Who Killed Creativity?: ...And How Do We Get It Back?

Part II: … And how can we get it back?

Chapter 5: The forensic lab report

Off-piste innovation and training the brain

Your heart skips more than a beat when you see your precious child strapped tightly to an emergency first-aid snow sled that is shimmying its way down a steep Swiss mountain slope with a first-aid officer at the helm. For a keen snowboarding family it is not uncommon to see these snow sleds, and it is usually a sobering reminder of the inherent dangers of a sport that is just asking for trouble. Think about it. Standing on a highly waxed plank and hurtling at high speeds down the sheer side of a mountain through a white mass of slippery ice crystals has to be crazy!

But this was the closest we had come to thinking that Kallen, then an active 12-year-old, might be critically injured. Our hearts probably simultaneously clunked back into beat when the sled arrived and we saw that our son was smiling. ‘That was such a cool ride,’ he said. ‘Can I do it again?!’ In the end the only thing he had suffered that day was sore and battered legs and a bruised ego, but luckily no broken bones. As the story came out little by little we discovered that he had gone ‘off-piste’, as he loved to do, and had not seen a sudden cliff drop in the afternoon shadows. The paramedics who came to Kallen’s aid on the snowfields not only helped him recover physically, they also gave him valuable advice on mountain safety, ensuring that he would thereafter treat wild off-piste runs with respect ...