I came across an article in the magazine Fast Company (October, 1999) that helped me frame how I work with creative people.

The article described something called a Creative Odyssey, where an advertising agency sends its employees and clients to New York “on a four-day whirlwind of cutting-edge art exhibits, groundbreaking theater, [and] hip clubs.” 

In the words of Stephen Zades, the head of the agency, the odyssey is designed to answer the question: “Where do idea companies get their ideas?”

The thinking here is, I guess, that these new and exciting experiences in the big city will somehow change the viewers’ thinking. And the change will be in the direction of the advertisers’ mind set. 

This approach seems to fit within the conceptual model of the learning theorist Jean Piaget, who felt that people typically “assimilated” new experiences into their thinking but that with very new experiences (such as the Creative Odyssey) they were forced to change or “accommodate” their thinking in order to understand the new experience.

In other words, the experience changed the person. Here towards the mind set of the advertiser. Which is a good idea – and why vacations to new lands can sometimes be so rewarding.

But there's another side to the story. I first thought of the other side back in high school when I avidly read so many adventure stories. I was struck by how people could undertake such arduous journeys – I remember particularly a young man alone and adrift at sea for many months – often to come back little changed from their adventure. 

I began to think that sometimes the experience changes the person, and sometimes it does not. (I guess now I think that more often it does change the person, only slowly, very slowly.) 

The other side of the story, of course, is to look towards the person, and not the experience. This view was put forth by the cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser, who said that people see based on what they expect to see, and that they change their expectations when they see new things. (Still somewhat close to Piaget, I admit.) But he went on to say that each person has a unique history of seeing, what he called a “perceptual history.” 

So that each person taking the odyssey to New York, for example, would bring their own, unique history of seeing to the trip. Which is why, I think, some people would allow themselves to see things anew, while others would come back essentially the same (because their histories would not allow them to be open to the experience). 

And which is why, as any parent or teacher knows, its difficult to engineer a trip so that large numbers of people will come away having had the same experience. Even something so engineered as a sporting event leaves people with various perceptions – everyone brings their own mind set to the game.

In my view, Neisser was on to something when he focused on people's unique perceptual histories. Which is why in my work with creative people I focus on their unique histories, helping them to recognize, use, and change their expectations so that they can indeed open themselves to new experiences. 

Which is also why I work with people before they take a trip, helping them to attune their expectations for new and better experiences.