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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Vol 130! One or Many Innovations: Creativity is Above, Below and Beside
Good Morning converging divergences,
We hope your Friday brings a sense of accomplishment—a good creative week that has co-evolved with you, and now the weekend is close.
We arrived in Austria yesterday (two days earlier than planned thanks to the Lufthansa strike in Germany, thus this week’s tardy publishing of this newsletter, but we digress) to prepare for a week-long deep dive into green innovation with our partners-in-crime at the University of Graz. It is enjoyable to be back in this region of West-Asia.
This Sunday, with the rise of the new moon, marks the beginning of Ramadan. We wish everyone peace in these very trying times.
This week, we are going to focus on the question of “what scales matter to creativity and innovation?” and to be able to do this, we are going to bring back the example of the invention of flight to make some of our key points more salient.
Today, we want to challenge the scale at which we consider creativity.
What do we mean by this? When we look for examples of human creativity, we often look for the answer at the scale of an individual or a team that was first to make something. For example, we look for the first to “discover” a medicine—Alexander Flemming and penicillin. Or the first to build a device—Thomas Edison and the light bulb . Hence, it would be fair to say that the scale that we most often consider creativity at is at the scale of the individual, or perhaps, if we are of a more generous nature, the team.
In addition to focusing on the scale of the individual or team the story is often framed in the language of a competition – who will be first? In our creativity narratives, we do tend to focus on the winners, and we equate them with being the true creators in contrast to those who did not succeed. And in this framing, we tend to make a judgment on who is more and who is less creative, with the assumption being that those who came first must have been more creative.
A classical example of this, and one that we have ourselves focused on for other reasons, is the Wright Brothers. Orville and Wilbur Wright were the first to develop human powered flight. And thus they were the “inventors of flight” and are considered more creative and more ingenious than their rivals who ultimately “lost” the race to be first.
We have spent considerable effort in previous newsletters to debunk the idea that creativity is some “thing” inside of creatives – and that one could have more or less of “it”. Creativity is not in anything, rather, it is a relational property that emerges from the specific conditions of the stable relational dynamics of a network—an assemblage of humans, tools, practices, environments, etc.
So, while it is clear that we cannot say that the Wright Brothers were more creative than their rivals, would it be correct to say that their “assemblage” was more creative than the others? This is the question that we want to focus on this week. In other words, is the right scale to look at creativity that of the immediate assemblage of an individual inventor?
Now, while Wilbur and Orville's approach and their assemblage were astonishingly inventive, they did not do this by themselves. This much is obvious; as Newton famously stated, we all “stand on the shoulders of giants.” Many others prior to the Wright Brothers contributed to flight. Of course, no one doubts this, nor does anyone hide this.
And of course, all of the historians of flight make a list of these contributions: X developed box kites, Y theories of lift, and Z came up with compact motors, etc. Historians have traced backwards all the critical aspects of their design or approach to the work of others. But the invention of flight (or anything) cannot be reduced to the simple addition of all that came before. Again, this point has been clearly articulated; in fact, it is an obsessive focus of most historians of their work: “The Wright Brothers uniquely and creatively brought all of these disparate strands of research together in a way no one else could, and that is their genius.”
While we would not go so far as to ascribe genius to anyone for any particular characteristic, there is merit in considering how things came together relationally in very unique ways in their assemblage. The emergence of novel macro level powers (such as flight) and possibilities is irreducible to the micro level components; rather, they emerge because of the specific relational nature of the system. Which is to say, no matter how consequential any of the historical components that the Wright Brothers inherit, we cannot ascribe flight to their mere existence and collective proximity. Flight rather, is the emergent potentiality of the emergent processes that, while dependent upon the component parts, are irreducible to them. Thus, in considering the invention of flight, we do need to shift scale “upward” towards the assemblage. But is this “mezzo” scale now the “right” scale?
To answer this question, we have to come back to critically reconsider what happens when innovation is framed as a race between possible geniuses to solve the puzzle of how to put together what came before. While this model makes for thrilling narratives—the race, the tension, the triumph of genius, etc.—does this zero sum game of competition help us understand how anything novel actually came about?
If we look at the actual “race” to be the first to heavier than air human powered flight, things get very interesting: There are a lot of people who claim to have flown prior to the Wright Brothers.
What should we make of this? Are they all lying for the sake of fame, glory, and fortune? And yes, while it does appear that a few were lying, but even in these cases, it is hard to be certain. Nonetheless, even if we exclude the possible con artists, it appears likely that many other innovators flew during the similar period that the Wright Brothers did. And thus it is reasonable to argue that someone else might have been the first to fly.
Now, we are not claiming that historians got it wrong and the Wright Brothers were not the first. Rather, we are simply making the observation that historians themselves are working from the realization that they cannot dismiss these arguments out of hand. And we understand the criticism that most of these were not successful—they were, for the most part, failures. But to get caught up on this point is to miss that it was all imperfect flight.
Settling the argument about who was first is not critical to us. Rather what does interest us is the question: from the perspective of understanding innovation, how should we understand the fact that there were others who either were on the cusp of flight, flew prior to the Wright Brothers in a slightly less controlled manner, or flew very shortly after them?
Looking at the period starting a year before and a year after the Wright Brothers first flight, many others managed to fly. Now most, if not all of these planes had serious limitations. Including, let us not forget, the Wright Brothers (no one flys planes of the sort they developed; their approach was abandoned for the most part within a decade). At this early moment, some could not take off, others could not steer, others could only stay in the air briefly, others had difficulty in making a controlled landing, others stalled, etc. It was a risky and challenging time; the paths towards a robust flight logic were being created one experiment at a time—as Machado says, they were “making the path in the walking.” Nothing existed prior…
From the approach to innovation that views it as a competition, all of these others simply become curious and entertaining footnotes in history, or lost causes championed at the fringes of the story. If we put aside this heroic race narrative, how should we understand this larger historical moment? Did the Wright Brothers succeed because they were the true geniuses? Is it that they were lucky? Did they stand on the shoulders of the “right” giants?
For us, none of this really matters, the problem is that we are misplacing the focus by looking at them alone and in competition with others. This scale and focus that the competition narrative utilizes hides from us something far more interesting and important about creativity:
What if the conditions that were broadly shared across the assemblages of many innovators gave rise to a semi-stable field of propensities that would allow flight to emerge along multiple immanent pathways?
What if, instead of seeing this as a zero sum game between opposing inventors each possessing more or less individual genius or unique more or less creative approaches + assemblages, we understood the total field of all of these actors and assemblages as the emergent source of creativity and flight?
This scale – a scale that we can call that of an extended dynamic but “meta-stable field”, is the one that most often goes unseen and unconsidered. At the time that the Wright Brothers were experimenting, there was a large, well networked set of teams, environments, embodied practices, tools, materials, skills, concepts, and diverse ethos and approaches. This was by no means a homogenous ecosystem; there was great variation in all aspects; it was a richly heterogeneous, open, and dynamic field. The heterogeneous but robust nature of the conditions was critical. Approaches were stabilizing around varying approaches and morphologies (number of wings, shape of wings and bodies), modes of propulsion, stearing, take-off and landing. That there were very distinct possible virtual approaches emerging is what the term “meta-stable field” defines. Rather than there being only one possible approach to flight there are multiple approaches that the system will allow.
From this perspective we can offer a different answer to the question of what scale should organizations interested in creativity focus on?
The first, focus on internal intrinsically individual qualities is, despite being the scale most often focused on, a non-starter as it is based on a series of utterly false assumptions about what it is to be a human. But, equally false is forcing the choice of scale to one scale is a false choice. Once we see the critical importance of the scale of the “meta-stable field” – this does not mean we should now only work at this scale. Rather, we need to recognize that the only way to work at this scale is to strategically move across and through differing scales. We need an approach to innovation that works, as John Protevi puts it, “above, beside, and below" the a assemblage of individual/team practices:
And this is where we want to bring back what we have been discussing in the last few newsletters: how can we compare this meta-field that gave rise to human powered flight with our egg cooking example?Is the “kitchen” comparable to the Wright Brothers Assemblage of dunes and winds of Kitty Hawk + Box Kites + Bird Soaring + Wing Torquing, etc.?
No. While this might seem like an obvious comparison, but it would be to miss that the “kitchen” and its total field of virtual possibilities is analogous to the meta-field of all of those engaged in the invention of flight.
It is important to remember that the “kitchen” in this example is an instantiation of both an abstraction and a concretization of the existing meta-stable field of all ways to cook an egg. A specific cook entering the kitchen with embodied skills, choosing certain tools and equipment, and bringing cultural and historical practices to bear is analogous to the Wright Brothers and their assemblage. The big difference between the kitchen and flight is that the kitchen is a highly established meta-stable field, while in the early 1900's, the meta-stable field of flight was being progressively invented/determined via experimental practices.
If we return to our visual example from last week’s newsletter and walk through the components with the dual perspective (this is (1) a meta-field, and (2) it is analogous to the total field that gave rise to flight), we can now see the importance of working at differing scales – and especially of recognizing the importance of zooming out to working at the scale of the total field.
At the meso scale we encounter the actual physical elements of the assemblage:
This is nested within and the larger field of practices, concepts tools and environments of a specific historical apparatus –
As we return to the visualization approach from last week we need to add one more scale or level – that of “below”. One critical aspect that we have not as yet focused on is what lies “below” the kitchen: The “kitchen” consists of the relation-dominant assemblage of cook + equipment + materials + techniques that have stabilized into processes of cooking. These processes are the outcome of iterative experiments that progressively stabilized the self-organizing propensities of materials (water, oil, eggs, metals, etc.) into a landscape of affordances. The kitchen is drawing upon – and drawing out the self organizing properties of an egg and how it is transformed by the vary applications of heat. These processes can thus be said to pre-exist and underpin the cooking processes. And it is because of this we can frame them as occurring “below” the level or scale of the kitchen assemblage:
The same set of processes and scales can be seen in the meta-field of of any assemblage – or of the emergence of flight:
…and these networked processes give rise to an emergent process that transformatively impacts the affordances/constraints of the assemblage:
…In a looping manner, the whole system is progressively determined and stabilized into a virtual set of potential outcomes:
…and as potentially very different particular novel outcomes are actualized (as just one possibility/actualization of the virtual field of possibilities). For example the Wright Brothers plane the “kitty hawk”. And with each novel outcome there is a counter-effecting of the existing assemblage and pushing it towards further new emergent processes and states:
The whole system exhibits a “metastability” and allows for very diverse realizations of the virtual field of possibilities, of which the Wright Brothers plane, the “Kitty Hawk”, is but one possibility that was actualized via an experimental process of progressive determination of differences. But it was not the only one that was possible – or at the cusp of also being realized.
So, are the Wright Brothers, by being the first to fly, the inventors of flight? Or are they the ones that experimentally progressively determined and actualized one of the immanent possibilities in a far larger emerging virtual field of possibilities? Who invented flight then? Would it not be more helpful to see this as having a non-individual – and even non-human answer? Is this invention not rather the outcome of the emerging propensities of an assemblage of assemblages that cannot be reduced to an one person, group of people or singular assemblages.
As we come to the end of this week's newsletter – What might this mean in terms of organizations and innovation? For us this changes what needs to be the logic and focus of innovation. Here are some of our key suggestions:
We would love to hear your thoughts on what this means for the development of a creative practice. Please feel free to email or reach out to talk. And have a great week working in and of multiple scales!
Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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