Definition of Change

What is Change?

Change is everywhere. Everything flows. But this does not mean that there is no stability or constancy in our reality. In our everyday lives, we see things staying the same. Your dining room table will still be there, looking pretty much the same when you wake up tomorrow.  

So what does this mean for the idea that “change is everywhere," that “everything flows,” and that everything is processes all the way up and all the way down? 

Yes, at every moment things are in the making—being created—it is just that these processes of change are ones of near repetition. These are incremental processes of change. Sameness is an astonishing creative achievement.

But not everything is in continuity; it is not the case that all change is quantitative. To assume this is a fundamental mistake. Change and creativity are not reducible to the “more or the less." In radical contrast to qualitative change stands qualitative change. This is a change in kind. The vernacular saying “you cannot compare apples and oranges” gets at this distinction. 

‍Qualitative Change involves discontinuity and rupture. What once applied can no longer be applied. History and culture are full of qualitative changes misunderstood and miscategorized as just extreme variations of quantitative change. Everywhere continuity hides qualitative difference. And everywhere change and the creative processes involved in change are reduced to continuity, incrementalism, and the quantitative.

To properly and fully engage with creative practices, we need to carefully categorize change in its two forms: change-in-degree and change-in-kind:

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These two forms of change are radically distinct, and the major problem in the world of human creative practices is that this is neither well recognized nor acted upon. Most methods and approaches to creativity and innovation simply focus on change-in-degree without even recognizing that there is another form of change. As such, we have many well-developed techniques for developmental change (Design Thinking, Brain Storming, Ideation, etc.)—but very few actual approaches to disruptive forms of change and innovation. This form of change is poorly understood in general and historically has not been the focus of innovation practices. 

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This can be taken further; most of our practices, environments, and sensibilities are entangled with change-in-degree (see above diagram). To effectively engage with change-in-kind processes and disruptive creativity, it is not enough to shift techniques; we need to develop new ecologies of distinct practices, environments, and sensibilities.

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Disruptive change in being qualitatively new and different has significant unique challenges to creative practices. The primary challenge is that we simply cannot ideate or think of the radically new. These forms of novelty are ones that do not exist, nor do they reference what exists. The techniques needed involve forms of experimental making in advance of knowing. To engage with novel forms of change-in-kind is to work in the dark where there is nothing to be known until it emerges. Such techniques and logics stand in sharp distinction from the more familiar forms associated with developmental forms of creativity and change. Where developmental creativity can focus on an incremental outcome, disruptive creativity is always, by definition, a practice of novel worldmaking.

‍See: Process, Change in Degree, Change in Kind, Difference, Worldmaking, Worlds