Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 135! Innovation: Not Knowing & What You Can Do Now...
Dear becomings of unknown capacities,
It has been a wonderful week. But in a word: Busy.
Yesterday we were leading a tour at the Met Museum in NYC, exploring enactive approaches to Math Innovation in a global context with our frequent collaborator Steven Greenstein. A big area of exploration was the possible connections between the implicit values of the practices inherent in a cultural way of life and the forms of innovation that emerge.
On Wednesday, we were out visiting a colleague of ours, Sam Gatley, who runs a really interesting digitally augmented fabrication and innovation lab called COMET. They have all sorts of bleeding edge toys—cutting edge 3D printers, and other astonishing new ways of making. Sam was describing to us that despite having all of these cutting edge technologies, he had the problem that no one was really coming in and pushing fabrication in radically new ways. He said it exactly the way A. N. Whitehead said it over a century ago: we are always making the new do the work of the old…
This is a fundamental problem for innovation – how do we let the new do the work of the new? This is a fundamental issue we are always trying to address in our work.
Things are always far more radical than we can ever recognize. It is our conceptualizations that, being so tied to our present realities and knowledge, bend the radical back towards the old.
Next week we are down in Rowan University doing a workshop on Emergence and Speculative Worldmaking and one of the big things we want to make apparent is just this issue. If speculation is separate from an experimental process of co-emergence then it will also fall back into the known.
For the sake of the new, we need to challenge the cultural dominance of knowing.
In regards to this question, we were in NYC over the weekend, visiting an exceptional exhibit at the Japan Society. The exhibit focused on the painting and calligraphic work of Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769). The show is up until June 16th, and well worth a detour if you can make it. He was an important figure in the revival of the Rinzai tradition of Zen in Japan.
The show presented his work, and those influenced by him and his precursors. One of the wonderful works was by Juin Onko (1718-1804) entitled “Daruma from behind”:
The writing above the figure of Daruma translates to: “I Don’t Know”
This got us thinking about the importance for creativity of choosing to inhabit this position.
Of course, we all say things like “I don’t know” in a very casual manner all the time. The contexts are numerous; it could be factual or just that you do not want to get into a topic. Saying “I don’t know” is a great solution to so many social situations!
Socrates was famous for claiming to be the smartest person in ancient Greece for claiming he was the only one who was willing to say that “the only thing he knew was that he did not know.”
But one should be skeptical of Socrates; while he claimed not to know, he was only willing to accept certain forms of answers. For Socrates, while he did not know the correct answer, he implicitly knew that the answer must reveal some unchanging abstract essence. Ultimately, Socrates was not willing to challenge what was so obvious that it was taken for granted.
And this is precisely the challenge that haunts creativity. To do something new, we need to be able to challenge the obvious.
The hard part is that before we can challenge the obvious—before we can really get to the point of saying meaningfully, “I don’t know"—we have to uncover and disclose the obvious. And this is certainly much harder than it seems. But it can also be much easier than it seems.
This week, we want to focus on the easier. There is a creative process that flows from “I don’t know” in a very accessible and pragmatic way.
But first, it is worth saying a word about the more difficult challenge of disclosing the obvious. A big part of the obvious is the un-thought and it is unthought for the “obvious” reason, that it is unthinkable; it eludes thinking. Rather than being something simply that we have not thought about, the un-thought lives in how we are embodied, in our tools, and in our built environment. And as such, it is not hidden thought, but precisely that which must be made to be thinkable. And that is a very difficult (and perhaps even impossible task.)
For those interested in digging into this further, we highly recommend the work of Francois Jullien (this work on Jullien serves as a great introduction to his project of recovering the unthought of the West).
Lets now turn to easier matters.
To say “I don’t know” can be an immediate and powerful creative act:
Try saying this in regards to the things that surround you as you read this newsletter:
“I don’t know all that this _____________ (chair – for example) is capable of”.
This starting point opens one up a radical terrain of experimentation and becoming, the helpmate to emergent novelty. Let's explore this:
Here is a favorite story of ours that we often use at the beginning of various workshops:
We will put up an image of a traffic intersection and a nut cracker:
And we ask the question: Are these two things the same?
We will get all sorts of answers, from the literal: Yes, they are both pictures, to No, they have entirely different functions, one controls car traffic so there are no accidents and the other is a tool to crack nuts.
Now obviously both of these answers are correct. And while the first is trivial, the second with its focus on the defined explicit purpose on each, misses something more fundamental…
It turns out that some crows use traffic intersections to crack nuts.
The crows will use the wires or traffic lights themselves as a perch. And wait until the lights turn red, which stops the nut cracking tool (also understood as a “car”). Then they will fly down, place their nuts in front of the tires, and fly back up to their perch. The machine kicks into its next phase, with the lights turning green and the tools rolling over the nuts and cracking them. Then the machine resets with the light turning red, allowing the crows to fly down to eat their cracked nuts.
These crows demonstrate the creative power of acting from not knowing; they show us that we do not know all that a traffic intersection can be.
Knowing focuses on identity—existing purpose, use, meaning, etc. But identity—what something “is"—can never exhaust all that something might be able to do.
To say in this way, “I don’t know” is not a literal claim; we do know quite a bit, but we are deliberately for the sake of creativity, putting this to the side and beginning again. We are asking,
This brings us to a second aspect of not knowing: all that an intersection—or anything else can do—cannot be known in advance. Ultimately, what something has the capacity to do that is genuinely new can only be discovered via experimentation. Just looking at an intersection or a chair can only tell us so much. One needs to experiment. The radically new will emerge in the doing itself. Prior to that, it does not exist, and as something that does not exist, it cannot be known.
It is only in experimentation that one can “discover” that by dropping the chair one is sitting in from a particular height onto the specific floor in one's room makes it bounce in a very unique manner, producing an astonishing sound. No matter how long you look at the chair you will never know this. If we are talking about the new, then Knowing comes after experimentation.
Thus, to say “I don’t know” is also a method of experimental acting: I don’t know until we do something new.
We like to frame this as a very simple approach for creativity. It involves five basic tasks:
We like to call this very direct creative practice, “blocking.” It can work at any scale, from a modest act to a very ambitious project.
But it is not just an eccentric creative practice for dropping chairs. This practice of turning away from the intended and experimenting instead with the unintended to co-invent the new is a fundamental quality of all innovation. The term for this form of innovation is exaptive. (We have written extensively about exaptive innovation—what it is and how to do it. Here is a good introduction to the topic).
Blocking/exaptation is one of the fundamental drivers of novelty in evolution and in human practices. It is something found at multiple points in every human innovation. The classical examples are things like the microwave, penicillin, and viagra. These all emerged as unintended outcomes where the original goal was something quite different. But don’t let these examples fool you into thinking that the unintended only plays a role in some innovations. The unintended is part of all innovations.
Last week in the newsletter, we were discussing “the two faces of innovation” – developmental innovation and disruptive innovation—and how each of them required quite different techniques:
Most of innovation sits in the world of Developmental Innovation. Most creativity and innovation are incremental change to what exists. Innovation is rarely qualitatively new. There are many reasons for this, but a significant one is that we don’t know how radical what we are doing could become.
Or to put it in the way our colleague Sam was discussing at our visit to COMET – we are always getting the new to do the work of the old.
So often, when we do something that leads to something unintended and novel, we default to understanding it from what is most obvious to us – our default practices, concepts, and needs. In other words, we jump to knowing far too quickly.
We fail to keep difference alive…
A really instructive example of this is the story of Alexander Flemming and the invention of penicillin.
Now we all know the story of Alexander Fleming leaving some Petri dishes out by mistake and coming back from holiday to notice mold had by chance found their way onto the dishes and killed the bacteria. This unintended outcome instantly spurred the idea for the first antibiotics, and the rest is history.
And this is exactly how Alexander Flemming will later tell the story when he accepts the Nobel Prize in Medicine:
“When I woke up on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer— but that is what i did…”
But that is precisely what he did not do—in reality, no one, including Fleming, thought at the time that this work was disruptively important or really had anything significant to do with wound treatment or that it might revolutionize medicine.
How do we know this? Well in the fall of 1928, Flemming and his team wrote up a paper about their discoveries, where they carefully spelled out what they thought this discovery meant: They thought that this mold he dubbed “penicillin” was somewhat useful to help isolate bacteria for research. That was the sum total of things.
So penicillin emerges unintentionally to become a tool to help grow the right bacteria. And that is where things could have stopped.
As late as 1940, the consensus was that it had little other practical meaning or use. With the beginning of the Second World War, a few other researchers started to look into the unintended affordance it had in the right context of effectively killing bacteria in surface wounds.
Now this next phase of the invention of modern antibiotics is very interesting, full of many many exaptive twists and turns—and worth a newsletter itself. What matters here for this discussion is that Flemming and his team had something disruptively new stabilizing in front of their eyes, but they could not recognize it for anything other than a developmental innovation: another tool to isolate bacteria for research. They were making the new do the work of the old, and in doing so, they did not keep the difference that could make a disruptive difference alive.
What could Flemming have done differently? They could have used a variation of the blocking technique: What else can penicillin do? If we ignore—or “block"—the obvious uses and logics, what else can it do? But that is not what they did; they went onto very different research.
The question that you might reasonably have at this point is, this is all fine – but how would they know what direction to experiment in? Should they just block things? Where will that really lead? Does this mean that they need to know where they are trying to go first?
If this is so, then, knowing comes back into the picture in a big way.
But, practically speaking, this is not necessarily the case. For one, you don’t need to have a goal—just a general heading (we discussed this process in a couple of newsletters back (Volume 132):
And secondly, you don’t need to start by being radically disruptive. It is not going to ever happen in one big move! (And that is ok.)
The thing to remember is that this is a co-emergent process; the radically new will emerge from a process; it does not have to be there as an idea at the beginning.
Flemming needed to refuse to be solution focused and imagine that he needed to establish a clear end use for the unintended outcomes.
His disposition needed to change to be one that could trust that a voyage into the unknowable would give rise to a “path made in the walking.”
If we dig a little deeper into this blocking process with Flemming (see diagram below),
But what if they did all of this and then, instead of stopping there with their solution, they used this simple blocking process for co-emergence?
Let's try this out: Now they engage with their solution, disclose its intended purpose, etc:
But from there (see below):
Critically, in all of these experiments (with which they are co-evolving) they are asking themselves, “has this now crossed a qualitative threshold and developed a novel/disruptive approach to our matter of concern?”:
At some point, they would. And things would shift from a developmental innovation space to a disruptive innovation space. The new would now be doing the work of the new and developing a genuinely novel approach to their matter of concern. Here, practices would shift into stabilizing processes and outcomes to make things real. But that is for another time.
Now, this process is not a guarantee for disruptive innovation; innovation as a radically open process has no guarantees. But with this example, we hope to show that blocking can be a graspable, pragmatic, and effective tool/process for innovation that allows one to go beyond the known, and avoid the trap of making the new do the work of the old.
With such an approach, we can confidently activate the practice of “I don’t know," of strategic non-knowing, of “beginning again from zero” as a viable technique and ethos for disruptive innovation.
Have a beautiful week, experimentally dwelling in the radical practice of actively not knowing.
Till next volume 136,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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