Setting the Stage

From Don Hallock — 2/7/2008

It could be said that many have described WGBH as a peak passage in their lives, and that for quite a few others the station(s) and the foundation’s further undertakings evolved into a lifetime career. If WGBH had a middle name it could well be ‘creative collaboration,’ thus the title for this evolving essay: Focus on Creative Collaboration.

And this project, in the best WGBH tradition, will hopefully become a creative collaboration in itself. Our intent is to have it develop here, right out in the open for you to follow, to reflect upon, and offer your further contributions, suggestions, corrections, or complaints.

Now it’s not as if we were contemplating an easy task, and all available brain power would be helpful. Attempting definitions of the concepts involved will be a difficult undertaking, and may well be best accomplished, not only through previous scholarship, but by your own direct experiential contributions, to be included as we go along.

Collaboration is probably the easiest term to deal with. It might be described as the intentional (and occasionally unintentional) cooperative involvement of more than one person in an undertaking of one sort or another. And collaboration of any kind would seem to imply the presence of a shared goal, ideal, vision or philosophy (again possibly conscious, but also perhaps unstated). That is what makes the evolution of WGBH a likely focal point and illustration for this attempt.

But now comes creativity, which is the most difficult of all to define. For millennia creativity has proven itself a very slippery concept, being as it is, so closely involved with others of similar ‘ghostly’ character such as ‘intuition’ and ‘inspiration.’

Some of the world’s finest minds have wrestled with the ongoing attempt to define these words. Partly, the difficulty springs from the fact that we are not really clear on where these impulses emerge from. Some have felt that, as is sometimes true of inspiration, they spring from external experience, forgotten and stored as content in the darker parts of the brain, and then seeming to rise up (given the right ‘cues’) from what we call the subconscious mind. Unfortunately, otherwise unexplainable evidence has proven this thesis largely unsupportable, and has caused us to look into yet more obscure sources verging on, if not firmly grounded in, the mystical.

This dilemma tends to occur when searching for the origin of such impulses before they enter the conscious mind to be acted upon. So, who better than a collection of individuals who have been active participants in a single, unmistakably and spectacularly successful project altogether spanning about 70 years by now, and which certainly deserves to be characterized as creatively collaborative – namely WGBH.

Proceeding, then, with our inquiry, here are a set of questions for you to consider: Please feel free to answer all or any of them, in any order or length, or to merge them all into a generalized statement if you would feel more comfortable doing so. We would also like to have permission to post your remarks as part of this section of the Alumni web site. Many thanks for being willing to take the time to help with this project.

Menu of possible questions:

  • What effect did (or does) your time with WGBH have on your life?
  • What did (or do) you learn about creativity from your experience at WGBH?
  • How did (or does) the WGBH experience help you to realize your own creativity?
  • How did (or do) your associations while there contribute to your own creative unfoldment?
  • What did (or does) the WGBH experience teach you about collaboration?
  • What did (or does) the WGBH experience teach you about intuition?
  • What about the character and spirit of WGBH added (or adds) to your journey of creative self-discovery?
  • And finally, what other thoughts and/or feelings of a more general nature might you add about your time at WGBH?

Send your contributions to alumni [at] wgbhalumni.org.