What is a Transversal Thicket?

Innovation begins thick and wide. It does not have a single source that sets it all into motion – there are no silver bullets. It is never beginning in one thing, one idea, one experiment, or one person. The linear and future backwards approaches to creativity that begin with projective ideation cannot objectively lead to the new (see Emergence). Creative novelty emerges from an already ongoing dynamic, rich, diverse, and deeply horizontally entangled ecology where novel possibilities of new relevance realization can co-emerge in startling ways. Of course, in human engagements with creative processes, there will be many unique moments of insight and inspiration – but they are never separate from a thick and wide entangled milieu.

This dynamic, rich, thick space of diverse becomings is our ongoing reality. As a novel “matter of concern/curiosity” develops in the midst of ongoing life, new transjective possibilities begin to emerge as relevant and transversally connected.

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Creativity can never be reduced to a single point (as the double diamond approach to creativity might imagine). But instead, it will be the thick and wide transformation of many entangled ecosystems – that will always remain a thick, wide, and deeply transversally entangled rhizome without end (see Transversal).

For creativity, the question is not “how to have a great idea” or imagine a revolutionary outcome. No, creativity asks us to collectively engage in ways that find, support, develop, collaborate, and co-evolve with an already existing transversal thicket such that it can configure in ways that can spontaneously allow for the co-emergence of novel adventures of relevance creation.

See Also: Transversal, Thickets, Rhizomes, Enabling and Stabilizing Configurations