What Is Creativity If It Is Not an Individual Idea?

Creativity is the processes by which something new and different comes into being. Those processes live in the ongoing activity of reality: the Big Bang, the formation of the solar system, water, life, and plate tectonics are all outcomes of creative processes. Keeping things the same is also creative. A chair staying a chair, a species persisting, or a business running its daily operations each takes continuous, distributed feedback work. There are no non-creative activities, only the question of which creative processes are coming to the fore. The picture of a single mind producing a novel idea and later struggling to make it real is a recent and culturally specific error.

How Does Emergence Change the Way We Think About Cause and Effect?

Emergence replaces the Western model of cause and effect built on reduction, essentialism, and linearity, the logic of icebergs, pyramids, onions, and great-man histories. In complex systems, diverse processes come together in tightly interconnected relations, nonlinear feedback produces an outcome irreducible to the components, and that outcome then transforms the components. Flight is a good example: cut open a wing and you will not find flight, because it emerges from feathers, hollow bones, thermals, winds, shores, and much more. Once the outcome changes its own components, the effect is also a cause, and the chicken-or-egg question loses its point. We are looping, bioenculturated beings, and the layered picture of nature versus nurture cannot hold.

What Is an Enabling Constraint?

An enabling constraint is the way an emergent whole creates, stabilizes, and limits what its parts can do. Flush a toilet and the water molecules, which could move in any direction, organize into a whirlpool. The swirl comes from the relations as a whole, and the popular story about the Earth's rotation is a myth. The water gains a capacity it did not have, and loses the option to go any direction. Office culture works the same way: a limited range of behavior shows up because of the relational properties people have by being integrated into that organization. What has been configured can be reconfigured.

What Are Affordances and Worlds?

Affordances are what James Gibson, founder of ecological psychology, called the directly experienced potentials for action that emerge between a skilled body and an environment. A trained swimmer jumping into a pool meets water as a liquid that slows a fall and supports floating. A marine bacterium in the same water is bumped around as if in an ocean of marbles. Jump from a 2,000-foot diving board, and that water acts like concrete. Nothing in the water changed. Each relational configuration gives rise to a different, real experience, and we call these different worlds. Worlds are also made: a swimmer learning to dive builds new skills and invents flippers, weights, and snorkels, and every living being co-shapes its environment.

How Do Assemblages and Apparatuses Shape Who We Are?

We find ourselves thrown, in Martin Heidegger's term, into assemblages of tools, built environments, concepts, regulations, and practices, the term Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used. Isabelle Stengers writes, "I do not exist and then enter into assemblages," and adds that agency belongs to the assemblage as such. The historian Barbara Duden spent years with an 18th-century German doctor's records of 1,700 women patients and concluded that her own perception of her body was epoch-specific. Since we always live in several partially coordinated assemblages at once, we turn to Michel Foucault's dispositif, or apparatus: a heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, institutions, architecture, laws, and scientific statements that produces a particular way of being alive. Creativity, at this scale, means changing configurations, and debating frameworks leaves them in place. We are of a world, many worlds exist, and other worlds are possible.

How Do You Introduce Complexity Thinking to Organizations?

You introduce complexity thinking to organizations by immersing a trusted group in an embodied experience of an emergent creative process and having them unpack it in their own terms. Lectures and debates invite disagreement. Jason adds that even after a workshop where the outcome came from experiment and doing, participants often revert to "I had an idea," so change takes more than one touch point and a slow unfolding. Other questions widened the discussion. Stephen raised Annemarie Mol's account of a disease enacted as several realities in one hospital, and we connected it to skateboarders who come to share what a planter edge means through practice. Katie asked about quantum mechanics in popular culture, which we treated as an analogy that shifts the conceptual affordance landscape. Vanessa asked how place-based practice differs between stable rural communities and churning inner cities, which led to geocreativity and to Deleuze and Guattari on territorialization and deterritorialization.

Watch the Full Talk

Watch the full talk and discussion on YouTube from House of Complexity.