Have you been CPSIed lately?
By: Bree Gillespie
What happens when you combine 300 creative minded individuals and the perfect location? An annual conference called The Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI, pronounced sip-see). CPSI is a week long summer conference sponsored by The Creative Education Foundation (CEF), which is a non-profit membership organization of leaders in the field of creativity theory and practice.
The conference consists of a series of programs to learn and apply a creative problem solving model called “CPS” developed by Alex Osborn and Sid Parnes in the early 50’s. This divergent and convergent thinking model has been practiced by professionals in nearly every industry and is still a leading process for creatively solving problems today.
Celebrating it’s 53rd year, the conference was held at the Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, GA and was appropriately termed “The Nature of Innovation”. The agenda provided everything from pre-conference workshops and one-day CPS classes to week-long training courses about the CPS process. One Innovation Focus employee, Margaret Hiltz, who was a CPSI first-timer, commented “The conference was a unique opportunity to meet others and see how they’re applying creativity techniques in both their personal and professional works.”
This three-stage, six-step process has been taught to professionals all over the world and is currently being used in many different situations. The stages of Exploring the Process, Generating Ideas and Preparing for Action help an individual find a “problem worth solving”, learn opportunities to solve the problem and build a plan to make the output actionable. Individuals at the conference can choose to dive deeper into understanding the specific stages and steps of the process, or they can participate in a series of smaller workshops that share how the process can be applied to different topics and categories.
As Sid Parnes writes in the manual called Springboard , “Thousands of people all over the world have been trained in using the CPS process. These people have come from business, universities, government and education. Others have come for personal growth…As you experience and practice the six-step process, you will find that it becomes a comfortable way of extending your creative abilities to all of your activities. It helps you assume a creative stance. You will not only want to use CPS in your professional life, but in your personal life as well.”
For more information on the Creative Education Foundation or the CPSI conference please visit www.creativeeducationfoundation.org or contact Bree Gillespie at bgillespie@innovationfocus.com.
