1. To what degree is The Change Artist based on a true story?
2. How are The Change Artist and your company The Artistry of Change related?
3. What made you choose a fiction format for this book?
4. What about those who like things spelled out in more logical, linear ways?
5. How did you come up with the personal challenges that the main character Fran had to overcome?
6. Do you teach people techniques to help them overcome these types of obstacles in your workshops?
7. Are people "reactive" towards the approach of looking for what's good in hard-to-deal-with situations?
8. You correlate unexpressed creativity with destructive behaviour in the book. How do you see that playing out today?
9. How is this approach to creativity different from what's out there now?
10. How does art help transform individuals or groups?
11. What is your background in creativity?

1. To what degree is The Change Artist based on a true story?
It is inspired by a series of true stories, some of which came from my life and some from other people's lives. The story was suggested to me after my father's death when I found a hidden box of photos, documents and some journals. This book is inspired by my father's life and my journey to reconnect to something in our lineage that felt disconnected. Yet, this book is a work of fiction, it is not a biography nor an autobiography. All the names have been changed, several people from real life have been collapsed into one character, actual incidents have been embellished and re-shaped, new characters have been added, events that may never have happened were added, and other events that actually happened were not included. In short, the names, characters, places and incidents are the products of my imagination. Yet, truth is stranger than fiction and I would never have imagined this book unless the essence of it actually happened.

2. How are The Change Artist and your company The Artistry of Change related?
As a speaker, trainer and coach on creativity, I wanted to find an artistic medium for sharing the principles of the Artistry of Change process www.artistryofchange.com. I felt that a mythic journey story would be an interesting entry point into the concept of how to turn your life into a work of art, and the pitfalls you can encounter along the way. I speak at conferences, leadership retreats, personal growth retreats etc on the habits of highly creative and resilient people, and it is a book people can take away to reinforce what they learned.

3. What made you choose a fiction format for this book?
The theme and core of the book is about being the source of your own creativity. I speak, consult and write about that, so I thought it would be more congruent to make the writing format as artistic as possible. I also have a strong background in myth, storytelling and Jungian archetypes. Those are the reasons I chose a novel format rather than a step-by-step, analytical, didactic text. I also noticed that people are far more interested in reading a page-turner type novel than they are in reading a textbook. Non-fiction often brings up memories of school, college and cramming for finals. Stories are associated more with leisure, enjoyment, being able to relax the left brain and surrendering to a more fulsome right brain process. I think that is why movie making is a multi-billion-dollar industry and why 80% of the book market is fiction rather than nonfiction. People love stories. For thousands of years it was the way we handed down education, customs and values before the written word. Do you ever notice that you feel like you have to go to a movie or read a good book? It's healing for people to lose themselves in a good story. There is evidence that retelling a story can help people reflect and extract lessons from those situations, which allows their "back brain" to release the trauma and thus integrate the learning. If you don't integrate the learning, you can tend to retraumatize yourself from the memory and repeat your mistakes.

4. What about those of us who like things spelled out in more logical, linear ways?
I think we all appreciate both: the logical, linear explanations as well as the concrete stories and examples. It helps us learn on both sides of the brain. To that end, my next book coming out is called The Change Artist Principles: The Top 7 Mistakes that Change Leaders Make. It will be a nonfiction workbook to help both individuals and groups leaders apply the principles.

5. How did you come up with the personal challenges that the main character Fran had to overcome?
They are from my life and all the people I have coached over the years. Although I was mostly coaching people in workplace settings, I often found that to solve an issue for good we often had to go back into family issues, even generational issues and cultural issues to address their concerns. Although Fran deals with some unusual circumstances, she has the kind of responses that many people can relate to. I want to make the main character a woman because so few journey stories have a female as the main protagonist. As women readers we have still found satisfaction from putting ourselves in the shoes of a male protagonists, so I'm happy to say that my male readers are also going on the journey with Fran. However, because the story is also told from the perspective of her father at times, many men have found powerful insights from sharing his journey and the moral dilemmas he faces.

6. Do you teach people techniques to help them overcome these types of obstacles in your workshops?
Yes. I asked people to bring forth an issue they had either with another person, with a life circumstance, or with the belief they have about themselves. Our problems and issues are like the unfertilized soil we start our journey with, that has the potential to contain a bed of roses. Then we begin the alchemical process of reshaping and reforming our beliefs and attitudes, or read composting and fertilizing the soil, and then planting the right seeds. Then people leave with specific habits to continue to fertilize, water and nurture the new way of being.

7. Are people "reactive" towards the approach of looking for what's good in hard-to-deal-with situations?
Sometimes. It depends when you bring up the question. If you ask it when someone is in a triggered state of mind, or what I call a "back brain" or "fight or flight" state, they tend to react. Yet asked at the right moment and you can trigger higher brain functioning that leads to more resourceful outcomes. One of the themes of the book is the notion that the seed of great things often comes from great challenge. As the old saying goes, "Necessity is the mother of invention". For example, one theory is that the Renaissance was seeded by the plague. During the plague about one third of Europeans died, leaving large inheritances to the survivors. The survivors gave that money to scientists, inventors and artists in hopes of, as a collective culture, reinventing themselves and preventing something like that from happening again. Many historians believe this is what fuelled the Renaissance, which was a huge cultural shift in consciousness.

The characters in the book ask the question, "What's good about... ?" when faced with a challenge. I teach that in my workshops and people use it frequently to deal with small problems as well as big. If it can be done at an individual as well as an organizational level, my theory is that we can do that at a global level. For example, can we ask ourselves "What's good about something as intensely challenging as the Holocaust?" That can be a controversial statement. Yet being able to extract the lessons can help release the trauma, because as a culture we have in many ways been re-traumatizing ourselves with that story. At the most simplistic level, war and genocide happen when too many people are focused on "what's bad", and "I have to get them before they get me". In this industrial age that expands everything, a negative mindset left to fester unchecked in a whole population can lead to genocide. Some theorists suggest that perhaps the Holocaust even seeded the Civil Rights movement. Those of us who were born into a post-Civil Rights era Western culture don't know what it was like to live in a culture where it was popular and commonplace to be racist and exclusionary. It was the first time in history that a genocide like that had been documented on film. Genocides are nothing new in the human story. They have happened over and over again throughout history. The difference is that it was happening in an industrial and technical world where killing could be accomplished on a much grander, more precise and calculated scale, and could also be documented on film and distributed around the world. It was a wake-up call to humanity. People who lived in peaceful little towns far away from war had to face the dark side of humanity on newsreels like never before.

8. You correlate unexpressed creativity with destructive behaviour in the book. How do you see that playing out today?
Yes, it is interesting that Hitler was an accomplished artist but also a failed one. He was rejected from art school, which embittered him and set him on a drastically different path. He then rounded up the art of freethinking artists of the time and put on a "Degenerate Art" exhibition warning people that if they think and create in this way they are a degenerate human being. Many of the people that were sent to concentration camps were freethinkers and artists because perhaps of this bitterness and repression of his own creativity. I think this is a macrocosmic version of what goes on in organizations, families and within an individual. On the one side you have control, order, logic, rationalization, focus and structure and on the other side you have creativity, diversion, chaos and innovation. Some might call it the left hemisphere versus the right hemisphere. In the book, the Germans represent the left brain qualities and the Olino artists commune as the right brain qualities. Within the character of Jiri, he has both and must struggle within himself to resolve that conflict. I work with organizations and see what happens when there isn't an integration of both. Too controlled and ordered and it drains the life out of the work, the product or service and the people. Too innovative and unstructured then you have a dilution of energy and nothing of value can be accomplished.

9. How is this approach to creativity different from what's out there now?
I believe we are all born creative, but our school system and society sometimes leads us to believe that we are not creative, or has tried to stamp out natural creativity in people. One reason is perhaps that creative people are harder to control and so there exists a natural tension between leaders and creative people who may challenge existing structures. Yet both are needed for healthy societies, organizations and individuals to thrive. One could say there is a masculine form of creativity that manifests things, and there is also a feminine form of creativity that sources new creations. This isn't to say one gender uses only one form more, but rather it is a metaphor for a more holistic form of creativity, and we need both. If you're just operating from feminine creativity, you have a lot of ideas and never do anything with them. Then there are also people who seem actively creative but it's not connected to anything of value, or has deviated from its original intention. It's like Enron. They were once listed as the most innovative company in America and yet their innovation wasn't ultimately attached to a value of serving the common good. This book is about getting both the left and right brain working together in harmony, and masculine and feminine forms of innovation.

10. How does art help transform individuals or groups?
A common factor in all cultures, at all times in history, is that art is a form of ritual that can transform consciousness. Also art goes across all levels of society. You don't just find art amongst the wealthy; you find it in the middle classes as well as amazing art in the ghettos and the slums. The irony is that, in many cultures, art is seen as an elective in school, a fluffy extra, a diversion. Somehow there is an invalidation of art and the artist in society, and yet the need to create and to express oneself is a core human need. I think the repression of creative expression may be at the core of many of people's ineffectiveness as well as the ineffectiveness and even violence in whole societies.

11. What is your background in creativity?
I started out my career in theatre as an actor and playwright, and had also studied visual art and creative writing in school. Then I went into organizational development, team building and conflict resolution. I noticed that people who had been trained in some aspect of the arts tended to be more adaptive and resourceful during change. I also noticed that many change management models were very similar to creative process models, and that at the core they were the same process. Organizations that could keep thriving in uncertain times seemed to be the most creative and innovative ones. I also notice through my years of teaching that many people who are incredibly creative label themselves as uncreative. It is as if unless you were a virtuoso in music, painting, or writing then you couldn't call yourself creative. Yet, you can make anything creative, even paperwork or doing the dishes. Creativity is more of a mindset. You can paint uncreatively and you can file reports creatively. It's a series of attitudinal habits that allow you to approach life in this way. There are so many people who say they can only be happy when they can leave their jobs and responsibilities and go to an island to write, or get on stage and perform, or go to France and paint. While those activities may give lots of joy, I don't think you need to wait for that kind of opportunity. We all have our obligations and responsibilities in life. We also still need people to operate the practical things of life. Why should those jobs always be boring, tedious and annoying? We've all met people who bring a sense of vitality and creativity to seemingly boring jobs, like driving a cab, or serving in a restaurant, or taking money at a toll booth. To me, it's almost more admirable to bring creativity to something that most people view as uncreative. Then everything you do becomes a work of art.

Back to top