When Lyn Heward enters the room, the level of talent and energy goes up a notch. She needs both these qualities. An accomplished dancer and gymnast who speaks five languages, she was the head of creative content at Cirque du Soleil from 2000 to 2006. It was a demanding job; her staff creates and performs Cirque’s 13 unique shows running around the world.

At Face to Face in 2006, Heward explained her theory of how to ignite the creative spark, which is the subject of her recent book The Spark: Igniting the Creative Fire that Lives Within Us All. The spark has become a wildfire, and Cirque has gone through many growth phases since its early days in the late 1970s.

At Cirque, the evolution and creativity of the individual performers matches that of the organization as a whole. Founder Guy Laliberte´ is the classic case. The one-time street performer reinvented the circus by returning it to its theatrical roots. The formula he developed is so successful that he is now a billionaire.

Heward describes her main role as casting director: “casting like casting a line, not casting in stone.” She began using this ability as a 13-year-old dance teacher, and now it is second nature. “I look for what is different in the individual,” she says.

“I want to see what their unique gift is.” The performers are the raw material. Many are former gymnasts who must be encouraged to find their artistic side.

Aside from the brilliance of individual directors such as Franco Dragone, who left Cirque to work with Céline Dion in Vegas, the essence of Cirque is the company’s ability to marshal what Heward calls collective creativity. “New directors will come in with a bundle of ideas, and then are confronted by others who are also big shots in their own right,” she says. “You need room to develop trust. It takes time and money to develop co-operative relationships.”

The strategy clearly works. Cirque opens a new show at an average of one per year under the big top, in Vegas, Disney World, and elsewhere. Often, a theatre is custom built or rebuilt before the rehearsals start.

Inspiration comes from what Heward calls “sensorial experience”—immersing oneself in the world of the senses. Often it comes from Laliberte´ himself. “Guy is a giant sponge,” says Heward. He is an inveterate traveller who calls his famous parties “laboratories,” which mix creative and business types, inspiration and deal-making.

Cirque starts with creativity but also needs advanced problem-solving skills. “High tech companies are proud to work with us,” says Heward. She cites Michelangelo: “He went to a quarry and picked out a huge stone that would become a statue. He had to solve many technical problems to satisfy his artistic vision.”

The book Blue Ocean Strategy used Cirque as an example of a company that created a new market by fusing circus and theatre. “It wasn’t so strategic at the outset,” says Heward. “It started out as a troupe of street performers. The evolution came on gradually. In the late ‘90s we had the notion that the sky was the limit—putting on five to 10 shows a year. Then it got too complex, and we pulled back. We needed to maintain our creative core and not become bricks-and-mortar people.”

When we spoke on the phone in December, Heward had just visited her father in a hospital ward. He had been a larger-than-life character: a professional football player, an MD, and an early specialist in kinesthesiology. Now he has Alzheimer’s, and his world is increasingly limited to his own sensorial experience. Heward had mesmerized the patients by putting up a Christmas tree. “They still have fond memories of Christmas that are triggered by their senses,” she said. “When I do something like this, I see that all my life is tied together.”