Giving Ourselves Permission: Day Two at the FUSE Conference

“We are human beings, not human doings” Andrew Pek, CEO of ivibe global and author of Stimulated! said during his keynote, Enlightened Innovation: A Mind, Body and Soul Approach to Creativity and Adaptation. Andrew explained that we should give pause to the constant chatter that we have with ourselves, the overlapping thoughts, and the idea that we need to constantly produce. It is in this frenzy of thought, Andrew argues, that we miss the “thoughts between thoughts” that help us tap into our creativity.

If we are constantly focused on the problem we are trying to solve without stepping away for perspective, we’ll never glean the insights that are lingering in the white matter in our brains. Pek sent the audience through a series of exercises to demonstrate how we can harness creativity by bringing simple awareness to the environment around us and stop the conversations we are having with ourselves. Pek showed a video of Jimmy Page, Jack White, and the Edge going into a guitar shredding flow to create a new rendering of the well-known Led Zeppelin song “In My Time of Dying.”
There was no talking, but you could see a creative conversation emerge between the three as they stood in an intimate circle, settling into their own style but paying very close attention to the other—a guitar call and response. Pek’s point was that we miss these moments of creative connection when we are not aware of tapping into the vibrations and other personalities we are surrounded by.
 
An acute energetic self awareness and tapping into all the senses was a theme that permeated many of the sessions that followed. During the anthropology track, a lot of presenters stressed the need for extreme consciousness of one’s own identity before doing any type of ethnographic research. They also shared that a lot of the users they interacted with were ultimately looking for permission to live an unconventional lifestyle and have fun, and preferred brands and products that allowed them to do that. I think the takeaway for creative and design researchers or aspiring anthropologists is that the more we step away from our routine, our usual deluge of data, and really (no, really) listen and engage with people, then we have the ability to truly understand and transform experiences.
 
I caught up with Andrew at the famous Chicago river to ask him how we can engage more fully with each other and get some tips on how to tap into our hidden creative juices during our daily grind to do just that.