Being a volunteer at the event, I didn’t get to participate in all the conference’s happenings but the Torontoist provides a good play-by-play here. I did make a point, however, to see the presentations by the creative world’s equivalent to All Stars -Sir Ken Robinson, Richard Florida and Charles Landry. Sir Ken’s speech was, in particular, thought provoking as he described the solution to our “climate crisis of the mind” by suggesting that we can plan for creativity.

I first found this comment counter-intuitive but his methodical explanation of how we accomplish this was worthy of the subsequent standing ovation. Simply defining creativity as new ideas that have value, Sir Ken implored the audience to consider why we associate intelligence with rational thinking while we associate creativity with irrational thinking since new valuable ideas are theoretically intelligent. His point, at the end of the day, was that we should not only embrace creativity but we must foster its growth in all of our systems. No system is more important than our educational one where we explained that “in school it’s called cheating, outside it’s called collaborating” to simply illustrate the divergent modes of thought in and out of our school systems.

The championing of collaboration ran deep through the conference to the point that by the time Landry spoke on morning of Day 2, he joked that he would not say the word in fear of overuse. But his presentation ran along this same current and he used example from cities where avoidance of collaboration produced disastrous results (in fact, Landry seemed to have a real disdain for public leadership in general). The goal, according to Landry was that we must go forward by being strategically principled but tactically flexible which parallels Sir Ken’s main point that we must start planning for creativity. Florida, on the other hand, left us with a different conclusion.

Florida’s takeaway point was that creativity’s biggest struggle now will be with control which was somewhat an ironic contrast to Landry and Robinson’s idea of bringing an element of control to the creative. He also talked at length about his new book, The Great Reset, which seemed to be a divergence from his previous works focusing on the creative city and the creative class in suggesting that we are all creative and can be a part of a ‘reset’ movement. I don’t disagree with the recession being a rare opportunity to start things anew but it was interesting to hear him argue for universal creativity when he’s already devoted so much time to defining a specific class where it most prevalently exists. Although Florida made a point to mention that he thought all people could be creative in Rise of the Creative Class, I wonder if his new book represents a maturity in his thinking or even an accommodation to his critics who accused him of class-based arrogance for his championing of the Creative Class.

The difference now, in the words of Florida and the rest, is how we bring creativity outside the creative class.