Dancing to a different tune

Internationally renowned writer and award-winning poet, Kirpal Singh, is a Colombo Plan scholar who completed his PhD at the University of Adelaide in the late 1970s. Now based at the Singapore Management University, Associate Professor Singh teaches courses on creative thinking.

He's a leading innovator in the world of creative thinking, but Professor Kirpal Singh is poles apart from that other giant of lateral thinking, Edward de Bono.

The latter is an advocate of practical approaches to complex problems, looking at the end results of creativity and employing it as a skill to achieve the right outcomes.

Professor Singh dances to a different tune. His approach to creativity is almost mystical, recognising it as a gift, which lies in our subconscious and is tapped through meditation and stimulation.

The two were both keynote speakers at the recent American Creativity Association's international conference in Texas. In 2005 Professor Singh became the first ever non-American to be appointed to the Association's Board.

The author of 15 books and more than 40 journal articles, Professor Singh's most recent publication is Thinking Hats & Coloured Turbans: Creativity Across Cultures.

On a recent trip to Singapore, Candy Gibson from the University of Adelaide posed the following questions to Professor Singh:

Lumen: How does one lecture in creative thinking. The concept is almost contradictory is it not?

Kirpal Singh: I don't lecture. My creative thinking sessions are best described as experiences. I don't give my students sermons, but rely on in-depth experiences to stimulate their imagination. My philosophy is simple: creative thinking IS, so one either has to experience what it is, or could be. My role is primarily to stimulate and ignite the centres of the creativity fire.

Lumen: You are an internationally acclaimed writer and poet. Who have been your greatest influences and what is it about your background that led you down this creative path?

KS: The story begins when I was about five years of age. I was living with my paternal grandmother in a small place called Batu Gajah in Malaysia. One day we young ones found ourselves all lined up to receive a great man, known as the district officer. He was a young, brash Englishman. I was singled out by fate to receive the end of his long cane on my nose. Using the cane to tickle my nose he said in an extraordinary upper class accent that only the British can pull off, "And what about you, my boy? How are you?" I made up my mind to master the English language so that one day the British would invite me to read my works to them, write about them and publish them. Over the years I am glad that all of this has happened!

The primary influences for my creative spur were my grandmother (who cradled me in her arms and told me about the moon and the stars), my uncle Bill, a few wonderful teachers... and William Blake, the ultimate genius of the creative mind.

Lumen: Can you give me your reflections of the time you spent at the University of Adelaide?

KS: I arrived at the end of March, 1976. My PhD was on Aldous Huxley and my supervisor was the late Professor John Colmer, with whose family I developed very warm, longlasting bonds.

I was not too much of a library user, but I plunged head on into experiencing the Aussie lifestyle and played tennis every Sunday at the house of Winnie and Rene Levy in North Adelaide. Here I had the privilege of meeting some very distinguished members of the Adelaide cultural and intellectual scene, including Anne Levy, who later became Minister for the Arts in the Bannon Government.

I did my share of research, but because I was handling a theme about Aldous Huxley's work, which had not been much mined, I had to do more of my own writing than reading other people's work. Huxley, to me, remains a prodigious mind, an often-misunderstood genius of the 20th century. He was a larger-than-life figure who influenced millions through his books, from the high priests of art and culture, to the drug users in the streets of San Francisco and Sydney. Years later when I met his wife, Laura, I realised just how tremendous my PhD thesis topic was in shaping my intellectual sensibility.

Lumen: I understand you were a part-time lecturer at the University of Adelaide between 1976 and 1978. Were you completing your PhD at the time and which area did you lecture in?

KS: Yes. I was slightly older than most PhD scholars. I had already been lecturing at the University of Singapore's English department when I was awarded the Colombo Plan scholarship to pursue my PhD in Adelaide. I did part-time lecturing at the University of Adelaide
as well as Flinders University and the South Australian Institute of Technology (now UniSA).

I lectured mainly on Indian literature, South East Asian literature and cross-cultural perspectives on English literature.

Lumen: Your philosophy seems to be focused on changing mindsets. Do you see this as an international problem? Can you name some of the world's most creative leaders and examples of how creative thinking has changed the course of history?

KS: Yes, the challenge for globalisation is to think of creative ways to change mindsets so as to avoid repeats of 9/11 and other blunders arising out of ignorance, neglect and poor education.

Among the world's most creative leaders I would place the founders of the great faiths--Christ, Prophet Mohammed, Buddha, Guru Nanak. To this group I would add people like Plato, Da Vinci, Pascal, Picasso, Tagore and Einstein.

In more recent times I would nominate someone like Nelson Mandela, whose creative approaches to intensely serious and complex political problems have resulted in radical transformations of attitudes.

Lumen: Your upcoming book "Leadership Across Cultures: Do We Ever Learn?" has a title that suggests we don't. Can you expand?

KS: The second half of the title is to challenge readers to engage with me.

If one takes the recent visit to the US by the Chinese President and the exchanges with President Bush, one immediately sees just how tense the contexts are, precisely of what I'd call the "sensitive cross-cultural arena".

My book is an exploration of leadership as it manifests itself across the diverse cultures of the world. I expect to finish the book at the end of this year.