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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 131! The Circumstances are Creative...
Good morning emergent beings of the meta-scale,
Today's newsletter comes to you courtesy of 9,773 meters or 32,068 ft – our cruising altitude over the North Atlantic. We just completed a very intense series of workshops on Green Innovation with our colleagues Elisabeth Kaufmann and Sebastian Ouschan at the Unicorn in Graz Austria. And in a few days we are off to a Conference in San Diego to lead a workshop and discussion on an emergent approach to prototyping.
The concerns of these workshops and what we have been exploring in the newsletter are very closely connected: How to work with and through the dynamics of a creative ecosystems to participate in the emergence of more creative rather than less creative outcomes.
Last week, in the newsletter, we challenged some of the standard approaches to the question “who is creative?” and who should get credit for creative outcomes. Radically challenging and rethinking this question is critical to understanding creativity.
Depending on who or what becomes the answer to this question, the focus of creative practices totally changes. For example, in almost all cases we answer the question “who is creative” with a focus on an individual. And because of this focus, the question leads to an approach to creativity where we are always left structurally looking for certain answers to some version of this question: What unique powers and skills did the individual posses to make this happen?
And our focus thus comes to rest upon the properties the individual posses:
Today this question and these answers have given rise to a whole industry of consultants and technicians dedicated to the development of internal individual human properties in the name of management and creativity. But all of this is a distraction. These supposed intrinsic properties of individuals are actually qualities of extrinsic circumstances.
Let’s take the term at the beginning of the list, “courage” as an example to explore. Is courage the property of an individual? In popular culture we certainly talk that way – we commend people for their unique individual bravery in the face of circumstances.
But, what if people are not intrinsically one way or another? What if courage or creativity is rather the outcome of the circumstance – and not something done in the face of the circumstances? What if courage is something that arises as a potential because the propensities or conditions allowed for by the dynamics of the situation gave rise to it? Francois Jullien, writing about the work of Chinese Philosophers meditating on Efficacy put it this way:
“For what counts is no longer what we oursleves personally invest in the situation, which imposes itself upon the world thanks to our efforts, but rather the objective conditioning that results from the circumstances… The Chinese strategists go on to point out that if strength and weakness are a matter of the situation, courage and cowardice are a matter of the situation’s inherent potential.”
Courage, like creativity are properties that we ascribe to individuals – and in fact, they are claimed to be the very special properties that only truly great individuals posses. But, what if they are not this? What if they are actually the outcomes of the circumstance? And furthermore what if they are not our individual responsibility?
Here Jullian goes on:
“As one commentator, Li Quan glosses, if the troops obtain the strategic potential, “then cowards are brave”; if they lose it, “the the brave are cowardly.” The treatise goes on to make the following point: a good general seeks success in the potential of the situation rather than demanding it from the men… Depending on whether or not he knows how to exploit the potential of the situation, he renders them cowardly or brave. In other words Wang Xi says, courage and cowardice constitute “modifications” of that potential.” (A Treatise on Efficacy)
And what is true of courage is equally true of all the so-called intrinsic properties: mindset, will, leadership, wisdom, and creativity. These are potentials of the situation.
In our contemporary context, we live in a world where we have developed an endless stream of techniques and consultants that focus on these so-called intrinsic properties – promising to help individuals augment and develop something that they cannot possess – because they are not the kinds of this that any individual could ever posses.
With this focus most innovation and organizational consultants are absolutely barking up the wrong tree. Focusing in on the individual and augmenting their internal intrinsic capacities does not help in regards to creativity or organizational success. Willpower, personality types, mindsets, brains, etc.; not only are none of these relevant to furthering creativity – they are ultimately a harmful distraction.
So where should our focus be if our goal is to expand the creative capacities of the circumstances?
Should it be on the circumstances of the most successful of creatives? Should we look more closely at the “winners” in the game of creativity? This is another key strategy we see everywhere today. We have biographies of Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and the Wright Brothers that promise to reveal the secrets of why they succeeded in their creative endeavors where others failed. And while some of these biographies fall for all of the cliched tropes of mindset, courage, and leadership. Many do not. David McCullough’s biography of the Wright Brothers is a great example of a biography that does not. It does an exceptional job on focusing on what Jullien calls the “potential of the circumstances”.
But, should we be so closely focused on finding the circumstances of just the winner in any creative challenge? For us, this is equally problematic – in jumping to focus on the winner we have arbitrarily singled out one area in the larger field of potential and confused it with the total space of creative potentiality. When classical Chinese Philosophers of Efficacy talk about the potential of the circumstances they are discussing this expanded field – and never simply the circumstances of one of the players. (Note: this was the focus of last week’s newsletter).
Creative outcomes emerge from the conditions that are broadly shared across the assemblages of many innovators. This shared ecosystem gives rise to a semi-stable field of propensities that have many distinct potentialities. One of which is what becomes the “first”. But this first is not the cause, nor necessarily the most important aspect of the total field of potentiality.
We need to stop seeing creativity as a zero sum game between opposing inventors each possessing more or less individual genius or unique more or less creative approaches + assemblages. We need to understand the total field of all of these actors and assemblages as the emergent source of creativity.
“Furthermore, a situation can never be pinned down. It is not a place, not a site. Pulled this way and that by its polarity, its configuration is constantly changing; it is always oriented by a propensity.” (Francois Jullien).
This brings us to one last critical aspect that we left implicit in our conclusions last week: Creative outcomes co-emerge with the changing dynamics of the field. They successively emerge in an iterative processes of reciprocal determination and stabilization of differential elements. The dynamics of the larger semi-stable field of propensities and its potential outcomes cannot be predicted wholly in advance. Why? It is dynamic, and with each experiment it is changing in qualitatively new and novel ways. This immanent field of propensities is itself evolving. Our probes and experiments are shifting things and leading to new situations that creatively constrain outcomes into new unpredictable pathways.
Because of this radical innovation/creativity that is engaged in developing something qualitatively new cannot work via a goal directed planning process.
The logic of a goal directed planning process is to work in a linear “future backwards” manner: this is a model that starts with a clear fully worked out future goal and then it carefully works out each step needed to move from where we are today to the final clear innovation goal. This model works via the imposition of a clear plan on the emergent dynamics of the circumstances. Because of this, future backwards planning casts a ridgid net over the dynamics of the situation in a way that can never come to terms with the novelty of co-emergent action.
Last week we said that there were five key lessons for creativity that came out of this approach. But as we explored these topics this week in our Green Innovation workshops we realized that we need to edit some, and add a few more (the new are in italics). And so, sitting in the plane, looking out north to Greenland far below, Jason and I discussed the week, reflecting on the emergent dynamics that stabilized in the workshops. Here is our new provisional list of ten:
Its been a long week full of great developments. And as the plane banks south with the curve of New England I pause in writing to read the last part of Jullien’s wonderful “A Treatise on Efficacy”:
“To summarize the difference between Western and Chinese thought: one constructs a model that is then projected onto the circumstances, which implies that the situation is momentarily “frozen”. The other relies on the situation as on a disposition is known to be constantly evolving. It is a disposition that functions as a device… this disposition-device does not carry the same meaning as we in the west ascribe to it… Rather, it means something that we now see to be back-to-front (from the Western point of view): namely a particular configuration that can be manipulated and that in itself produces an effect.” (Francois Jullien)
So – to come back to the question that started this newsletter: “who should get credit for creative outcomes?” Should it not be the circumstances?
Have a wonderful week messing with the circumstances such that more creativity rather than less emerges in surprising ways.
Till next volume 132,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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