Leaders' Playground

9: Four ways to make conferences worth the effort with the science of creativity

• Irene Salter, PhD • Season 1 • Episode 9

Share episode

Why do we endure the hassle of conferences and retreats with time away from family, expensive travel, noisy venues, and exhausting days? The allure of online professional development is strong. Yet, something magical happens at the best events that leave us feeling rejuvenated and inspired. Why?

In this episode, we’ll learn what makes some conferences and retreats so powerfully invigorating. After attending a playful and creative DnD convention, I began to see a pattern. The best events reignite our creativity. We explore three unique professional gatherings I experienced this year, dive into the four stages of creativity, and learn how to harness this power to make our future conferences and everyday lives more creative and fulfilling.

Join us to discover the top 4 ways to transform your next conference into a creativity-fueled adventure!

Resources:


For complete show notes, transcript, and free downloadable resources go to: https://www.irenesalter.com/podcast

Speaker 1:

Hi and welcome to the Leader's Playground. Today's episode connects conferences and retreats with creativity. How does creativity happen in the brain? Why are some conferences and retreats so much better than others, and how can those best ones reignite creativity and play in your workplace? I'm going to be taking you to a writing conference, a school leadership conference, a D&D convention and a retreat in the woods. Are you ready? Here we go, hi. Thank you for listening to the Leader's Playground, the podcast for leaders who wish their work to feel more like play.

Speaker 1:

Leadership can be lonely, overwhelming and just plain crazy-making. We are here to rekindle your spark. I'm Irene Salter, your host and a PhD neuroscientist and science educator with a passion for helping people thrive, not just survive. Please click that follow button so you don't miss a single episode. Sometimes I wonder why it is. I even bother going to retreats and conferences. There's all that time away from family. It's super expensive, noisy, it's exhausting to be on for days, and especially for those of us who are introverts, there's sometimes really boring sessions that are a total waste of time. But there you are, stuck in the the front row and you can't leave and you can't fall asleep. So you sit there with toothpicks propping up your eyes. There's the crappy, expensive hotel food, all of those impersonal hotel rooms. I mean, why don't we just do it all on Zoom or just do an online training Seems so much simpler. But then, every once in a while, there is that retreat or conference that just lights you up. You come back jazzed and rejuvenated, or your eyes are just opened to this entire world that you never even knew existed.

Speaker 1:

I remember the very first time I went to the Society for Neuroscience conference, which is 25,000 neuroscientists showing up for a conference. I was utterly blown away as a grad student by the depth and breadth of the kinds of research that was being done in this world. There are other times, like going to my women's leadership retreat, where I am just so in awe of the people that I am there with and so excited about what we've created over a weekend together. Why, why, what's the difference, and is there any way we can exert some control over that experience to make conferences and retreats even better? Well, I was thinking about this question after having gone to a D&D conference, a D&D con that was called DundraCon. It was pure fun and it made me wonder about the other conferences and retreats I've attended and I think that, after really pondering it, the answer of what makes a conference amazing is that the best conferences spark creativity. So here's what we're going to do in this episode. We will begin by introducing three very different professional conferences and retreat experiences that I've been to in the last year. We're also going to look at that D&D conference and figure out what in the world that was all about. We're going to examine the four different stages of creativity and finally we'll loop back again to those professional conferences and examine how can we boost creativity and fun in any conference that you attend and maybe even create some creativity and fun in your everyday right now with our strategy of the week.

Speaker 1:

So let's begin with the Charter School Development Center's Leadership Update. That conference took place this past year in Anaheim, California. It's a place where California charter leaders from across the state come together for governance, accountability and leadership support. For me, it's a professional conference that I've been going to for over a decade. Lately I've been going to as a presenter and I shared three different conferences there. One day, at the leadership update, there was the legislative update. That's the time where the head of the Charter School Development Center, eric Premack, goes through the entirety of the recent legislative session and discusses all of the different things that have been happening at that legislative level related to charter schools in our state. There was a panel session on mental health and wellness for school personnel. I delivered my own presentation on imposter syndrome. That day was a chance to reconnect with other principals, superintendents, schools that I've worked with, coaches and consultants from across the state. It was a very classic conference and it had that classic conference feel, that buzz of being inside of this huge hall, hallways with different rooms leading off where you could attend workshop sessions, meeting all of the people that you knew in the hallways and talking about the sessions that you had for the day. It was a lovely experience.

Speaker 1:

This year I also went to the Book Passage Tribal Writers and Photographers Conference. It had a very different feel, almost like a family reunion rather than a conference. It was small, only 200 to 300 people, and we met in a bookstore. It was definitely a professional conference, with me as attendee learning the craft of travel writing. In a typical day there, we would begin our day with a morning workshop, one in which we had been meeting together for a course of nine hours over the weekend, so three hours that morning were spent with this tiny group of people really diving into our writing craft. Afternoons were full of panels, different experiences, one on social media, another on what's the meaning of travel and then in the evenings, we all sit down together in the patio, faculty and attendees alike, and we talk. We talk about travel, we talk about writing, we talk about photography, we talk about books. It's a beautiful family reunion feel because it's so intimate and small reunion feel because it's so intimate and small.

Speaker 1:

Another experience was the Women's Leadership Retreat that I do with Tutti Tagerli every year. Last year we brought 12 women to Mendocino. It was a professional conference or retreat rather, and it was very different. It had this feeling not of a conference, not of a family reunion, but of the support group of people who intimately come together to really look at what is going on in their professional lives. We have workshop sessions on strength and visioning, we go sea kayaking, we have guided meditations and then we circle around in the evenings, to everyone given a chance to bring forward a struggle or a challenge that they are working on and receive the collective wisdom of the group. Beautiful, beautiful time and, as I said, one of my favorite experiences of the year.

Speaker 1:

And finally, there is a very personal conference called DunderCon. It was four continuous days of playing role-playing games and board games in a hotel full of uber geeks. At that conference I went there purely as a participant, with my friends, to play. I had no thoughts necessarily of the impact on my professional life. You would go there and you would have a day full of scheduled games We'd go into. One of the games that I played was a whole bunch of TIE fighters flying through a Super Mario Kart racetrack. A whole bunch of TIE fighters flying through a Super Mario Kart racetrack. I placed fourth behind some rebel scum flying X-Wings and Y-Wings.

Speaker 1:

We also had lots of D&D, just open-ended, unstructured freedom to act and choose within this imaginary world. So much autonomy, so much imagination world, so much autonomy, so much imagination. It was a place where the brain tried on new things and we got to do so many fun games and spend time with friends. It was wonderful. That experience lit me up. Being at that DunderCon lit me up. It was so playful, so creative, so fun and that's where I recognized the connection between creativity and conferences, that the best conferences lit me up in the same way that DundraCon did by reigniting my creativity, and that was why sometimes those conferences have so much insight and so many connections are made, both interpersonally and within oneself.

Speaker 1:

It really helps to understand what creativity is in the brain, and the best person and one of the first people to really explore what that is was an English psychologist and economist by the name of Graham Wallace. Way back in 1926, he was exploring what creativity is and he mapped out four stages of the creative process. Those four stages are preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. So let me walk you through those four stages and I'm going to use the example of Isaac Newton and his fabled apple tree aha moment to introduce those four stages. A lot of people think that Isaac Newton's discovery of gravity was when he got hit on the head by a falling apple and imagined that same force of gravity working on the moons and planets. But that creative moment, that moment of illumination, was just one out of the four steps that it took for Isaac Newton to develop that idea.

Speaker 1:

The very first stage of the creative process is preparation, which is all about collecting memories and organizing them into file drawers. You put them in first one way, then another, you define the problem, you read more. You grab a new file folder and add it to your drawers. It's about adding memories to your own mental file cabinet. For months, newton had been contemplating the orbit of the moon and planets while he was studying at Cambridge. He attended lectures, he studied it from books, he was talking to his colleagues, he was really taken with the work of philosophers and scientists like Descartes and Galileo, and those filing cabinets of his mind started to fill no-transcript. The executive attention network is a web of different brain areas that are devoted to helping people focus on, plan out, problem solve and execute goal-directed behaviors. It's the network that we use in a typical day at school or work. It's that path of routine learning and productivity. That executive attention network will fill with all of those memories that you need, and it uses a pretty well-ordered, highly optimized system for filing away memories. That's the preparation stage, after which comes incubation.

Speaker 1:

In 1665, the plague shuttered Cambridge and Newton and all of his colleagues and all of the students had to retreat home. Newton went to his hometown of Lincolnshire, he was removed from his normal context, and it was in that time that he entered an unusually creative phase the seeds of Newton's ideas, not just about gravity, but also calculus, optics and motion. They all incubated in his brain. While he was surrounded by nature in the gardens, newton's mind was given permission to wander and it was in that phase when the apple fell in the garden. Now in his head in Lincolnshire there was a different brain network that would flip on. It was called the default mode network. You have it in your brain and as do I. It's an entirely different set of interconnected brain areas. It's active when the mind is resting, wandering, untethered, remembering. It's what happens when you're imaginative or self-reflective and when you're task-free.

Speaker 1:

In contrast to that ordered routine and precision of that executive attention network, the default mode network is carefree. It looks through the memory banks like a child, full of curiosity and whimsy. It might flip from one file drawer on this side all the way to another. It explores things in unexpected and unknown and wild corners. It free associates. And that's why when you have Isaac Newton going from a place where it was dominated by the executive attention network, going to Lingen Shire where his default mode network came on, that's when the illumination, the insight, happens that brings us towards the third stage of that creative process, and from art to math, to science.

Speaker 1:

When neuroscientists scan the brain at that moment of creative insight, you find that there's almost always default mode network activation right before, and then it stays on while the executive attention network comes back online. Normally those two systems, the default mode and the executive attention mode, are mutually exclusive. One is off while the other is on and they flip-flop. But it appears that insight strikes in those rare moments when both default mode and executive attention mode are on at the same time and that's why the super annoying missing jigsaw puzzle piece appears suddenly after you've wandered away for a while. It's also why sometimes it's those middle-of-the-night musings that race you to grab a pencil and write down your brilliant idea. It's why sometimes the smartest insights happen in the shower, happen in the shower. It's because your brain gets into that relaxed, free, associative, reflective, imaginative state, that default mode network activation, and when that happens, all of those orderly memories that you've created with the executive attention network, that all of those can be put together and that's that moment of illumination.

Speaker 1:

The final stage of the process is called verification. That's where you check, compare and confirm. You test the validity of the idea and you condense and reduce that idea to a more precise firm. Newton's apple tree moment happened in 1666, but his masterpiece, the Principia, was not published until 1687, over 20 years later. In all of that time in between, he was doing the math, designing the models, he was creating spreadsheets, running the ideas with others. He even had to create the mathematical system of calculus in order to fully explain those laws of motions and put it together with the orbits and the gravitational forces. With the orbits and the gravitational forces, that verification stage takes a long time and it, too, is filled with little moments of illumination along the way. So when we look at that creative process, we have those four stages preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. What does this have to do with conferences? Well, conferences and retreats engage each one of those four stages of creativity. Think about stage one preparation. People have two basic goals when they attend a conference or retreat they want to encounter new ideas and they want to connect in person with people that you wouldn't have met up with in person otherwise. That preparation phase is one of the hallmarks of what conferences and retreats are about. So think about it this way If you've ever felt really stuck on a problem, usually what happens is that in your own brain, you go round and round and round and round with the same old ideas and same old data rattling around in your head like a hamster going round and round and round on a running wheel.

Speaker 1:

You never get anywhere. I call that the stuck cycle, where you have a question or a problem that takes you to the same old ideas, to the same old data, and then you come back to that same old question and problem with no progress made. Round and round and round and round. That contrasts with an inquiry cycle, which is especially prevalent at conferences and retreats. You have a question or a problem there. That's where you can talk to people. You can have new ideas, new experiments, new data to be added to the churn and that will lead to the question being answered, the problem being solved and maybe new questions and problems arising as a result. All of which just because you talked to people and you gathered in those new ideas. That's that preparation phase. Networking at the Charter School Development Centers Conference was exactly that for me. It was that chance to encounter new ideas about mental health or about what's happening at the legislature, and it was that chance to reconnect in person with people that I had been seeing once a year for over 10 years.

Speaker 1:

Now let's go to stage two, that incubation phase. This incubation is where retreats really shine. That's when you don't need to get new ideas, but when you need to digest them, when you need to let those ideas incubate. Incubation activates that default mode network In our day-to-day workplaces. The way that sometimes we structure things, sometimes it can be very hard to get a long stretch of default mode network activation, and so retreats, by getting you out of your everyday, can open up the space to look at things differently.

Speaker 1:

There were two times in my life where that happened. One of those times was way back when, in the year 2003, I was trying to decide about whether I was going to continue on on the path that I had been planning, which was heading to Cambridge, england, for a postdoctoral fellowship. But when we were contemplating that choice, my boyfriend who is now my husband he didn't get into the London School of Business. He was deferred. So we decided to defer for a year and so I put off my Cambridge postdoc and instead we traveled. And it was in that travel, in getting out of my everyday reality, that I could look back on my career trajectory very differently. I came to the realization on that year that I loved the teaching more than I loved the research. I loved helping people grow more than I loved the day-to-day of the science, and so I made a switch. That trip was a retreat for my brain, and retreats that we choose intentionally for our professional development create the opportunity to do exactly that to let you incubate and digest, to let you take that 30,000 foot view on your life and see it differently.

Speaker 1:

The third stage of creativity is illumination. It's the ability to activate the default mode and the executive attention mode at the same time default mode and the executive attention mode at the same time. When we can do that, when we can alternate regularly between executive attention mode and default mode, that's when our brains are at their peak. And this is why teachers structure the school day with regular doses of recess and open play in between, focused learning. Children really do learn best with a 50-minute block of learning interrupted by 10 to 15 minutes of recess and break. But it is also so important for adults. This is why places like Google, apple and Facebook have grown up playgrounds with hammocks and gardens, tree houses and foosball. It's to give their employees that default mode network activation. Jpl encourages all of their engineers to spend 20% of their time on a play passion project. Again, it's to activate that default mode network, so to intersperse that executive attention focus with default mode activation. This is also why TAME management expert Tony Schwartz encourages pulsing, which he says is alternating 90 minutes of intense focus with 30 minutes of rest, of a completely different brain activation. Every adult really does need those regular doses of uncompromised, delighted play and even when I was at DundraCon I continued to write every single day. Even when I was at DundraCon I continued to write every single day and I found restructure that work that I was doing while I was in that default mode network activation.

Speaker 1:

So let's take a pause. Here's a way to activate both your default and executive attention mode at the same time, even when you're not at a conference or on a retreat or at DundraCon. There's a lot of research that suggests images and models can often capture things far better than words and because they engage different areas of the brain than when we work with words, it actually can activate subconscious level memories and things that you've stored away in preparation, allowing them to incubate and make connections in different ways. What you'll need is some blank paper, pencil, colored pencils and crayons or markers when you can gather those materials together and have just a 15-minute stretch of time.

Speaker 1:

I want you to think about a problem or a challenge you're stuck on. So you bring that problem or challenge to mind. Then you take a pencil and in one continuous line, without lifting your pencil from the paper, you draw a scribble that somehow represents that problem or challenge to you. It could be a really curvy, loopy line, it could be jagged, it could be tight and small and intense scribble right in the center of the page. It could be a border of some kind with a blank empty space in the middle. A border of some kind with a blank empty space in the middle. What you're trying to do is, with one continuous stroke, capture that problem or challenge in an abstract way. Perfect.

Speaker 1:

Now put the pencil down and now you'll bring out all of those colored pencils or markers and crayons. What you'll do is you'll take that pencil line and create an art from it. Perhaps you're going to add lines, perhaps you'll color in the loops or the jags. Maybe you'll add a border if there wasn't one. Maybe you'll add something tight in the middle if there wasn't one.

Speaker 1:

There you aren't forcing a solution. You're not even trying to necessarily solve the problem. You're not forcing a solution. You're not even trying to necessarily solve the problem. You're simply decorating the problem line in whatever way looks and feels good. All you're doing is you're just seeing what emerges naturally. Now do remember, this is not an art class. You aren't being graded or judged. There's no need to show this artwork to anyone. It's about communicating with a deeper part of yourself. You're taking all of those colors in order to decorate around that problem and perhaps, when you're all done, you can step back and look and see if there's anything now you can notice about your problem that you didn't notice before.

Speaker 1:

Those initial ideas, when you're not trying to find a solution, but simply drawing and decorating around the problem, can sometimes allow images, solutions or ideas to emerge. If you ever become blocked or have trouble drawing, just close your eyes for a little bit and begin again. Or even you can try drawing with your non-dominant hand and seeing what happens All right back to the show. So that final stage of creativity is verification. On the surface, it seems conferences might be best for those earlier stages, but you can also use conferences in this later stage too. There's science poster sessions. I remember vividly from that Society for Neuroscience conference where I would bring my nascent, very rough ideas about my research and I would get the reflection of all of the people who came by my poster. They could look at the research, point out different ways to improve it, and then I would go back to the lab and do some more work on it. At book passages at that travel writers conference I had the opportunity to take my book ideas and talk them out with a much larger network of far more experienced writers. I could get input on what works and what doesn't, and then I would use those post-conference interactions and friends to continue that process and go deeper. So I would love to leave you with a couple tips to get the most out of the next conference or retreat that you attend.

Speaker 1:

Tip number one choose a conference or retreat wisely. Think carefully about what it is that you need for your growth. Do you need preparation? If so, go to a conference with lots of content. Do you need incubation? Perhaps you should choose retreat with an emphasis on integration, recentering or getting away for that opportunity to have some deep reflection. Do you need illumination? Then you want something that stimulates both that executive attention mode and the default mode network, alternating between them. And finally, if you need verification, go to a conference where there's trusted peers with whom you can safely share your nascent ideas and then you can check and compare and confirm them.

Speaker 1:

That said, no matter what kind of conference or retreat you attend, here's tip number two Go with a question in mind. Use the conference or retreat like a quest. If you can solve one problem or breakthrough at that retreat, what would it be? Don't try to do it all, just choose one quest and look for insight on that one. Tip number three take regular incubation breaks. Even if you're there for that preparation, intentionally cycle from executive attention mode to default mode. I want you to let those new ideas that you gather digest. And then, final tip number four see what you can do to maximize that social connection time, especially with people that aren't from your hometown. That informal coffee, that walk outside, that casual dinner. Even if it means attending fewer sessions. It's an opportunity to talk through and create that moment of creativity that you might not be able to get at home. So there you are the connection between conferences and retreats and creativity and creativity.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for joining me at the Leaders Playground yet again. I'm hoping that this podcast really gives you that chance to make your work feel more like play. I'd love to thank Tyler Lockamy, my sound producer and designer and engineer. I'd love to thank Robin Canfield for all of the website backend and thank Tessa Borquez for being the most amazing chief operating officer ever. In the show notes you're going to find notes to Tony Schwartz and all of the other conferences that I mentioned, as well as some resources on creativity, like Anna Abrams amazing book, as well as Graham Wallace's original stuff.

Speaker 1:

I usually conclude with an invitation to share this podcast with a friend, but instead I'd like to give a personal invitation. If you are a woman who is in the middle of your career and is looking for that moment of incubation, I would love to invite you to my Women's Leadership Retreat in Mendocino. We go glamping there's leadership development, two executive coaches and tons and tons and tons of time for you to incubate. We do this every year. So if you've missed the deadline for this year, don't worry, join the wait list for next year. So if you've missed the deadline for this year, don't worry, join the waitlist for next year.

Speaker 1:

You can learn more at irenesaltercom slash leadership dash retreat and join me next time at the Leaders Playground for an episode all about fixing time confetti. What's time confetti? It's when your to-do list is overflowing and there's so many demands, distractions, fires and interruptions that your day gets shredded into teeny, tiny scraps of time. You end the day exhausted, not even really knowing what you did all day. I'm going to work on and get you some solutions. So click that follow button on Spotify, apple, amazon or wherever you get your podcasts. So don't miss the next episode. See you soon.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Irene Salter, PhD

Host