narrow down the long lists into clusters, groups until you agree on one or a combination of some
G - Gather tools, resources, people.  Generate a plan or plans and back up plans and GO FOT IT!

My Working Model I labeled S.P.R.E.A.D.ng
that stands for 6 clusters of things, activities, systems that to help develop creative thinking in individuals and entire organizations

S -  SUPPORT
P -  PROMOTE
R - RECOGNIZE/REWARD
E - ENCOURAGE/EDUCATE
A - APPLY, create ATMOSPHERES (Environments)
D - DEVELOP

Each team, department, office, plant, organization or corporation needs to create their own and they will vary from company to company, product to product, people to people over time

The result is the development of a C,r,E,8,N,G! Community where creative thinking is a major part throughout

That is the goal of MELT THEM DOWN to provide you ideas, tools and systems.

One word to the wise based upon my 41 years of working at this and studying such programs from the 6 continents in many countries you have one major nemesis.

Cultures, Religions, Groups, Organizations tend to believe that rigid conformity is necessary to succeed.

I strongly disagree and believe in this book title from the early 80's title by Robert Kriegle

IF IT AIN'T BROKE,
BREAK IT ANY WAY!

at least once in awhile.

During the past 10 to 15 years this has been called. . .

STREET FIGHTER THINKING
GORILLA THINKING
DISRUPTIVE THINKING

IT IS YOUR CHOICE

as George Land one of my mentors and teachers wrote in the 70s

GROW OR DIE!

Where he talked about LIFE CYCLES and how too many individuals and even large corporations are not willing
to "step out of line", "get out of the box", or If It Ain't Broke, actually BREAK THINGS in order to succeed.

We now need to BREAK THINGS more than ever around the globe.

My hope is that MELT THEM DOWN will be one of the books that will help individuals, families, teams, corporations do that.

Melt Them Down - Introduction

Melt Them Down - Preface

In 1994 I was approached by a salesman for Kendall-Hunt Publishing, Inc.

He was contacting all the Georgia Speakers Association members to sell the publishing services of K-H to as many as he could.

My fellow GSA member and friend was also approached and the two of us decided we would publish with K-H through their CONTRACT PUBLISHING approach eliminating all the middle people between starving author and finished high quality published book.

This process was often called VANITY PRESS in the past.

K-H was a high quality publisher with an excellent reputation.

Both Keith and I signed up.

Him with his book ATTITUDE IS EVERYTHING that took him to fame around the US. Got him a large article of the front page of the Marketing Section of the Wall Street Journal and many other publications plus on many regional and national radio, tv shows, including his own Channel 8 NPR fundraising show.

In my case my book BROKEN CRAYONS was published by K-H.

It has taken me around the world many times during the past 22 years.  Gotten me on a few radio interview shows but alas not tv yet.  I did get 2 lines in an article in WSJ about strange speakers and 4 seconds on an episode of 60 Minutes once when they did an attack story on the professional speaking profession.

BROKEN CRAYONS was published in 1995 and has had some mild success.  Thanks to colleagues in Turkey, Slovenia, South Africa it has been republished by other publishing companies.  It also was taken on by a Japanese businessman to publish who ended up wanting me to turn it into a complete cartoon/comic style book, Manza I think is the style's name.  I thought about it for months but then declined, simply in my whole life of cartooning and drawing I had never done that many drawings for a single project and I was very busy speaking around the globe at the time.

I simply didn't think I could do it.

Like many FAILURE STORIES about 
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES I turned him down.

You are now reading a new book about creativity that I have decided to publish.

MELT THEM DOWN

using another of my wax crayon analogies or metaphors.

I grew up learning from my all time favorite elementary school teacher: MRS. JOHNSON; that you can do more with BROKEN CRAYONS than you can with perfect, wrapped, right out of the box crayons.  I took that analogy or metaphor and applied to the last 41 years of my life.  When the K-H salesman contacted me to ask

"DO YOU HAVE A BOOK YOU WANT TO PUBLISH?"

I had been doing workshops and keynote speeches from 1976 to 1994 using the analogy, the metaphor, as the title for varied programs for public workshops or in-houe workshops for individual clients.

Since 1995 when BROKEN CRAYONS was published I have been traveling around the globe doing workshops on creative thinking that grew from my original ones in the 70s up to 1995.

This book has been written to capture much of what I have Learned and Created in the past 22 years in addition to the previous 19 year of studying creativity and 32 of living as a creative person or a person doing things creatively by choice.

In 1976 I volunteered to be a Gifted Education Teacher for 23 academically gifted elementary school children.  My oldest and late son, Jeff was one of the 23.

Within a month of beginning my Tuesday, "VENTURES UNLIMITED" sessions with the children, K to 2nd grade in the morning and 3rd to 5th in the afternoon, I had begun reading many books about teaching, education, learning, children including two specific articles by the same author/researcher/professor, Dr. E. Paul Torrance, originally from central Georgia, who began his 50 years of devotion to the development of creative thinking in school classrooms in the 50s.

In the first article he wrote about how every human being is born with capacities to think creatively.

In the second article he wrote about how creative thinking skills could be taught or trained.

Photo of my mentor, teacher, colleague, friend: Dr. E. Paul Torrance the day I received my diploma for completing my PhD with him as my major professor in 1984.

Those two articles began my 41 year journey or pilgrimage focused on the Development of Creative Thinking Skills, Traits, Behaviors, Tools and Processes that has taken me to over 40 states and 93 countries.

Come along as I share much of what I believe can 

help you, 
your children, 
your friends, 
your fellow employees 
and if you are a leader from supervisor to CEO or owner of a small company to a large corporation help ALL of your employees

become the

CREATIVE THINKERS you/they were BORN TO BE!