That’s my rendition of a Death Star, built out of a Ball of Whacks – the new creativity toy/tool developed by Roger von Oech.� Built from� of 30 magnetic blocks, its’ geodesic shape reminds me of the Montreal Biosphere or the Hostel in the Forest (photos).

Roger sent me a complimentary Ball after I praised his books in a post on creativity. His level of engagement online, as Paul has discussed, is both startling and logical: the audience and market for truly though-provoking innovations really has moved online.

I can go on and on about Roger’s past work encouraging creativity and innovation, but I’ll let my recent experience with the Ball of Whacks say it all:

• when I have this ball on my desk, everyone – I mean everyone – who stops by plays with it.
• when I took it home, my three kids fought to play with it.

We went on a road trip this past weekend, and the kids demanded equal time playing with the ball. One of them even brought a plastic Ikea tray so she could smash the ball and reassemble it into different shapes. If you look closely, you can see white dots where the kids wore down each individual magnetic piece as they played with the ball.

I found it remarkable that all three kids wanted to play with the ball so much – they each have their own style of learning and expression. Nevertheless, the expressive kid, the intuitive kid and the crazy kid all found different uses for von Oech’s Ball of Whacks.

This observation seems to apply in the office as well. The control freak wants to reassemble the ball. The skeptic takes it apart and reassembles it. The procrastinator tries to build a Transformer robot out of it. The lazy bastard just takes it apart and leaves all thirty pieces on the desktop. And the truly creative person uses the pieces to spell words on the side of a metal filing cabinet.

As a visual thinker and attention-deprived worker, I appreciated the 96 page handbook that comes with the Ball, but I haven’t read it yet. I’m sure it’s very good, and will make good reading when I find time – in 2007. In the meanwhile, I’m going to continue playing with my ball.

[tags] Creative, Creativity, Imagination, Whacks [/tags]