Who We Are
Our team, our secret, our purpose.
Our team at Creative Leaps International is an inspired mix of learning specialists, interdisciplinary thinkers, performing artists and scientists whose most prized capacities are exceptional imagination and a gift for agile, 360° orbital thinking, that is, thinking inspired by multiple perspectives — intellectually, culturally, across disciplines and generations.
We are passionate about bringing ideas to life, especially in ways that can take you by surprise. Indeed, our uniqueness is rooted precisely in this concept of “learning by surprise” and our award-winning performing, teaching and consulting artists are masters at coaxing, facilitating and triggering its touch points.
Our secret? Simply a bold, skillful harnessing of the inherent power of the arts to inflect our thinking, shift and sharpen our perceptions, and engage us richly at the level of our emotions and values. With these tools and techniques, we help leaders and decision makers access multiple creative connections, deeper personal insights and rich new solutions to the challenges at hand.
The result - a renewed sense of purpose and new vantage points for looking beyond present limitations and into the future.
What We Do
Creative Leaps International (1992) is a US-based non-profit specializing in the development of highly creative learning and conferencing experiences for professional centers, organizations, think tanks, universities, major corporations, government agencies and social enterprises worldwide.
Our trademarked pathway to new thinking and breakthrough insights is known as The Main Sequence and opens with an original keynote performance we call a “Concert of Ideas”. This state of the art event embodies a set of artful triggers designed to set minds and hearts in curious exploratory motion. Participants are royally entertained. Simultaneously, they are invited to think deeply and, ultimately, to enter into thoughtful dialogue with one another.
Via The Main Sequence, participants move step by step through a series of cognitively stimulating and emotionally rich scenarios at once full of imagination, uplifting, challenging and deeply felt. Its six interlocking stages include our catalyst Concert of Ideas, facilitated inquiry and discussion, deep dives into extension topics, and special activities for synthesis, discernment and final harvest.
Our planning begins with a thorough query of each client's organizational goals, challenges and culture and a clear understanding of current and long-term objectives. Our design work follows from there, partnering closely with clients to advance key learning and change agendas.
John J. Cimino, Jr.
Dianne Legro
Paul Spencer Adkins
Jon Klibonoff
Donna Wissinger
Richard T. Albagli
Danielle Duell
What's In a Name?
Our name, "Creative Leaps International", is rooted in the power of imagination to transform our thinking, our work and our world. A 'creative leap' is a leap of imagination and courage taking us beyond currently available facts and mental models into the realm of the ‘not yet’, the unknown and the possible. It is not an indulgence in fantasy as that word is commonly used. Rather, it is fantasia, (from the Italian pronounced fan-ta-SEE-ah), meaning imaginative insight, a seeing into the essence of what we desire to understand or desire to become.
The word "international" underscores for us our global, cross-cultural, multi-faceted approach to complex problems and challenges - multiple perspectives gained through the lenses of diverse disciplines, ways of knowing, sensing and seeing. With the artist René Magritte, we are keenly aware that “Everything we see hides another thing; we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”
Finally, our name "Creative Leaps International "is tied closely to our logo image of the winged figure of Icarus rising in ecstasy toward the sun, new knowledge, new heights, freedom, the very embodiment of imagination.