On Friday, January 25, Eastman’s Institute for Music Leadership partnered with the Ain Center for Entrepreneurship and the Barbara J. Burger iZone to host Eric Booth for a workshop: Framing Problems Accurately and Solving Them Creatively. Booth – an actor, author, artist, entrepreneur, and educator – completed a residency at the IML on January 26, after leading a number of events on teaching artistry. Drawing upon his own experiences, he helped University of Rochester students learn how such artistry can be incorporated into a multitude of disciplines.
Booth’s background spans years and fields. After working as an actor, he taught at Juilliard, Stanford University, NYU, Tanglewood, Lincoln Center Education, and the Kennedy Center. He is currently a senior advisor to El Sistema-inspired sites around the U.S. and around the world. To address pressing social problems, Booth employs an entrepreneurial approach, specifically that of the Cynefin Framework.
Created in 1999 by Dave Snowden, a Welsh management consultant who is now the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge, the Cynefin Framework allows individuals to identify and categorize problems accurately to provide for the most imaginative and efficient means to solve them. Cynefin is named for a Welsh word that loosely translates to unseen forces that influence our lives that we can work with, though understanding them is impossible. In this framework, complexity is critical and encourages creativity.