Imagination is a cognitive process used in mental functioning to help us think about possibilities. It helps us consider problems from new perspectives.
Read MoreProfiles in Craft: Hannah Gadsby
Creativity (or, as Maslow says, “creativeness”) is a facet of self-actualization. It is not a process that results in something novel and useful. In contrast, Maslow observed that there is a correlation (in his experience) between psychological health and ordinary creativity.
Read MoreProfiles in Craft: Nellie Bly
Curiosity comes from being present, trusting, and trustworthy. Rather than impeding it, curiosity facilitates progress.
Read MoreProfiles in Craft: Stacey Abrams
Fear disguised as practicality is what we do when what we really want seems impossibly out of reach—so we never dare to ask the universe for it.
Read MoreProfiles in Craft: Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Self-regulation—while integral to our success—is not a part of our educational system. Nobody teaches us how to manage ourselves, how to stay calm under pressure while we are expected to perform with mastery. We learn this skill intuitively, through trial and error.
Read MoreProfile in Craft: Nel Wieman 1st Indigenous Female Psychiatrist in Canada
To tackle the wicked problems of our present and future, we need to embrace a strange, counter-intuitive irony: as organizations across all sectors continue to create and adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, employees need to stay relevant by increasing their subjective intelligence. My research on master craftsmen and how they gain mastery helps connect the dots on this new dilemma, and might be the place to seek initial solutions.
When it comes to open ended problem solving and learning to improvise with what we are given; master craftsmen have something to teach us. Having to work with a material where they cannot be sure what will happen is something they are used to. Combined with the more structured training and education offered to us today, improvisational thinking in the face of uncertainty is useful to leaders in any sector. Even in the face of countless books and articles about how important it is, most traditional business school programs and organizational training fail to address sophisticated thinking about ambiguous problems.
Listen to Dr. Cornelia Wieman, Canada's first Indigenous psychiatrist, and current Senior Medical Officer, Mental Health & Wellnessas at FNHA as she speaks about Indigenous perspectives in psychiatry and her own personal story. - via aboriginalhealthVCH
Nel Wieman is one of the survivors of the '60's Scoop'. She was taken from her biological parents at the age of three and adopted by a non-Indigenous family in Ontario. Nel Wieman went on to become the first Indigenous female psychiatrist in Canada.
Nel works with people in intensely distressing periods of their lives. She uses her training, but also who she is as a person to help and support her clients. When she got to medical school she learned she was the first female aboriginal psychiatrist in Canada.
She works at the Center for Addiction and Mental Heath and feels that in order to make an impact “you need to give something of yourself to the interaction.” Her patients are depressed and suicidal and have been in the emergency room for some type of crisis. She works intensely with people over a short period of time and finds her rewards in the gains they are able to make in that time frame.
Nel also teaches at McMasters University where she recruits students into the health sciences professions and helps nurture them through their education. She appreciates hearing people’s stories as it reinforces her culture’s oral tradition.
As she became more aware of indigenous health issues, she became more aware that mental health was a tremendous need. She hoped she could make an impact. Now she meets children in indigenous communities across the country and serves as a model of someone, like themselves, who has walked the path before them. She shows the meaning and importance of creating a path of support and guidance for others.
Christine Haskell’s research focuses on individuals dedicated to the craft of their professions, in pursuit of excellence, sustainability and integrity. Craftsmen and women use those principles to raise standards toward a better world. Her current work is featured in Look To Craftsmen Project. featuring the Profiles in Craft Series. You’ll find a trove of profiles of intriguing artisans and innovators spanning a wide variety of professions across the globe that illustrate her research with links to the full articles. Christine’s book The Future of Work Will Require Craftsmanship is due in late 2019. To understand more about Christine’s work, check out Our Current Problem.
Profiles in Craft: David Easterly
To tackle the wicked problems of our present and future, we need to embrace a strange, counter-intuitive irony: as organizations across all sectors continue to create and adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, employees need to stay relevant by increasing their subjective intelligence. My research on master craftsmen and how they gain mastery helps connect the dots on this new dilemma, and might be the place to seek initial solutions.
When it comes to open ended problem solving and learning to improvise with what we are given; master craftsmen have something to teach us. Having to work with a material where they cannot be sure what will happen is something they are used to. Combined with the more structured training and education offered to us today, improvisational thinking in the face of uncertainty is useful to leaders in any sector. Even in the face of countless books and articles about how important it is, most traditional business school programs and organizational training fail to address sophisticated thinking about ambiguous problems.
Craftsmanship refers to something made with the highest quality. It requires a distinct mindset and approach. Values like durability, integrity, and calling are often associated with craftsmanship.
Awestruck at the sight of a Grinling Gibbons carving in a London church, David Esterly chose to dedicate his life to woodcarving—its physical rhythms, intricate beauty, and intellectual demands. Forty years later, he is the foremost practitioner of Gibbons’s forgotten technique, which revolutionized ornamental sculpture in the late 1600s with its spectacular cascades of flowers, fruits, and foliage.
After a disastrous fire at Henry VIII’s Hampton Court Palace, Esterly was asked to replace the Gibbons masterpiece destroyed by the flames. It turned out to be the most challenging year in Esterly’s life, forcing him to question his abilities and delve deeply into what it means to make a thing well. Written with a philosopher’s intellect and a poet’s grace, The Lost Carving explores the connection between creativity and physical work and illuminates the passionate pursuit of a vocation that unites head and hand and heart.
Esterly kept a daily journal during his year carving the restoration, a diary that became the springboard for The Lost Carving two decades later. The book narrates his evolution as a woodcarver and describes how the project crucially shaped his own artistic development.Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer Rita Giordano noted that even a reader who cared nothing for woodcarving could “still be absolutely in thrall to the lushness of Esterly’s language, his passion for creation, his reverence for the physical act of work. The Lost Carving is a study in the marvel—both the pain and the joys—of doing a thing well.”
PhotoCredit: Harvard Magazine
[From Harvard Magazine] Then as now, Esterly was and is internationally regarded as the most accomplished practitioner of the “subtractive art” of limewood carving since Gibbons. Indeed, Esterly is something of an anachronism: he has devoted most of his adult life (“I work seven days a week, after dinner, all the time”) to chiseling soft, malleable limewood, a particularly receptive medium for these delicate renderings. Many of his pieces take a year or even two to complete: such carvings are a painstaking art that calls on skills cultivated over decades. Thus Esterly has created a magnificent, if small, oeuvre: his 38-year career has produced only a few dozen carvings, almost all in private collections.
They are not hidden from the public, though. This January, Esterly assembled 15 of his most recent works for an 11-day show at the W.R. Brady and Company gallery in Manhattan. Soon thereafter, the collection went on display for six weeks in an exhibit, The Art of Subtraction, at the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, an elegant museum in Utica designed by Philip Johnson ’27, B.Arch. ’43. Borrowing the carvings from their owners, transporting the fragile works, and putting them on display was “an arduous undertaking,” Esterly reports. “It will probably never happen again.” Photographs, however, are viewable on his website (davidesterly.com).
Of his improvement as an artist over the years, he says, “I never had a sense of getting better, but my earlier work gets worse and worse.” Carving, for him, is “a profession for high-functioning obsessive-compulsives.” He explains that “the first 90 percent you can do with 50 percent of the effort. The last 10 percent may take another 50 percent of effort. But that last 50 percent is what changes it into something good.”
Christine Haskell’s research focuses on individuals dedicated to the craft of their professions, in pursuit of excellence, sustainability and integrity. Craftsmen and women use those principles to raise standards toward a better world. Her current work is featured in Look To Craftsmen Project. featuring the Profiles in Craft Series. You’ll find a trove of profiles of intriguing artisans and innovators spanning a wide variety of professions across the globe that illustrate her research with links to the full articles. Christine’s book The Future of Work Will Require Craftsmanship is due in late 2019. To understand more about Christine’s work, check out Our Current Problem.
Profile in Craft: Kelly Sakaki moving from academia to industry
To tackle the wicked problems of our present and future, we need to embrace a strange, counter-intuitive irony: as organizations across all sectors continue to create and adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, employees need to stay relevant by increasing their subjective intelligence. My research on master craftsmen and how they gain mastery helps connect the dots on this new dilemma, and might be the place to seek initial solutions.
When it comes to open ended problem solving and learning to improvise with what we are given; master craftsmen have something to teach us. Having to work with a material where they cannot be sure what will happen is something they are used to. Combined with the more structured training and education offered to us today, improvisational thinking in the face of uncertainty is useful to leaders in any sector. Even in the face of countless books and articles about how important it is, most traditional business school programs and organizational training fail to address sophisticated thinking about ambiguous problems.
Image credit: Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health.
[from scientifica.uk.com] Always taking things apart and not always able to get them back together again, Kelly Sakaki never lacked confidence to try.
Now Kelly is an engineer and post-doc fellow at the Center for Brain Health. His job focuses on developing instrumentation for scanning cells in brains. He works as a scientist, biologist, engineer—to name a few disciplines! Kelly is developing cures for autism.
There are a lot of toys to play with, but ultimately the goal is to help people. Kelly’s passion is designing instrumentation. It’s an art, and rarely works the first time. It’s a process of iteration. There’s no rule book to tell him what to do.
“I’ve found my passion. I know this is where I want to be.”
Christine Haskell’s research focuses on individuals dedicated to the craft of their professions, in pursuit of excellence, sustainability and integrity. Craftsmen and women use those principles to raise standards toward a better world. Her current work is featured in Look To Craftsmen Project. featuring the Profiles in Craft Series. You’ll find a trove of profiles of intriguing artisans and innovators spanning a wide variety of professions across the globe that illustrate her research with links to the full articles. Christine’s book The Future of Work Will Require Craftsmanship is due in late 2019. To understand more about Christine’s work, check out Our Current Problem.
Profile In Craft: Lesley Holm Art Therapist
To tackle the wicked problems of our present and future, we need to embrace a strange, counter-intuitive irony: as organizations across all sectors continue to create and adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, employees need to stay relevant by increasing their subjective intelligence. My research on master craftsmen and how they gain mastery helps connect the dots on this new dilemma, and might be the place to seek initial solutions.
When it comes to open ended problem solving and learning to improvise with what we are given; master craftsmen have something to teach us. Having to work with a material where they cannot be sure what will happen is something they are used to. Combined with the more structured training and education offered to us today, improvisational thinking in the face of uncertainty is useful to leaders in any sector. Even in the face of countless books and articles about how important it is, most traditional business school programs and organizational training fail to address sophisticated thinking about ambiguous problems.
Craftsmanship refers to something made with the highest quality. It requires a distinct mindset and approach. Values like durability, integrity, and calling are often associated with craftsmanship. But it’s more than that. Craftsmanship—to live a life and perform work with craft—is the struggle for individual agency in a world telling us to fit in. More than finding a calling, it is about understanding how to fully utilize ourselves and our unique ability to solve problems of every kind. My goal is build a bridge between the principles of craftsmanship in the traditional sense and apply it to our own lives and work.
Vancouver Psychology Centre http://www.vancouverpsychologycentre.ca
For Lesley Holm the dream was to work creatively with children in a way that would make a difference in their lives. Today she fulfills that dream in her career as an Art Therapist.
She didn’t initially know that art, creativity and working with children would look like in terms of a career. Most people don’t know what that is; she didn’t either. Art therapy is more than analyzing pictures. It is a blend of psychotherapy and art where art is incorporated as part of the regular counseling process. Art isn’t the end goal. Art is an illustration of a client’s process and what sense they make of their image.
When Lesley was young, her parents separated. She remembers that being a chaotic, confusing and scary time. Art was a comfort to her.
Now, Lesley specializes in helping children of divorce and helping them through that process. The drawings don’t have to be great, they just have to be expressive.
“There isn’t any better reward in life than a child who knows that I’m really there for them.”
Christine Haskell’s research focuses on individuals dedicated to the craft of their professions, in pursuit of excellence, sustainability and integrity. Craftsmen and women use those principles to raise standards toward a better world. Her current work is featured in Look To Craftsmen Project. featuring the Profiles in Craft Series. You’ll find a trove of profiles of intriguing artisans and innovators spanning a wide variety of professions across the globe that illustrate her research with links to the full articles. Christine’s book The Future of Work Will Require Craftsmanship is due in late 2019. To understand more about Christine’s work, check out Our Current Problem.
Profile in Craft: Graham With Master Brewer
To tackle the wicked problems of our present and future, we need to embrace a strange, counter-intuitive irony: as organizations across all sectors continue to create and adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, employees need to stay relevant by increasing their subjective intelligence. My research on master craftsmen and how they gain mastery helps connect the dots on this new dilemma, and might be the place to seek initial solutions.
When it comes to open ended problem solving and learning to improvise with what we are given; master craftsmen have something to teach us. Having to work with a material where they cannot be sure what will happen is something they are used to. Combined with the more structured training and education offered to us today, improvisational thinking in the face of uncertainty is useful to leaders in any sector. Even in the face of countless books and articles about how important it is, most traditional business school programs and organizational training fail to address sophisticated thinking about ambiguous problems.
Graham With talks to the Straight about what got him into brewing, Vancouver's craft beer scene, and more.
Graham had his career all figured out — he was going to be a Chemical Engineer. He just never thought those ‘chemicals’ would involve hops, barley and malt. Now, he’s head brewer at Parallel 49 Brewing Company, managing recipe development, brewing operations, quality control, and engineering projects.
A brewing company approached Graham while he was working at a wastewater facility. After a month of decision making, he made the switch. He appreciated the similarities. where you take dirty water, ferment out the impurities, and release it to the ocean. His engineering skills are very active in the brewery.
The brew-master works with a team that brews around the clock.Graham is ordering ingredients, coordinating production schedules, and designs recipes. His work is a mix of science and creativity and he feels lucky to have his hobby intersect with a career path that is related to engineering.
Christine Haskell’s research focuses on individuals dedicated to the craft of their professions, in pursuit of excellence, sustainability and integrity. Craftsmen and women use those principles to raise standards toward a better world. Her current work is featured in Look To Craftsmen Project. featuring the Profiles in Craft Series. You’ll find a trove of profiles of intriguing artisans and innovators spanning a wide variety of professions across the globe that illustrate her research with links to the full articles. Christine’s book The Future of Work Will Require Craftsmanship is due in late 2019. To understand more about Christine’s work, check out Our Current Problem.