ART WORKS FOR TEACHERS PODCAST | EPISODE 104 | 44:59 MIN
Curiosity, Culture, & the Future of Innovation
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Well, welcome, Theo. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Theo
It’s my pleasure to be here.
Susan
Absolutely. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself to get started? Specifically, what a culture futurist is?
Theo
So I think a lot of folks have a misunderstanding about futurists. And so first we could maybe start with clearing that up and then we can add the culture piece to it. First of all, also thank you for having me on today. I’m very excited about the conversation and as a board member at Americans for the Arts and a lifelong artist and poet myself, arts education is something that is very near and dear to my heart and also doing what I can to support the evolution. is undergoing and will continue to go under. And we can get into that a little bit in the futurist part. A futurist is not someone who predicts the future. What I essentially do is I answer three questions. And so when you’re thinking about a decision to be made, a strategic direction, where do we play? What does it take to play wisely and what do we need to stay resilient and curious when the unexpected does happen because it always will. And so those are the three questions that I kind of center on. I grew up neurodiverse and I grew up part of the LGBT community and I grew up in a nine generation Appalachian family. So I learned how to navigate systems that were not necessarily designed with me in mind all the time I was growing up but I now have some $25 words for, I now know that I was cultivating a pretty deep skill set in pattern recognition and strategic foresight. So I learned how to understand kind of cognitively where people are and in any room I was going into, learned to understand how the emotional creative tension, if you will, of a room was open or not open to whatever it might be that I would be introducing into it. And then also learned how to, you know, like cultivate the skills for navigating multiple directions I might need to go. Skip to 2024, we now know that those skills, pattern recognition, strategic foresight, analytical combined with creative thinking, self -awareness, resilience, curiosity, these are among the World Economic Forum’s top future of work job skills.
And so, know, if you’re fortunate enough to live long enough, you get to play a lot of roles and a lot of parts. I feel like where I’m at now is probably the most aligned where my particular skill set has been with kind of the culture moment at hand. And so the culture part of Culture Futurist is really signaling context. And, you know, we often think about, especially in higher education or in the research world,
We like these kind of, you know, nicely, tightly lab laboratory control conditions for experiments and so forth, but life doesn’t always work like that. And so cultural context matters. And so when you think about a data, what I look for is what are the culture signals that are in data that I can then stack on top of each other that maybe in the normal kind of
Most people wouldn’t think about stacking these particular data sets on top of each other to understand something. But if I do that, those culture signals, and I find that thread that I start to pull, all of a sudden all those data ports start collapsing down into something that looks more like infinite present moment of multiple possibilities. And so that’s the activity that I’m engaging in. So what is a culture signal? What are those culture signals?
Loneliness is a culture signal I’m looking at right now. I you know, we can talk about loneliness as a, the surgeon general does as a, as a health crisis, as a mental health, driver. But honestly, think loneliness, maybe more than any other thing beyond that, beyond the health implications is a signal that we are in a systems change. And the new system has not quite yet come to fruition yet we don’t know what that looks like. And most all of us have connected our identities to this kind of old system that seems to be breaking down. And so, you know, we know from, for example, from psychological research from Erickson and Marsha are two researchers. I look at how identity gets formed. We know that about individuals, but you know, I think that same thing happens in teams, in groups, in nations.
So we can talk about the micro, meso or macro level. So what identity are we holding onto now? And how is it connected to a system that maybe we’re just becoming aware that it is not getting ready to go through a change, but is firmly in going through a change. And know, like when people struggle with identity, a lot of things happen with that. And so the cultural signals I look at, are things like systems change and how loneliness is an indicator maybe of an identity attachment that we’ve not been able to kind of quite latch onto yet of the next thing that is coming. you know, I’ve more, it’s a, I’ve developed a method called quantum storytelling that kind of looks at any decision within the context of essentially quantum physics, multiple possibilities where you put your attention manifest for the outcome that you’re going to see, but even in that decision for a new product, a new idea, a new service, there’s ancestral wisdom that’s there. And in that action you take, you’re writing future history. But if we take, go beyond that linear construct and think about the infinity loop of it, it just helps to locate where we are in something. And if we can locate ourselves, then we’re on our way to asking better questions.
Susan Riley
This is completely fascinating to me because I’m seeing some of these images in my head of the idea of you’re drawing upon your own skill set, your own empathy to try to look at some of these data points. And for me, when you walk into a room, it’s kind of like you can see the people in the room, you can adjust and see who’s there and what’s needed. But you’re doing this on such a large scale.
How do you decide what data points to look at and where and how to kind of measure that without actually being with the people in real time?
Theo
So there’s a few questions that were packed into there. Let me kind of tease those out a little bit so I’m answering the right one. So I think all of us before we even had kind of language, I think it’s encoded in our brain from the time we were born.
Whenever, and this is some people talk about as the social brain and like we can, I hate kind of being reductionist and when we’re talking about the brain, but I’ll use that for efficiency sake. So I think there’s like three questions that even before we have language children, once we have kind of, we’re aware of ourselves as an independent sentient being that has, these are my hands. You go into a room where there’s other people.
There’s three questions. The first one is, am I safe?
Depending on how you answer that question for yourself, you move to the second question. And that is, I believe, how am I connected to these people in this room? Depending on how you answer that, you then go into the next level. So if I’m safe and I can understand how I’m connected. Third question I think we all kind of ask is, in what way does the things that I see and need and want, et cetera, human desire for my future depend upon my contribution to the thing this group is trying to do together. And so what we’re doing there, I think, is trying to understand the internal and external synchronization of our experience in moving through the world. And so that first question about like, how do you put these skills together and know where they come from. So in some ways, I’m doing something that is incredibly common to the human experience. How do you know what to measure? How do you account for other people? think if you have kind of, if you recognize that all of us are bringing those kinds of questions into the room, I think you would, you know, you would have to be seriously checked out to believe that your own boundary conditions, your own view of the world is the limits of the rest of world. think was Schopenhauer from getting my philosophers right, you know, talked about how that we often conflate that our own limitations based on our own experience as if they are the limitations of the world. And that’s just, you know, that’s just not true. was just down at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, got to listen to this amazing hour long presentation conversation by Lin -Manuel Miranda. And he was talking about kind of the same thing, actually. He was talking about the question he was asked was, know, how did, you know, like, are you a historian? like, because of Hamilton, and he’s like, he’s straight, he’s like, no, I’m not a historian at all. In fact, I started doing the thing, the beginnings of Hamilton before I actually knew anything about him, because the question I started with was, here’s this person that we’ve all heard, maybe heard the name thrown around, that if we’re being honest, most of us don’t know the first thing about, but still to this day seems to have this larger than life impact on our modern day lives. And I’m curious about that. And so it was that curiosity that drove the inquiry into why don’t I know more about this person? What will I find out if I find out more about this person? How do I kind of… not judge this person 200 years ago for the things they did through a present day lens. And so that idea around, you know, the self -awareness, the curiosity, and by curiosity, I just don’t mean like, I’m curious about this guy, Hamilton, right? What he was really saying is I’m curious, and that’s what allows me to stay open long enough to hold creative tension where I don’t feel like I gotta start solving for the creative tension and I can stay open enough and comfortable within that creative tension to let myself find some different questions in that space. When we can get ourselves in that kind of mindset, right?
Then interesting things can happen because we’re never gonna know like, like this, you know, like my work today with Creativity America, which I’ll share a little bit later, is focused on teams. Like we, we conflict in popular culture creativity as to just an individual activity, but nothing really gets done unless we… partner up with somebody else and a bunch of somebody else’s in order to do something. I think that is this false story that we’ve told ourselves in the United States that it’s baked into kind of the value proposition, if you will, of the US of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, individualism, all super important. But the idea of genius being a, you know, just this exceptional individual and nobody else in the world like him and then Einstein or Steve Jobs, et cetera. Well, the thing is, you don’t have to scratch too hard to realize that nobody would have known who either one of those people were if they hadn’t connected their ideas into networks of people who could share their story and that could help them grow. So this idea of genius, rather than being the virtue of an individual, the way I think about genius is it’s a cultural outcome.
It’s a cultural outcome of a group of people who successfully sit within creative tension long enough to get to some deeper questions. And I think for me that fills a lot more to the origin of genius, which the origin of that word is the protective spirit of a person or a place. And if nothing else, I think we are each other’s protective spirit because we have to do things together.
Susan
Yeah, yeah, I think you’re so right in that in so many things like there are so many kind of little little nuggets that you just drop throughout there. This idea of the having that curiosity and how it opens to this creative tension. I think we’re so focused on problem solving and making sure we get to the answer, particularly when we’re talking about education, that we don’t leave the time, which is or the space to allow for there not to necessarily be an answer to allow there to be this space for innovation, if you will. So I would love for you to tell us more about Creativity America because I know that that is a huge initiative that’s working right now specifically to boost creativity skills across the country. So tell us more about that.
Theo
Yeah, sure, I’m excited to share it with you. And you all are actually hearing some of that. We’ve just started beginning to roll things out a little bit, just in the last month or so. So with creativity America, it is a, America in that word is signaling a cultural context. And so why is that important? It’s not saying that America has got to figure it out and the rest of the world should follow us, but it is saying that America is a context. And so if you think about,
Think about something like, some of your listeners of yours may be familiar with like arts prescribing, you know, some big topic these days. A lot of that research comes from the United Kingdom. And for 30, 40 years, they’ve been doing social prescribing based in community, you know, so they’ve got a lot of experience with it. But I think even more importantly, the UK, the EU has made different social agreements than we have made in the U S they.
We have commodified healthcare and we’ve commodified education here unlike the social agreement that those are something that looks more like a human right that everybody has access to in these other places where a lot of this idea of arts prescribing social prescribing comes out of. And so it’s a great idea, but when you translate it into the American context, the commodification of healthcare and education take differently what people perceive to be possible and valuable. And so different value equations get kind of put around any new idea that gets introduced. so creativity in America is really signaling a cultural context of the US, the stories we tell about what the origin stories of America are, who we are yesterday, who we’re going to be, et cetera. And with creativity America, we talk about it in terms of the wonder economy. So that word innovation gets thrown around quite a lot
We often in today’s world can conflate it with some notion of technology or some future of work strategy and both of those things super important, but there’s a human side to both of those things. And so the wonder economy is not saying that those things don’t matter. It’s saying what is the human side? How do we become more deeply human at this time in order to thrive alongside future of work demands and technology that is emerging. And so the wonder economy is simply kind of like the human side of technology and the future of work. we talk about creativity as being currency in that economy. And that’s actually quite literal. So Creativity America is on a mission to weave the arts and science of creativity into mainstream business innovation. When we talk about weaving that into mainstream innovation, why is that important? It’s important because…
Eight out of 10 Americans work in the private sector. And we often, think, in the arts can conflate private sectors if we’re only talking about these kind of big multinational corporates. But indeed, it’s solopredors and mom and pop shops in communities all the way up to these multinationals. And that’s where eight out of 10 of us in America are putting food on our table and clothes on our back.
So to think about systems change, we have to be in the cultural context that are kind of governing and shaping the way most people understand their lives and navigate their lives. Now we can talk about if those are the right systems or not, but that’s a different conversation. I’m taking a very practical approach with creativity here. so I… definitely also believe that the private sector, that we have been in an unhealthy relationship with them between the arts and the private sector for a very long time. It’s been what seems to me mostly transactional that, you know, we are the, we are recipients in the arts of their funding, blah, blah. That’s all valuable. However, the question that I ask is,
What’s beyond that transactional relationship? Or the transformational relationships that could be built? And so that’s what we’re trying to kind of go into with Creativity America in a very practical data -driven kind of way. And so we bring together arts, science, mostly brain science and business, and the brain sciences we’re talking about depend upon not just cognitive neuroscience of creativity in the brain but also those team level, group level, industrial, organizational, behavioral, social psychology, and companies, aspects of how the brain works. And so if you think about creativity as currency, we call it creative brain capital. And that is that we’ve developed a methodology for quantifying the creative brain skills that the World Economic Forum says everybody’s got to have in the future of work. And those are analytical creative thinking.
self -awareness and resilience, curiosity and emotional intelligence, and importantly for me, it’s storytelling. Storytelling that actually moves markets. When we talk about storytelling, data is a story that we tell, right, narratives, our personal narratives, our marketing and companies, the way we create movies that gets people interested in going into this industry or that industry as a career. We’re telling stories all the time. And if you think about kind of like what operates on the workforce.
We talk in coming out my public health kind of background, talk about social ecological models and probably a lot of your viewers are very familiar with those. It’s the idea that no person is just a person, that these people, individuals are surrounded by not just their bodies and their brains with kind of a sack of skin, but that individual is something more than just the sum of those parts, even like Columbia researchers talk about how something like spirituality is encoded in our DNA, not religiosity, but just like we’re born with an understanding that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. that, you know, the spirituality piece of this is super important. And we don’t talk nearly enough about that, but so that the individual within that individual is part of communities. And those communities are part of cities and industries. And you just keep on going up.
But you also have the multiple intelligences of the animal world or natural world. The James Webb Space Telescope, these images that it is coming back with, just I see the next one of those. Every time it’s something, a new image comes across, it’s like, it’s the only time I can think of on social media where people just kind of for a nanosecond just let their stuff down. It’s just collective, whoa. Right?
Susan
Yeah. It’s awe. It’s collective awe, right? Yes.
Theo
It is, it is because we, in that moment, there is something in psychology, the hypnopompic or hypnagogic state of when you’re going into dreaming and coming out of dreaming. And it’s just that liminal space where it’s kind of more like melancholy maybe than anything, where you know you’re not awake yet, so there’s an anticipation of what’s happening and you know you’re not still fully dreaming, so there’s maybe even a melancholy, you know, there’s maybe a longing for that state that you were in. And so in that moment, really interesting things get born in our mind. And these images, I think, are similar to that when one comes across. it makes sense because if you think about it enough, everything that a human has ever built, everything that we understand is a building, a city, a nation, anything that humans have ever built contains two things. Things that we have pulled from the earth and human imagination. Both of those were born in the heart of a dying star and both of those things are quite literally stardust. So how is it that our human imagination and a tree are the same thing? That’s because they come from the same materials.
And so when you think about those levels, the personal, the community, I’m in the workforce and private sector, the thing that industries, this idea from the individual to the cosmic is our way of understanding the world. And so with that orientation, though, you’ve got things that act upon workers. And these are things like social determinants of it health as we talk about sometimes, So, socioeconomic status, your identity based upon economic systems, where you live, where you grow. So, all of these things that we talk about, social determinants of health, act upon workers and having a big impact. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has, you know, have got to, we’ve got to all give them the credit for really helping us to fully appreciate and understand that, your zip code determines your life expectancy more than your genetics. So things acting upon workers. But then you have the things that manifest within workers. And those are things like…
neurodynamic processes. And so when you think about loss, I’m more more convinced that we are, that unprocessed grief in our nation is our biggest innovation as well as biggest national challenge. And what I mean when I say that is, if you dig into how the brain uses laws.
You see that there is a process in place called neurodynamic processes, that if the brain loses something, a loved one, a dream. Now innovation is yes it’s something new but something is going to be have to be given up often for innovation to happen so without understanding the loss of a new idea that’s going to have to be that people will have to go through we’re not really working with the whole picture we focus I think you talk about solutions and we’re you we have historically rewarded confidence in solutions not vulnerability and I might not have the right question.
Right? And so these neurodynamic processes, if we don’t engage them effectively, allostatic load becomes allostatic overload, becomes inflammation, you know, and we understand this in epigenetics, in generational trauma, we understand this in heart disease and some forms of cancer. it’s a powerful process. So the things manifesting within them. Things acting on workers, the social determinants of health, those kinds of things, things manifesting within workers. And I would add too, that’s like around loss and grief and neurodynamic processes and allistic overload. I would also add in there the things that our sacred traditions have been talking about for a very long time. You know, the five poison buddhas, attachment, envy, anger, pride, ignorance. These are some of the top topics that brain research and psychology is really, you know, investigated heavily these days to understand how these work in our societies. But these have been around with us for a very, very long time. These are basic human things. So manifesting within, acting upon workers. But then I am coming to believe that there’s something more powerful than any other thing that shapes what people in the workforce, people in industries see as possible and valuable.
And as the stories we tell about whatever it is, our brains are hardwired to receive those stories and be shaped by them. And those storytelling determinants of kind of our creative brain capital happens on an individual level, but then it happens even more at, you know, organizational levels or national level. You can see it in our national politics right now. We don’t have that new identity of that system that has, that is forming but it’s not quite fully formed. So there’s nothing to attach that identity to. And so the stories that we’re telling matter and they matter greatly.
That’s all fine and good. But I think one of the things we’re trying to also do with Creativity America that I learned from the last 10 years with well -being research, we were very, we were a victim of our own success in the well -being research community. We convinced, rightly so, every CEO, every leader who was listening that well -being mattered and mattered greatly. It was subjective and one size does not fit all. We were successful in showing that data to them to which almost no one I could think of in a leadership position said anything other than, my God, that’s amazing. Here is this story that I have about myself and this well -being fill in the topic. Here’s a story I have about myself and my daughter, you know, my child, how we feel, how we’re experiencing this topic. But if you’re telling me, I believe you, that wellbeing only matters, but it is also highly subjective. I manage and run teams of teams. I don’t know how to do, if I’m running a team of 10 or 10 ,000, I don’t know how to do individual strategies for every single one of those people and well -being is not why I’m being paid by our external stakeholders.
I’m being paid to produce a return on investment for them. Again, back in Kentucky, we’d say this is bourbon conversation we could have about this sometime. I’m just saying that that is the practical realities of the way we have constructed our social agreements with the U .S. And so…
Susan
Yeah, yeah. And well, I was going to say, and as much as you’ve started out with well -being, I think that’s also the conversation around creativity in the workforce as well, right?
Theo
It is. And that’s exactly where I’m going. -being can be the goal. It should be an input though, because when we try to make it the goal of well -being, what leaders did is they said, you know, it’s important. So I’m going to give it to our HR folks and they’re going to figure it out. Well, at that moment, one of the HR’s main, the HR does a lot of amazing and good things in the world. But risk mitigation is one of their primary roles.
And HR is historically largely been seen as a cost center, not a growth center. So when we assigned well -being to that, or leaders assigned well -being to that, they assigned it as risk and they assigned it as cost. And so with Creativity America, we’re trying to avoid that impulse to make creativity the thing, but to make creativity the brain skills framework, or economic form, as everybody needs in order to drive business performance, right, in teams, in teams. And so the stories we tell around all of this, how you know, move from the me to the we, how do you take brain science and sync it up with culture? You know, how do you have, create new innovation rituals and collaborations between brain scientists, both cognitive and I will behavioral and artists who could help rewrite the biology culture dialogues that I think have stymied us from kind of seeing new ways to reimagine talent management, engagement, new ways to look at leadership development, business strategy, social impact, because I think our, especially with the arts, kind of singularly, at best I think we have made some inroads on the design front but artists are so much more than that. And I say that as an artist, we’re amazing strategists. We can do things in ways that, while are not unique from a creative mechanism standpoint, because creativity is not the sole province of the arts, neither is culture. Creativity and culture happen everywhere in society. But we do do something very unique with it that is hard to replicate.
And so all I’m suggesting with that is if that if we’re able to kind of stabilize a relationship where the entrepreneur, the business leader, the brain scientists, the artists are able to enter in as equals to hold in sitting creative tension long enough to get to a better question, a question being a story that we’re going to tell what can happen on the other side of that. I think the big innovation here is the way we have developed something called creative brain capital index. so one of the things that around that you’ve got to be able to quantify something in order to show a causal relationship to the outcome, the return on investment of a company, right? So creative brain capital does that. So when I talk about the wonder economy, creativity is currency. This is what I’m talking about. So creative brain capital has, there’s three legs to that stool. One is the creative potential of the group and we can measure that. That is the province of our cognitive neuroscientists who are doing amazing work, you know, in this field. So we can measure the creative potential of a group by using those cognitive measures. But then the second thing you have to be able to measure is the creative motivation of the group. Is this group motivated to work together to unlock that potential? In that second vector of measurement, the creative motivation vector, we get there through four kind of spectrums. We measure a spectrum we call wonder, which is a quantitative assessment of awe to curiosity, a trust spectrum, which is a measure of hope to belonging and mattering, a freedom spectrum, which is a measure of compassion to courage, and a joy spectrum, which is a measurement of adonite to eudaemonic well -being or happiness to purpose.
And it’s through that kind of those kind of four spectrums of measurement, we’re able to quantify, yeah, this group is motivated to work together to this degree to unlock that potential. And the third vector we measure is if motivation and potential there, does this group actually have the skills that research shows are required in order to turn motivation and potential into new enterprise value? And those are, that’s a set of creative collaboration assessment skills. And so you put all of that together and you get a pretty good idea where you can then start designing something that looks more like a precision intervention, kind of like how, where we’ve got to with healthcare, with precision medicine. So, you know, to, to deliver the optimal intervention for a particular individual’s biology, gut biome, all the things. So if we, what if we are able to then have something like a creative brain capital index that we could use to do precision intervention to optimize the creative intelligence and performance of teams to drive who are being tasked with driving their organization or their company’s growth.
Susan
Yeah, that’s amazing. There is so much that you’ve embedded into this initiative, which I think is so critical to where we’re going because we speak to educators all the time and one of the things that educators know is that building creativity into their curricula, into how they teach, into what they teach and into the culture of how we teach, right, as schools is important. It’s more critical now than ever, but sometimes they don’t quite understand why we know that it’s supposed to be in the workforce. It’s part of the 21st century skills, but what you’ve shared, I think, helps us to understand where this is going and why it’s so important. And you’ve talked a lot about story. We talk in our organization all the time about what story are you telling yourself about whatever it is, whatever situation it is. Before we close out, I would love to hear a story from you about how creativity has impacted a cross -disciplinary project for you and what might that look like?
Theo
So I could tell you many, just to stick with the vein that we’re on. Creativity America is that for me. I’ve had three different careers already in my life, not jobs, careers. I had a corporate health career. I had a career as a visual artist and a producer of theater between Europe and New York for the last 10 years, my husband and I co -founded an organization called Ideas X Lab. So that was in 2013 and the idea there was to, you know, is that what if question? What if you take a really interesting creative artist process and integrate them into other innovation teams so it becomes possible. So we were in 2013, 2014, we were putting incredible artists with great conceptual practices into innovation teams of Fortune 50 companies.
Not to make art, I knew art would happen. I’m an artist, art always is gonna happen. But it was to integrate that different type of creative mind into a team with other creative minds in service to that goal. And then the other side of that was to do the same thing in community innovation, of, a lot of people talk about it as social entrepreneurship, community development. And so that was the third career. And then the last half of that third career has been, I got invited to be into the, I’m an accidental academic. I got invited to join a faculty in School of Public Health at the University of Louisville. And so I’ve been for the last five years deep into National Science Foundation work that I’ve led as a principal investigator. And then for the last three or four years, been looking at when we say creativity, how many, what are all the disciplines you’ve actually got to have that because you know the way the media tells the story brain scans are really cool and easy to get somebody to click on in the media because you know we all we all love to think about ourselves right and so but again that’s all great but it’s not the full picture of creativity creativity in teams creativity management creativity in arts education i was just working on something the other day like trying to find creative thinking
What’s the definition computational computing uses? What’s the definition arts educators use? What’s the definition of IOSA colleges use? What’s the definition of So like there’s a lot of similarities, but there’s also the places we miss each other. So it’s a complex thing. But so I tell people that I’m entering into my fourth career that brings corporate healthcare.
My experience as a working and showyed artist and a social innovator and, and pracademic, accidental academic, all together into something designed to actually make change in the world. Cause one thing I’m clear on is that there’s a lot of brilliant researchers and there’s a lot of brilliant research fitting inside of higher education. I don’t believe a lot of it’s getting out and being applied in the world because there’s a system of risk and reward for professional, assistant professor, associate professor, et cetera, right? That keeps people in place to reinforce their own discipline. And that’s important, that depth is important, but that can’t be all we’re doing. There’s gotta be, we talk about interdisciplinary, we talk about transdisciplinary, and I think everybody who talks about that is intellectually on this, in their wanting good to do it, but the risk and rewards prevent that from happening.
And so what is this third space that brings kind of knowledge of how things get done kind of in the private sector? What is the knowledge of that space that brings things from the arts world? I hate that term, you understand what saying? And then what is the space of kind of academics, big philanthropy, social, the way we fund social entrepreneurship, social innovation?
How do you bring those three things together to create a third space where art, science, and business are released from the things that hold things in circles and incrementalism in those other areas don’t have it perfected yet, but it’s an important thing for us to be working on to try to figure out how that does happen.
So bringing all three understandings of those spaces together into a third space that we have parity in those relationships so that one is not in service to the other. I’m increasingly bothered by how we always immediately assume that the arts are in service to telling the story of science rather than a reciprocal feedback loop. Because I get it, but I think, I think we’re missing some really important stuff there by not trying to think about those feedback loops differently.
Susan
Yes, and you know, you’re speaking our language with arts integration because that’s exactly we talk about this all the time. The difference between arts enhancement and arts integration is that integration one is not in service of the other that you have to have both in order for things to actually work if instead of arts enhancement where one is usually being served by the other.
Theo
That’s right, and that’s where you think about language. That means also being able to begin crafting new language, creative brain capital. what is that? Well, you know, we’ve talked about, it’s something I’ve never quite liked, but it’s what I’m gonna say, it’s human capital for a long time in the private sector. What if we got more precise with that? Creative brain, so you’re not actually asking wholesale replacement for people just to forget everything you know. You’re asking them to like, put a Venn diagram around on some things they know and just operate in that space. And, you know, like that’s a more realistic, I think, way to achieve some early wins over a shorter term together. We tend to start with like the really big hard stuff, right? And don’t recognize that we have to get a lot of little small wins to have that social capital to get to the bigger stuff.
Susan
You got it, you got it. Well, this has been just a fascinating conversation all the way around. Theo, thank you so much. If our listeners would like to get in touch, what’s the best way that they can stay connected with you?
Theo
Thank you, Susan. Yeah, there’s a couple of ways. I am LinkedIn. I’m on Instagram, but LinkedIn is for sure my go -to. And so there, and you could also get me at my own website, Theo Edmonds, and it’s edmonds with an O dot com, or at creativityamerica.com. Not creative America, creativityamerica.com.
Susan
We’ll put all of those in the show notes so that people can immediately go find you. Theo, thank you so much for this inspiring conversation and for the work that you’re doing for the world. We really appreciate it.
Theo
Thank you, Susan, and I come from a family of educators, so your audience is very, very near and dear to my heart.
Susan
Thank you.
