Eileen Clegg is an expert in design thinking for co-creativity. Bringing together experience as a journalist, visual facilitator and creativity researcher, Eileen has worked on the front lines of innovation for many years, codifying the specific behaviors, techniques, and communication patterns of the most successful teams. She has gathered their stories and developed powerful interaction methods that are transforming people and organizations.

Eileen’s story: With a B.A. in Philosophy, Eileen embarked on her first career as a daily newspaper journalist focusing on environment and education. She wrote several commercial trade books including one on creativity that inspired her to change careers. She joined Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future, where she learned to use big-picture visuals to develop future forecasts. She lost that job during the dot.com crash and began volunteering as a graphic recorder to support groups working on global education. Then Eileen was “discovered” as someone who could tell stories real time in words+pictures—leading to a new career as a visual facilitator performing at conferences and facilitating innovation teams including IBM’s Integration and Values Team, Nobel Peace Prize Youth Summit, Gates Foundation’s Model Secondary Schools, and many other great organizations.

Then a mystery and a mentor emerged. Why were big picture visuals so powerful in groups? How could we maximize the contributions of everyone in the room? How could we connect brains together to think better and contribute more? Light began to shine on those questions after Eileen met the great technology inventor, Dr. Douglas Engelbart, with whom she worked for several years to visualize and write about his quest to raise humanity’s collective IQ to solve urgent and complex problems. Engelbart’s team at SRI was the most innovative of the 20th century and Eileen documented his methods for connecting individual brains to enable breakthrough innovation. To better understand what Engelbart called the “human systems”—the role of human emotions and imagination in this process—Eileen completed an M.A. program in Depth Psychology that illuminated timeless techniques for connecting people at the deepest level where true innovation can occur.

Today, Eileen conducts seminars and gives talks on the eight methodologies she has developed for group co-creativity. She also continues developing big-picture murals (4 by 28 feet in analog, adapted for the web) that show patterns of history leading to future forecasts on topics including education, technology, and innovation. Her most recent mural on Women Inventors and Innovators has yielded surprising insights into the gender gap conundrum. Eileen’s group design thinking methods—and the murals that capture the insights—are inspired by Dr. Engelbart’s advice to visually map what is known about a problem, then embark on well-designed experiments with feedback loops.

Eileen was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and Manufactures (The RSA) in London, in 2014.