Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 133! Innovation - Organizing for Efficacious Circumstances and Propensities...
Good morning events of these circumstances,
Over the next few weeks, we are doing a number of workshops and keynotes on the topic of organizations, leadership and innovation. These events are meant to get into things at an introductory and high level—nothing too detailed and nothing too theoretical. This is a place where we like to operate. I know—it might seem a surprise from reading our newsletters: Here, with you, we obviously like to go into things in great detail and develop concepts and theoretical approaches. For us, theory is a practice that emerges from hands-on experimental practices, extends out into research practices, and joins back into the hands-on world of everyday practice. This relay across differing forms of practice is critical, and we use the newsletter to explore these more conceptual and theoretical aspects of creativity and innovation.
But our approach to almost all of our external engagements, whether it is advising, teaching, workshopping, coaching, or consulting, is quite different. In these engagements, we privilege active engagement as the mode of learning—real, hands-on full-bodied participatory exercises, games, experiments, tests, and scenarios. Most often, we will begin such learning engagements by framing the context briefly with a tangible but high-level question and its relevance. Then we will launch into a carefully crafted experiential engagement, after which we will take the necessary time to unpack it. Our goal in the unpacking is that the participants develop their own conceptual tools, processes, and language—in a sense, their own practice of theory development. And then we continue, via further exercises and discussions, with the goal of connecting their nascent theorizing to existing theories, concepts, and practices—in a dialog where both will change. And from this, their practices, environments, and tools can change.
This brings us back to our internal discussions and preparations for the next set of workshops and keynotes on organizations, leadership, and innovation. In our effort to keep things simple and tangible, we have been discussing “where should one start?”
Last week in the newsletter, we introduced an exercise we often use to start certain workshops. This was an exercise that focuses on co-emergence in contrast to ideating and prototyping.
This week we want to go into some of what we are thinking about as a possible way to introduce our approach to innovation via some key high level and general considerations for organizations and leadership to consider.
Our thought is to use one of our favorite analogies as a starting point:
Let's proceed by way of an analogy:
When you see a bird in flight, where is “flight”?
Is it a property that can be found in the bird?
Is it a property that can be found in a part of the bird, say the wing or a feather?
Certainly the feather plays an important role in flight, but a feather by itself does not do anything, nor would a wing. Both are extremely relevant for bird flight, but alone or even together, they do not possess the “property” of flight.
What then possesses this property of flight?
Perhaps you might imagine the bird as a whole and distinct being that possesses this property. But can a bird by itself fly?
Can the bird flap its wings and lift off without gravity or a very specific atmosphere? Most definitely not.
Bird flight happens in an enabling and determining relations between the bird and the atmosphere, plus gravity.
And if we take a moment to observe birds in flight, we will see that they are using winds, and thermals to fly. They are using trees, cliffs, meadows, waters, and waves to gain certain flight capacities.
So where is flight?
It is most definitely not in the wing or a feather, nor is it “in” the bird. In fact, capacities like flight are not in anything. Rather, flight is a set of propensities of the specific irreducible dynamic configuration of the bird-environment assemblage.
Capacities like flight are wholly relational; they are never properties that can be found in things. Capacities are of the specific configuration of “assemblages” (networks of unlike things):
So, what has this to do with organizations, leadership,, and innovation?
We can draw some analogies to explore how this scenario might help us radically reconfigure approaches to managing and leading organizations for innovation.
We can ask a similar question: Where is creativity?
And there is a common answer: It is in the individual.
This is a very general assumption held across most of our standard approaches to creativity and innovation. The individual is creative.
Which is to say: creativity is conceived of as the internal property of certain individuals. (Many now take this further to argue that creativity is the internal property of certain brain configurations.)
But, creativity is a capacity—the capacity by which the new emerges. It, like flight, is not a thing that can be possessed.
Thus, is this “internal individualistic property” approach to creativity really the correct approach? Is it ever correct to frame the individual as creative or innovative?
Again, like with our example of flight, we need to seriously ask: where is the capacity to be creative? Is it in anything?
Is creativity or innovation a property that can be found inside a person or a part of a person (say, the brain)?
Following our analogy of birds and flight, the clear answer is no.
Just like flight, human creativity and innovation are emergent propensities of the specific configuration of people in, and of, a richly diverse, and active environment.
Thus, the prevalent contemporary model of internalized creativity is deeply flawed because it is looking for creativity (and, by extension, innovation) in all the wrong places. This model turns inward when it should turn outward. It seeks essences when it should seek relations.
We can easily think of the multiple ways organizations and leaders focus on the “internal qualities” of individuals, especially in regards to creativity. Often, the approach can be found working at its simplest: identify “creatives” and give them space.
All of this leads to a profoundly mistaken leadership and organizational focus on the internal properties of individuals: inherent character, internal disposition, fundamental mindset, genetic disposition to creativity, etc. These need to be discovered, identified, and measured via individual evaluation via various tests, from “personality” tests to “creativity quotient” tests. And despite these tests being shown time after time to be arbitrary to the same degree a horoscope is, they are still regularly administered.
In relation to "personality," perhaps a simple example will help: if someone is quiet, this does not signal a personality type; rather, there are any number of situational reasons for this, from power differentials, past experience, culture, time at the job, their mind being on things outside of work, etc. Rather than focusing on identifying and rectifying “personality” traits, an organization can focus on developing multiple viable alternative ways of interacting—in this case, a communication system with multiple forms of engagement and communication, etc.
We can extend this bird flight analogy further: no meaningful capacity can be found as an internal property of some thing or someone.
It is useful at this point to explicate this internalizing approach a bit further: This approach of internalization is one that contrasts the internal, deep and essential from the shallow, surface and trivial. It is ultimately an essentialist model:
Sadly, if you look at the literature on organizations, leadership, and management in general, there is still quite a bit of literature that has such an “essentialist” focus. This is most easily identifiable in the constant search for some “internal core essential feature.” We see this in various “onion models,” as well as all the pyramid models:
…And all of the Iceberg models:
What is to be done?
A key shift in approach that an organization should make is:
Rather than focusing on the internal property of individual’s or any form of essentialism – an organization's focus should be on things and relations.
From the perspective of this relational approach: Innovation is a question of the composition of configurations of assemblages. For example: if things (the assemblage) are held in a certain relation (configuration) via the work of bringing things together (composition), then it is more likely that what happened yesterday will happen again today. And if we change the configuration by the work of innovating a new ordering (composition) of the same assemblage of things, quite different outcomes—and perhaps more innovative outcomes, will be possible.
With this approach, we also start to see directly how dynamic systems have their own agency and logic. And we see that we have moved far from the normal models of action focused on linear causality.
Now, does this mean that as a leader or an organization you are not interested in people and how they might feel or think? Of course not. It is just that how people feel and think are the co-emergent outcomes of the composition of an assemblage. For example, there is a growing body of research that suggests people feel better when in contact with forest environments, which has led to practices like the Japanese activity of “forest bathing.” Thus, if we configure practices, routines, and environments (an assemblage) so that they allow for the activity of getting out into a forest, we will more likely change how many people feel for the better. Shorter workdays, more autonomy, rich informal networks—these are also compositional configuration elements.
Sensing, thinking, feeling, and knowing emerge from working in and of specific configurations of specific assemblages.
One more example: A lot has been made of mindsets, especially the supposed importance of a “growth mindset” for creativity and innovation. Ignoring for one moment the growing research that debunks this “growth mindset” approach, what is the point of a growth mindset if the organizational structures do not effectively allow for timely responsiveness to creative changes?
From our perspective, the organizational question has to be: what environment, tools, practices, processes, infrastructure, rituals—what configuration will lead in general towards the emergence of innovations that moves towards your organizations general strategic direction?
All of this leads us to a second key practical aspect that we can draw out of this bird flight analogy: these “things” in the relational assemblage are not just human. When we talk about the importance of changing interactions, we are not just talking about human interactions. Specific relational environments have agency. So do tools. And so do the many non-human beings that participate. All of these profoundly relationally shape us, our thoughts and the propensities of assemblages (of which they make up the vast majority of things.) We have written extensively about this elsewhere.)Beyond the physical—concepts, processes, and rituals—these are also key components of the assemblage.
For our purposes, a very simple example will suffice: How can the configuration and material logic of an office shape innovation propensities? The now standard office layout is a type of donut: open workspace in the middle, and offices around the outside.
Meetings happen in the private and removed offices on the outside perimeter. Things get pinned up, projected, and whiteboards written on. Then, when the meeting ends, everything goes away and becomes invisible. And only those who were there have access to what happened. This configuration and material logic does not enable the continuous reflection on a project by anyone, nor the spontaneous conversation or collaborative experimentation. What if innovation projects stayed visible and were discussed in more public spaces?
What new configuration of space, equipment, processes, and rituals would be required for this to become a reality?
Here, it is not the people who are directly the focus of the creative recomposition. It is the environment—the specific shape of the room and how it can be configured and activated. The specifics of tools in these spaces are: chairs, tables, whiteboards, floor treatments, projectors, doors, walls, windows, hallway size, access rights, rituals of meetings, processes of organizing workflows, pens, paper, digital resources, location of coffee, openness to the lunch area… and more.
We don’t bring up this example because it is profound or our alternative groundbreaking, rather because it is simple and obvious. And as such, it becomes clear: organizations and leaders need to tend to the space and agency of things: we need to be making tools, environments, practices, processes, concepts, and rituals, as well as inviting in the right non-humans (the trees for forest bathing, and the gut microbes for mood health, etc.) such that the assemblage is configured to have more innovative propensities than not.
If we go back to our bird and flight story, it was never just about the components; you could assemble all of the components necessary for bird flight: feathers, bones, muscles, gravity, moon, sun, atmosphere, environments, etc.—and still not have flight. It would just be a random mess of stuff. It is not about simply assembling the correct list of things. Sure, it is about the things, yes, but in the correct relation.
Relations and relationality is not just that things are connected in some formal manner, like all the stuff piled up on my dining room table: books, glasses, computers, papers, cables, mail, etc. What our flight example shows us is that reality is irreducibly relational and that the specifics of these relations are determinate. Thus, there is nothing that is not in a determining relation; nothing exists separate from determining relations.
What a thing “is” is not found inside of itself; it is the outcome of a vast web of its determining relations.
The term “relation” can be nebulous. So what is a relationship? Relations, in a very simple sense, are practices. They are specific determining and enabling practices.
Here is a wonderful, simple example: love. Love is a relation between beings. And yes the beings pre-existed this relation but love makes them something far different than they were before. This is what is meant by the terms “determining” and “enabling.” The love that emerges has an agency; it enables and determines certain propensities. With love, the specific relational capacities of the separate beings are what allow the relation to emerge, but once it does emerge—once they “fall in love," their love takes on a life of its own and re-makes the participants. And love is nothing but a vast set of practices.
Now we could get far more complex with all of this and dive into a discussion of emergence, affordances, agency, etc. But the power of this seemingly simple analogy from flight is that it effectively disrupts the certainty of the essentialist approach: Is creativity really something internal to the individual? Now we worry and get curious, perhaps we should focus more on relations, configurations and emergent propensities of the assemblage?
If so, then we can begin to experiment:
How could an organization interested in becoming more innovative focus on efficaciously configuring assemblages of people, tools, environments, practices, habits, organizational structures and rituals both formally and informally such that the propensities of novelty emerging are more likely than not?
We are going to leave it there for now. Have a wonderful week experimenting with your vastly entangled relational subjectivity that extends far into things, environments, and practices.
Till next volume 134,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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