Quantum Creativity: Nine Principles for a Life of Possibility

Rating:
Summary: This book has many fascinating qualities.
Review: The following originally appeared in the June/July 1998 issue of BrandPackaging Magazine.

Review of Quantum Creativity, Nine Principles for a Life of Possibility Author: Pamela Meyer Publisher: Yezand Press, Chicago, 1997

If creativity is a key element in developing packaging with impact, then you have to like a book that includes the word "galumphing". However, let's not get to specifics as yet. That is because this book should be viewed, this reviewer believes, as a "helicoptering" tool. It allows one to hover over the popular subject of creativity and observe it from a new perspective. That is one of the book's fascinating qualities.

Pamela Meyer presents a broad scene of creativity, an infrastructure which allows one to see new opportunities. It is a book, therefore, which should be read before you read other creativity/innovation texts. That may be impossible, given the many books already available on the subject. So, maybe it should be read after all those others. Better yet, read it before and after. It's that good.

In her Introduction, Ms. Meyer states "This book is not intended to define a specific experience for the reader. That would be arrogant and disrespectful." That is the type of considerate empathy she has for her readers. Because of this, each chapter can offer something quite personal for each reader's own thoughts, introspection and "re-cognition". That is a fine achievement for a creativity book.

The book presents its holistic overview related, in part, to the author's improvisational theater experiences. Using these and surprisingly understandable quantum physics allusions, Ms. Meyer is able to move the reader away from purely mechanistic and linear thinking. Each of the nine principles - some more immediately accessible to this left brain reviewer than others - serve that purpose. Other readers, I am sure, will find their own insights in their own personally involved principle(s). That is, perhaps, another charm of the book: instant recognition of something quite specific to "lead you back to what you once spontaneously and intuitively knew."

Each principle has its own chapter with its own visually creative symbol/logo. As further aids toward the re-acquisition of the process, toward "re-cognition", each principle is clarified by showing its antagonistic Learned Blocks and how we may progress by Doing Things Differently. At least one principle particularly began to gnaw on this reviewer's many blocks: Embrace Chaos. I have seen elements of this principle presented in many ways by John Cleese, Roger von Oech, Carl Jung ("In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.") and others. Ms. Meyer's Chapter 7 parsimoniously affirms them all.

What is "galumphing"? Exploration just for the fun of it, I think. Galumph through this book then study and re-study the Nine Principles for a Life of Possibility. Whether you are a team member, a manager, a graphic designer, a copy writer, an editor, a printer - whatever -- you'll be rewarded with a whack to the seat of your psyche.

The reviewer is the principal at JFT Studios, a member of the BrandPackaging magazine Advisory Board and an instructor at DePaul University's School for New Learning where he teaches Management for Creativity and Innovation.