Tel Aviv native Nimrod Eisenberg had no intention of following in his parents’ footsteps and becoming a doctor. Although his childhood was spent mostly in hospitals—his mother is a midwife and his father a physician—he had career ambitions outside the medical field. So when he was just seventeen years old, he says, “I ran away and joined the circus.”
Not literally, but he did spend several years performing as a clown and juggler at circuses around Israel, much to his family’s consternation. And he eventually moved to Paris to study the clowning arts at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, a renown theater school. (He never wanted to be a clown in the traditional Western tradition. “In America, your clowns are either happy hobos or sad hobos.” His clowning personality, he says, is more like Charlie Chaplin.) Eisenberg soon found his way back to Israel, where he enrolled in the University of Haifa and graduated with a bachelor’s degree… in medical clowning.
“Yes, that’s a real thing,” Eisenberg laughs. “A lot of people think I’m kidding, but I’m a university accredited medical clown.”
In 2003, he joined Dream Doctors, an Israel-based organization that brings medical clowns to clinics and hospitals. It isn’t an unorthodox option that patients have to specifically request. In Israel, medical clowns are available to anybody who wants them. “We’re just another service provided by the hospital,” Eisenberg says. “We’re as integral to the medical staff as anybody.” He works alongside the doctors and nurses as a collaborative part of a patient’s treatment. “We try to be there for every procedure,” he says. “We’re there when they draw blood or change a bandage or do an x-ray.”
He has arguably the toughest job in medicine. Making somebody laugh while they’re stuck in the unhappiest place on earth is, unsurprisingly, often an uphill battle. “A hospital can be pretty grim and depressing, even for positive people,” Eisenberg says. “But if I can change their perspective, get them to reconnect with their joy, it can do wonders.” Clowns can be so effective in stress reduction that, in some minor surgeries, Eisenberg says, “a clown replaces general anesthesia.”
It’s a healing philosophy that’s also at the core of a new experimental treatment being pioneered by Eisenberg and Dream Doctors: Clown-assisted in vitro fertilization. “I only visit the patient after the in vitro procedure,” Eisenberg clarifies. The theory is, much like laughter contributes to the healing of sick people by reducing their stress, a little levity could have the same effect on fertility patients. There’s even research to back it up. In a study conducted by Dr. Shevach Friedler of the Assaf Harofeh Medical Centre in Israel, 219 women undergoing IVF were visited by clowns for 15 minutes after embryo implantation. 36 percent of them became pregnant.
“There’s a lot of unspoken tension and stress in a fertility ward,” Eisenberg says. “Once you start playing with that tension and acknowledging it and joking over it, it’s able to burst out and offer some relief.” One of his more successful bits with fertility patients involves a tea kettle with a red nose covering the spout. “I hold it like it’s a baby that’s crying,” he explains. “It’s my clown baby. I apologize for it, and I try rocking it to sleep and singing it songs, anything to make it stop crying.” Perhaps not a comedy routine that would amuse most audiences, but for a patient just coming out of IVF surgery, it addresses the elephant in the room. A tea kettle baby is the manifestation of all their hopes and anxieties.
“It’s a delicate balance,” he says. “You have to play on their fears without mocking them. You take those things that sit in the stomach and bring them to the surface so we can look at them and laugh about them.”
Fertility clowns have become more commonplace in Israel, but the rest of the world is still reluctant. Earlier this month, Eisenberg and fellow Dream Doctors clown Jérôme Arous toured hospitals in Canada, giving conferences and hosting workshops for fertility patients and curious doctors in Quebec City, Montreal, Chicoutimi and Halifax. They were met, Eisenberg remembers, with cautious enthusiasm. “I am not convinced,” Dr. Hananel Holzer of Montreal’s McGill Reproductive Centre told a local radio station about fertility clowns. “Not yet.”
Eisenberg is confident that the global medical community will catch on eventually. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that even his own family didn’t take him seriously. He was the black sheep who went into clowning instead of medicine. But he ended up in the family business anyway. He even spent a few years in residence at Hadassah Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, where he worked alongside his brother, an orthopedist.
“It was pretty easy to tell us apart,” Eisenberg says. “One of us dressed strange and talked funny, and the other was a medical clown.”
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Yep! This Clown Will Make You Pregnant
Monday, May 14, 2012
Innovation Requires Both Ideas And Action | Idea Sandbox Brainstorming
Ideas have been getting a bad rap lately.
Some say the lack of innovation within organizations isn’t because of a lack of ideas, rather a lack of action. There are too many ideas and not enough implementors.
But, ideas need champions to implement them. Just the same way seeds need farmers.
A popular recommendation is: Stop generating ideas and start taking action. Stop the brainstorming and get to work. To return to my farm comparison, that would be like declaring:
Since crop production (innovation) is down
we need more farmers (execution)
and fewer seeds (ideas).But that doesn’t work. We’d end up with a bunch of hungry farmers standing in cropless fields.
Fact is, we need both.
There is a symbiotic relationship between the pair. One can’t get along without the other.
We ‘get’ that a seed isn’t a plant. We should understand an idea isn’t a plan. Seed (and ideas) take time, patience, pruning, and weeding to bear fruit.
And, brainstorming is for more than idea generation; it is also a solution-finding process. We meet for more than creating ideas; brainstorming and strategy sessions help us choose the right idea to properly solve the problem or grow the business. Which seed is right for the soil you have? For the amount of water you have access to? What is right for the crop you want to produce?
Next time you run into someone bashing ideas and strictly touting action… Remember, it isn’t one or the other. To be innovative, we need to be good at both idea generation and idea execution.
This article was originally published on the MarketingProf’s DailyFix blog
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Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Need help brainstorming? Try the ‘Ask Einstein’ card deck
By Chuck Frey
Ask Einstein is a new deck of 150 thought-provoking "imagine if..." questions that are designed to stretch your thinking in new, creative directions. Developed by Gary Bertwhistle of Blue Moon Creative in Australia, this brainstorming tool was inspired by the insatiable curiosity of Albert Einstein, who always asked questions.
Ask Einstein was also an outgrowth of Bertwhistle’s work as an advertising executive: “Previously I would stand in front of a group and throw questions out at them to give them hooks to alter their thinking and give them new directions to grab onto. However, I found that people like to have a physical tool that they can take out of their cupboard and put on their desk or the boardroom table to use by themselves or within a group. Having the Einstein cards allows them 150 questions that they always have with them that they can use in a number of different applications,” he explains.
The Ask Einstein cards
Each card is laminated for durability. One side contains the “imagine if…” question, while the other side of the card contains a whimsical illustration of Albert Einstein that is themed to the question. What’s amazing is the sheer number of cards in this deck (150) and the nature of the idea-stimulating questions it asks. For example, it asks you to think about connections between your current challenge and several famous brands: What if it was a Rolex? What if it was a Mercedes? These and other “imagine if” questions help you to engage in lateral thinking, combining your product, service or challenge with different attributes or qualities – a very effective ideation strategy!
Some of my favorite cards in the Ask Einstein card deck include these:
- Imagine if it was in a circus
- Imagine if it was a superhero
- Imagine if it was a toy
- Imagine if it was a cartoon character
- Imagine if it spoke to you
I asked Bertwhistle where he came up with such a large quantity of thought-provoking questions. “The questions were designed from doing ten years of workshops and me putting myself in the shoes of an attendee and looking at what would stimulate my mind to answer their questions or problems,” he recalls. “I simply looked at what I would use to generate ideas for breweries, chocolate companies, software manufactures or wholesale merchants. I kept the questions that would stimulate my mind and give me potentially useful and profitable outcomes and ditched the ones that wouldn’t.”
Applications of Ask Einstein
The card deck’s instructions recommend a number of possible uses for Ask Einstein:
- Generating new ideas for your company, brand or product
- As an interactive tool to energize your team
- As a brainstorming tool for your team or office
- As a catalyst for client meetings
Bertwhistle says his card deck is used by creative thinkers in many different types of businesses, from hospitals and landscaping firms to sales teams and restaurants. “Pretty much anybody who needs new ideas will find a use for the cards,” he says. He did a “soft launch” of Ask Einstein in Australia seven months ago, and demand for it has grown quickly via word of mouth.
Conclusion
Ask Einstein is a very promising brainstorming tool. It combines a large quantity and an impressive variety of idea stimulators in an affordable package. In addition, its simplicity means nearly anyone can pick up this card deck and begin generating potentially profitable ideas almost immediately.
You can order the Ask Einstein card deck exclusively from the Fink Inc. website for A$129 (approximately US$98) via innovationtools.com
Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. Jim is board president of a charter school located in Colorado Springs whose sole purpose is to prepare otherwise disadvantaged students more competitively for college. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective hypercompetition strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.
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