Charles Leadbeater, a leading thinker on issues of creativity and innovation, visited Providence yesterday as part of the “Remixing the City” tour sponsored by CEOs for Cities. The workshop was held as part of the Providence & Beyond program at New Commons.

Currently, he is working on a book called We-think which explores models of “mass creativity”. The central proposition is that creativity is collaborative. “There are all sorts of different ways to totally misunderstand creativity,” he quipped yesterday. A popular version today is that there are certain special people, one might call them the “creative class”, who are creative. To get more creativity in a city, what you need then is more of these special people, and then ta da! creativity happens. Mr. Leadbeater does not subscribe to this point of view. Creativity is social, collaborative, and it begins in ignorance. And at the heart of the matter is conversation. That is where ideas and concepts come together, interact, and spark new ideas. I couldn’t agree more.

And he certainly seems to walk the walk. His new book has been posted in rough draft form on his website for the last several months, and he has invited people to read, comment, and interact with it. From his website:

In the four months between putting the draft online in October 2006 and sitting down to write the introductory chapter in February 2007 the eleven draft chapters were downloaded, on average, 35 times a day. I got 91 emails from people with detailed comments and suggestions; about 150 comments were posted on the site; it was mentioned in more than 250 blogs and a Google search for the book title and my name came back with 68,000 hits. As a rough estimate by the time the book is formally published in the summer of 2007 the rough draft will have been downloaded about 12,000 times. It is a much better book as a result of this process and I now cannot imagine writing a book in another way. It is now much clearer to me that the point of this is not just to write a book but to promote a conversation, make links and connections. I cannot say I have done this terribly well. There are all sorts of ways I would do it differently next time but you have to start somewhere.

The goal of the Remixing the City tour is to work with City leaders to help them enable and motivate people and entire neighborhoods to change, co-creating solutions to seemingly intractable problems like welfare, education, healthcare and economic development. He laid out a process that had 5 ingredients:

• Core
• Contribution- Who? What? How? Why?
• Connect
• Collaborate
• Create

The core needs to be attractive (worth contributing to), unfinished (there is potential for creative contributions), and plausible (not a hopeless case). In the case of Wikipedia (one of his case studies), the core was “newpedia” (sp?) a platform that was the predecessor of Wikipedia, it had potential, but it had some kinks that made it hard to use. When he asked our group “What is Providence’s core?” the answers were all over the place. People talked about the social networks that connect people, the spirit of independence and tolerance that dates back to Roger Williams, the landscape and architecture of the place, and the diversity of the people.

After his presentation, the folks at my table talked about the need to get more specific about what is was we were trying to engage people in- and why. The platform for engagement would emerge once it was clear what the question was. There are plenty of people with opinions to share, but how to you enable real contribution and creation instead of just talk. Lynne McCormack talked some about the planning process that the City has been spearheading, and the progress they’ve made in that direction. It sounds like they are on the right track.

This conversation will continue, and I am excited to be a part of it. Notes from the presentation and the cafe that followed will be in the Providence & Beyond Wiki, where we hope to continue to discuss the points he made and their potential applications. The other Providence & Beyond sessions have been recorded there too.