Hard on the heels of More Space I’m now waxing lyrical in another new book John Winsor’s Spark. The book’s subtitle is “Be more innovative through co-creation”. John’s interviewed innovative people from organisations like Patagonia Nike and Herman Miller and er… me, and each gets their own chapter. Mine focusses on using improv to co-create ideas.
This is the third book chapter I’ve produced, and it was by a country mile the easiest. John bascially interviewed me over the phone and then wrote up what I said. I did a quick edit and, bob’s your uncle, the chapter was done. John’s then added a simple bullet point summary of tools as well as a lost of additional reading resouces. He’s repeated this for 16 different authors.
So as well as making it easy to contribute, John has made it very easy to digest.
I bang on about facilitation a lot here, and I want to say that John hasn’t so much written this book as facilitated it. He has put the contributors in the spotlight and kept himself in the background. One of the great principles of improv is “make your partner look good” and John exemplifies that here.
PS It was good to see fellow blogger Jake McKee featured too, with a good, down-to-earth perspective on building a community, versus conventional marketing, in his work for Lego.
PPS John has a blog for Spark.