Yeah, I'm gonna get started because we only have a limited amount of time. I'm gonna go here. Intercultural creativity. Now, why is this a term that you're gonna be familiar with during this next decade?And why is it a term that you will need to be that eighth up your sleeve? I want you to know that intercultural creativity is so important right now because technology is an ad advance is advancing as at a crazy speed. And it's not that we basically, we need to think about moving forward by looking back and getting back to the basics of what it means to be human and what it means to be creative. And this is what I mean by intercultural creativity. Technology is going very quick quickly and it's our human aspect. That's what's going to set us apart. Now, before I go on to intercultural creativity, I wanna make sure we're dealing with the right definitions. A lot of times people think creativity only deals with the arts.

So you have millions of people walking around thinking they're not creative because they're not artistic. And so for us going forward, creativity is the process of problem finding and problem solving with relevance value and novelty. That's our new definition of creativity that conjuring up of new ideas. OK.

And um and so route value and a novelty and moving forward, especially in this area. Creativity is key. But my work focus on how culture affects creativity. And when I say culture, I don't just mean ethnic culture and national culture. I know this is a global conference and we're from so many places around the world. But culture is a group of people with agreed on uh values, beliefs and systems and the structure you could have, of course, um you know, soccer mo culture, of course, ethnic culture and national culture, but a group of people that have a set of values and and beliefs. So intercultural creativity is the process of problem finding and problem solving with relevance, value and novelty with people from different lived experiences and different cultural identifications. That's where our nation and our globe is headed. Now, I need you to understand that creativity is a skill.

A lot of people think creativity is just for them. It's not for me, a lot of people think it's just the artistry, but creativity is a skill that you can be developed. It's a capacity we all have, but it's a skill that you can develop things like divergent thinking, uh Combinator thinking, transformational thinking and obvious associations, right? Imagination, metaphorical thinking. These are things that actually my company and, and I train people on to get back those skills that you had when you were three. But intercultural competence is also a skill as well. Intercultural competence is your ability to be self aware, to be other aware and to see people with complexity and to be able to adapt your behavior in different cultural situations. Surprisingly, not everyone is very advanced in that skill. There's an assessment out there that my, my company gives and it's global, it's a global assessment that looks at the intercultural competency of a particular person and how their mind thinks when they interact with people from different lived experiences. There's people who operate in a monocultural mindset where they have difficulty switching perspective and there's people out there that operate from an intercultural mind mindset. Um and they are able to, to observe complexity and to adapt their behavior with different people.

And we know for creative things to happen, for innovation to happen, you have to be able to create together. So this intercultural competence is needed for your DN I work for your inclusion work and it's needed for creativity. A I, we had a great speaker this morning about in uh artificial intelligence. A I can do so many things for us and just using our imagination, we need to see where it can possibly take us. But A I can't imagine the possibilities for us. They can't create authentic diverse connections and they can't help that person in the corner of the room feel included. That's our job and that's why this work is so important. And so my, my company and myself and my research looked at the seven gems like the seven key components of the skills we're gonna need to move forward, that deal with intercultural creativity. So I'm gonna go through those gems now, right? I have a big gem. This is diamond and my logo is a diamond for my company because I believe that everyone deserves the op the chance to shine bright like a diamond. And we use the gems to talk about the seven gems of intercultural creativity and how we can shine together with people from different lived experiences.

So I'm gonna go through the seven gems really quick and let you know the skill set that we all should be very aware of as we get ready or we're in this globalization of creating together with people from different lived backgrounds. The first gem is the creative growth mindset, right? We're on a journey and I want people to know that creativity is a process and it's a choice. You have to choose unconventional thinking. You have to choose to go against the status quo. You have to choose to cross fertilize idea. Creativity is a choice. Intercultural competence is a choice. You have to choose to, to reach out to, to that person who has a different lived experience than you. You have to choose to sit in discomfort when someone presents an idea or belief that does isn't in alignment with yours. You have to choose to suspend jud judgment in order to experience the new. And I forgot to mention at the beginning before the gems, creativity and intercultural competence, sit on the same set of cognitive skills. And that's why my work combined them to talk about intercultural creativity because they sit upon the same set of cognitive skills. So this first gem is his first skill that both of these are developmental journeys. OK. The second gem. And you've heard this word of being talked about throughout today, the empathetic way. Now the business world knows how important empathy is.

And the research shows that the number one in indicator of a highly creative person is your ability to have an open mind. And the number one indicator of a highly inter culturally competent person is your ability to connect with people who have different lived experiences. So having an open mind and open heart and practicing this training yourself on, on, on having this be a part of your essence is, is a part of your ability to create and connect across cultural lines. Your second gem is cultural observation. When I say the word observation, people automatically think c right? But observation comes from the Latin and it means to attend to what are you attending to? What are you paying attention to as humans? We're already at a deficit. There's, there's things we can't see on the visual scale. There's sounds we can't hear that other animals can hear that we can't. So we're already at a deficit. But are we doling ourselves even more? Are our phones in front of our faces? Right? Lowering our observation skills, we're not paying attention. And so observation um is so critical if you can develop the skill and I want you to know that observation is affected by culture. If you have people who are around you, who all look like you and, and think the same way you do, there's not really a lot of cognitive diversity, you'll all see the same things, but you'll also miss the same things as well.

So that's why diversity and inclusion work is so key because it increases your ability to observe well within a diverse group. So keep that in mind. Your next gym is cultural curiosity. OK. Curious George, a curious little monkey. That's a, a cartoon here in the United States.

This secu this little monkey that was so curious and into everything. But who knew that this trait this little monkey had is now the trait that your CEO S have or need. It's the trait that your leadership needs. It's the trait that everyone needs. I say if creativity is the driver of innovation, curiosity is the driver of creativity, we need to be more curious. And sadly, some of us have gone through systems, whether school systems or cultural systems that have shut down our ability to be creative, our ability to know how to ask questions. So you're increasing, your creativity is so important. In the words of Rain GRE Grey, we need to escape to where the puck is going to be, not to where the puck is. So in order to go to where it's gonna be, we have to be curious, we have to be observed servant. So looking at this next era, people who have trained and really developed their curiosity are going to be those innovators that we are going to be looking for one quick way to improve your curiosity. Reframe your questions. Look at how you're asking questions and try to reframe it in a different way to see if a new viewpoint pops up. All right, your next gem of intercultural creativity, perspective shifting. We don't really understand what perspective shift shifting is.

And I sat down with Doctor Michael Platt, the top one of the top neuroscientists in United States of America. And if you go to my podcast, create and grow rich, it's episode 66. And he talks about how your leadership needs to work on perspective shifting, seeing things from multiple viewpoints because the higher you go up in position, the lower your ability to perspective shift, therefore the lower your ability to be creative. So they have to be intentional about training their ability to perspective shift. And this is so important in, in our ability to innovate and to serve our clients, serve our team members and to understand where they are coming from. Your sixth gem of intercultural creativity. Yes, authentic adaptation.

We all know this past year, we have had to really look at that skill of adaptation. And there's two ways I want to look at this. Number one. How do you adapt in crisis? How do you pivot? A lot of people had to learn how to pivot those people who train that skill before the crisis happened, were able to pivot faster with less stress and with better results. I also want to look at this gym as adapting culturally as the main speaker just said on the main floor, we are now a global global, we're now globally connected. So talent will be coming from everywhere and organizations, companies that are looking to really innovate know that the top talent may not be in their own country, they may need to go outside. So how do we adapt to different types of cultural norms in other parts of the world? Understanding that relationship? And my company does that training on, on um d deference of power of, of just systems, how pe people respond to different cultural environments? How does that look like if you have someone from Mexico leading a team in France, you know who's working with pe people from Japan.

How do you have that cultural communication and that adaptation within cultural, ethnic, cultural and national cultural teams, but also within your, within your country as well even within the United States, how do you adapt authentically? You're still holding on to your core values.

But how do you adapt on cultural um sit situations? That's an intercultural competence, skill that can be trained. And my last gem that I'm gonna talk, talk about is creating a across cul cultures and being the bridge people who have trained and worked on the professional development of looking at their intercultural competence and their creative thinking abilities are able to be that bridge that connects cultures together, connects groups of people together, really are able to translate.

In case there's, there's a communication issue that they can communicate. Um If you're looking to be the front runner of your organization in your field, you need to be able to empower all voices at all levels. And that will take some people who need to be the bridges between different levels, different cultural groups, people with different lived backgrounds. So being the bridge is, is key, but it's difficult to be a bridge. If you haven't developed the other gyms that the bridge sits on, you have a gross mindset, you have empathy, you know how to observe. You're very curious, you know how to perspective shift and you know how to adapt. These are all key skills for you to be the optimal position for you to be that bridge. This is why my company focuses on diversity equity and inclusion work in connection with creative thinking. So we teach, you know, dealing with biases, biases, cuts down your ability to be creative and it cuts down your ability to make authentic connections. We teach, dealing with microaggressions and we, we call them subtle acts of exclusion because if you're excluding people, you're not including them.

So they can create, we teach how to perspective shift and how to be curious and go that extra mile the traits you had. When you were three, we teach you how to get them back and have functional agility and not think outside of the box. Use the box and create a spaceship. Use the box for the next tech advancement. That's what we teach you to do in order for you to create the innovations, your imagination, your creativity, your curiosity has to be a tip top shape and no one wakes up and says I need to work on my curiosity day, right? It's something that you have to be intentional about and we haven't really pushed it up to the forefront yet. But mark my words, intercultural creativity, you're gonna hear about it because people are gonna start to understand the importance of developing these human skills.

As A I continues to develop, how do we keep the human skills in tip top shape across the board? So these are the gems, the seven gems of intercultural creativity. These are the the elements that are gonna be separating the masses from, from the top. And I hope you will really look into it. If you scan the barcode, you will get to the page where you can download the seven gems, you can look at it more closely. You can also see our trading programs that we have there that we go to organizations, we go to leadership, we go to C Suite. And because if the leadership gets a hold of the seven gems and the Intercultural Creativity Movement, it'll trickle down into the organization. Um So check that out.