Tomorrow during the final hour of the last session of the annual conference of the Michigan Society of Association Executives, I will interview the closing speaker, David Kord Murray, author of the book Borrowing Brilliance.  MSAE has featured the ideas of this book in its magazine IMPACT for the past year.

It’s Kord’s belief that “the creative journey is a matter of constructing an idea by taking it apart, reorganizing it, adding and subtracting things, and then putting it back together.”  He recommends a series of four meetings for “brilliantly borrowed brainstorming:”

1. A problem-definition meeting.  Kord writes that many mistakes are the result of “choosing the wrong problem to solve . . . perceiving the problem in isolation and so not understanding its scope.”
2. A borrowing ideas meeting.  Kord writes:  “There are no truly original thoughts . . . In order to create, first you have to copy.”  He says creativity is “improvement rather than originality.”
3. A new ideas meeting.  Kord writes:  “It’s with a metaphor that two ideas combine and fuse together to form a new one.”
4. An evaluation meeting.  Kord writes:  “Creative thinkers are skeptics.”  Steve Jobs is “able to build great new products by seeing the problems with the current ones.”

The book, and my preparation to interview the author in front of a live audience, have caused me to reflect on our problem-solving skills in interscholastic athletics.  While we work with admirable efficiency – that is, take action promptly and purposefully – the truth is we often are not effective.  We salve more than solve difficult situations.  We patch rather than permanently fix complex problems.  We govern well, but too often group-think poorly.  We regulate well, but too often research badly.

We could use at least a little more “brilliantly borrowed brainstorming.”