Lynda.com Review: Creativity Bootcamp

Do you consider yourself creative? Do you believe creativity is an innate talent or a learned skill? Do you have to be artistic to be creative? And, since creativity is considered a “soft skill,” can it somehow be objectively measured?

These are all questions I have been asking myself over the past year. In fact, I made a New Year’s resolution last year to seek out opportunities to be more creative. Now I wish I had watched this Lynda.com course to launch that resolution – it would have been a great start to my journey.

I am interested in creativity from both personal and professional perspectives. On a personal level, I have often questioned my own creative abilities. Taking creative risks can be scary. However, my two sons – Michael (12) and Matthew (10) – remind my wife and I every day that invitations to be creative do not need to be approached with fear or judgement. On New Year’s Eve, we created a “Nailed It” challenge for our family (based on the Netflix cooking show) and they enthusiastically participated! Their lack of self-censoring gave me hope that I can find non-judgmental ways and create safe spaces for me (and others) to enjoy creativity again.

Meanwhile, in my professional role, I have the responsibility to ensure that RRC anticipates and responds to the ever-changing demands of students, industries and communities. The ability to find creative solutions will be our competitive advantage, so it is key that we cultivate and support creative thinking across the organization. This Lynda review is just one way that I hope to ignite a spark of interest on this fascinating topic with you.

This Lynda course really does feel like a ‘Creativity Bootcamp’; it is fast-paced, completely engaging and very hands-on. The instructor claims that participants will be more creative by the end of the course and, in fact, that such an improvement can be measured. He also provides three Bootcamp “commands”, which serve as interesting provocations that turn assumptions about creativity on their heads.

The exercises are silly and fun (for instance, one centers on breakfast cereal toys) and are no longer than 5 mins each. The learning came in the de-brief, during which the science of creativity was explained. Of particular interest was a fascinating explanation of the “graph” of creative thinking, which maps out creativity within a group across time – a theory that I can’t wait to test with one of our academic teams.

As a starting point, this one-hour Creativity Bootcamp course served as an energizing and illuminating launching point for me to explore other courses and videos on this topic. Thanks to this course, I can confidently say that when I completed the exercises to measure the improvement of my creative ideas, I nailed it!