President's Introduction

John Cimino, President Creative Leaps International

Imagination creates possibilities and envisions the future. Imagination leads the way to the only learning potent enough to change our thinking, perceiving and acting. It unleashes our intuition, extends our sensory acuity and helps us see through baffling chaos to what Stewart Kaufmann of the Santa Fe Institute calls “the adjacent possible”—the countless breakthrough ideas just one metaphor, one mental picture away from “ah-HA”! It’s the future waiting to be born.

Imagination is optimistic! It is the art of the possible. Whether in the arts or the sciences, the social sector or the business sector, imagination carries with it an inherent optimism, an enabling affirmative dynamic. Our spirits thrive on this energy; and business, as a human endeavor, cannot thrive without it.

We at Creative Leaps International are passionate about learning and bringing ideas to life, especially in ways that can take us by surprise. We are fascinated by boundaries, intersections and horizons—the places where things connect and become (or get ready to become) something else. This is the favorite terrain of imagination and the arts: the space amidst transition, paradox and uncertainty. In our experience, applying arts-enriched imaginative thinking to business problems produces deeper insights and more reliable perceptions, new ways of seeing problems and framing questions, and new vantage points for looking beyond our limitations and into the future.

flutist & poet, Donna Wissinger

We, as individuals and as a society, need the vision and courage of our creative leaps. We need the life-changing heart-mind connection begetting not only creativity, but courage and compassion. For us at Creative Leaps, this is the heart of the artistic process, and it is the meaning of art in our lives. Imagination is a spiritual reaching out to that which we most desire, and to that which we most desire to become. At its best, this reaching out also extends to one another, begetting compassion and empathy. We at Creative Leaps want to reach out. We want to transmit life, hope and joy through our work. In so doing, we believe that extraordinary things are possible. And we really do believe that we can change the world.

In this age of technology and light-speed progress, it is still the human element of our endeavors that will determine our successes, mitigate our failures, and catalyze our growth. The greatest strengths of the arts—ingenuity, innovation, and imagination—speak most directly to all that is human in ourselves. Those strengths should never be under-estimated.

In our world, music is never just music. It is revolutionary. It is the sound of ideas.

John J. Cimino, Jr.,
President & CEO