Emerging Futures - Volume 144: Creativity and Enabling Configurational Agency

Good morning summering or wintering propensities,

Last week we finished our three lecture series on “rethinking creativity” at a big pharma company. It was a special treat to have the space to develop and lay out more fully our approach to engaging with creative processes within an organizational context. The other great aspect of having the challenge of delivering a longer series of lectures is that it gave us the opportunity to rethink and further evolve many of the practices and concepts that are critical to our approach.

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The first lecture focused on three things: (1) a critical reframing of creativity from a human, individualistic, mind focused, and idea driven causal approach towards a more ecosystemic approach; (2) the importance of understanding the qualitative differences between disruptive innovation and developmental innovation; and (3) how each of these requires very different methods.

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The second lecture and discussion focused on a series of practices that would correspond to this ecosystemic approach to creativity and innovation. One of these was exaptation—the process of co-opting and radically repurposing a suite of features to develop new possibilities. The classical example of this is how feathers, lungs, reproduction, and environmental change were radically repurposed, such that dinosaurs became birds. A critical but much misunderstood technique in the space of innovation. Given this was a pharmaceutical company, we used the highly exaptive example of the ecosystemic invention of antibiotics as an example.

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In our final lecture, we focused on how organizations can develop an ecosystem in which invention is an ongoing, spontaneous, and self-generating process. Here we had a really fascinating discussion about the invention of human flight. One of the things we wished to stress is that to understand innovation, you cannot just focus on the “winners"—e.g.,  the Wright Brothers—you need to focus on (and emulate) the much larger dynamic tangled ecosystem. After all, the goal of innovation is not to be the first, but to foster the co-emergence of a new world.

Normally we shy away from lectures and focus on more engaged and collaborative methods of working with others. But lectures, especially series, can be a great way to develop a more holistic overview of an approach and sensibility such as ours. (Plus, it was a chance to take some time to develop 150+ new drawings and diagrams!). And finally, a big thanks to our friend and colleague Serge Marten and the whole team that brought us in and supported the project.

Just as a quick note: if you are curious about our lectures and workshops, starting later this summer, we will be working on developing more online self-guided “how to” resources, from introductions to key topics to facilitator guides to workshop techniques. These should start rolling out in late fall or early winter, so stay tuned! 

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Onto This Week

This week has been a week of moving. Not just the regular and ongoing movements that define being alive, but the act of moving households and labs. Iain’s been busy packing boxes, and we have been busy radically reconfiguring our innovation lab at the university. 

All of this reconfiguring and moving had us thinking about the important and all encompassing role “environments” play in creative processes. Which led to this week's post on LinkedIn: Creativity is in the World.

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And our friend John Flach kicked off a great series of discussions around language and what it might mean for creativity to be understood as "environmental," what are the roles of humans in the process (when they are involved)? and what is the nature of causality in all of this. 

For us, LinkedIn has become a wonderful place to have a thoughtful public discussion. We do recognize that it is also a place with far too much shallow self promotion, prowled by the usual school yard bullies, but nonetheless, it gives us a chance to form a community of shared concerns, evolving interests and practices. So a big shout out to all of those who have been part of the dialog over the last couple of years—and especially the last month or so.

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Evolving Away a Causal Creativity

The discussion around the word “environment” and whether it is correct to characterize creative processes as being “environmental” is an important one. Why? Once we realize that creativity is not a thing but a process and that it is not simply the purview of humans, we need to shift to a more worldly and non ideational logic to understand the creativity of crystals forming or birds evolving. After all, dinosaurs did not sit around brainstorming what to do next! And this shift is broadly speaking a shift in how we understand the agency of environments. Critical to this shift are three things: 

1. understanding what constitutes an environment,
2. understanding how agency arises from the middle of environments, and
3. precisely how we are part of environments. 

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What Constitutes an Environment? 

What constitutes an environment? Is it just all that “stuff” out there that surrounds us? If this is the case, then there could be a clear divide between ourselves as free, independent “subjects” who just happen to be “in” someplace—some environment of stuff. In such an approach, the environment is a collection of stuff that makes up the “backdrop” of our creative lives: you have an idea, you look around, and you find things to carry it out. And for quite some time this was how we in the West approached creativity and our human agency in general (e.g., “the God model”).

But this is not how we are of the world, and this is not how anything is of an environment. Nothing is simply “in” an environment. Environments are not just lists of stuff. Things are “of” environments. We are “of” environments. This seemingly simple shift from “in” to “of” is radical and requires a total shift in our sensibilities. 

To be “of” something is to understand that: 

1. There are no independent things; there is no “stuff” just lying around. Everything is part of many integrated and coordinated processes, and everything is always part of some integrated process. You can, of course, reach out and pick something up—say, your coffee cup—and use it in any number of ways. But you are a being of a web of creative enabling relations that gives rise to a space of possibilities and in that you pick up the cup – which is itself part of these creative enabling relations (and many others).

2. There are always many, many intra-woven coordinated processes going on at the same time and location, and these can be quite oppositional to each other. This is why we speak of an environment – it is an open multiplicity of entangled, mutually inflecting processes.  

3. Coordinated processes of which things (and us) are an integral participant are not something neutral & separate from us. As processes coordinate in a specific manner, they come to have an emergent creating-enabling configuration that actively shapes all of us by creating the contextual space of possibility. We are the “outcome” of these processes. Hence, we are “of” this environment.

4. But this is not a one-way process; all environments have been co-constructed by the many things that make up the environment (what is called Niche Construction in evolutionary theory). This shaping is not happening in a linear one way manner, as we, along with other beings, & various forces co-shape our environment, while at the same moment the emergent enabling relations of the environment shape us. To call this a “loop” would be misleading, as the integration is of a different nature. This is what it means to be “of” and not “in” an environment. 

While we could extend this list, let's look at a really clear example.

First, what does it mean to say (as we say above): 

“Coordinated processes have an emergent, creating-enabling configuration that shapes things by creating the contextual space of possibility”?

Here is a very simple example, one that hopefully we can all relate to:

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This is a wonderful example where some thing is created: a whirlpool event.  This is important – we first need to recognize the creativity happening in this event. And what is created is not the outcome of something “in” a water molecule. There is nothing in any water molecule that “tells” it to behave this way. And there is no commanding force coming from the outside that tells the water molecules to behave this way—there is no outside “creator” of this creativity, so to speak. 

Rather, what we have is an environment in which a configuration shifts into a new set of relations—a new configuration. This is what flushing processes sets in motion. This is a reconfiguration of coordinated processes. And this new configuration coordinates processes in such a manner that an emergent creating-enabling configuration develops that shapes the contextual space of possibility. Which means, in simple terms, that the water molecules now act in a new manner (the whirlpool).

The particular and unique relations between the water molecules, temperature, the energy gradient of flushing, the volume shape and materials of the toilet bowl, gravity, etc. come together in a specific configuration to creatively enact a new form of order to emerge (the whirlpool), and they “hold” the possibilities of the water molecules to this pattern (as long as the conditions of the configuration are met). 

We could term this “enabling configurational agency.”

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And this “enabling configurational agency” is the creative agency of environments. The water molecules are not just “in” the toilet bowl; each one is independent of the situation—the environment. They are fully “of” this creative situation. They are certainly not nothing in this situation—this environment—contextually relevant aspects of their being are being drawn forth as relevant by the relational processes to co-configure the relations. And it is the creative configuration of the relations that allows for new creative propensities to emerge in this environment. 

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Environments/Middles/Media

Now the twentieth century is full of the exploration of these relation determining dynamic processes. We see these develop, for example, early on in cybernetics, ecology, and media studies. Now, media studies might seem like an odd example, and we bring it up not because of the richness of this approach but because it allows us to sense the importance of the agency of environments. 

Reading Marshall McLuhan for example, today is still astonishing in this regards:

 Basic technologies acting as a medium “work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, & social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered… Any understanding of social change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments…”

And we would suggest that: any understanding of creativity is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments…

Today the word media refers to something akin to “broadcast journalism.” But media has a much richer and different meaning. A few hundred years ago, the term media refered to the natural elements – earth, water, air, fire, aether.  

Media and medium come from the latin medius – the middle:

“et e medio flumine mella petat,” (and let him seek honey in the middle of a river). Ovid.

The “medium,” – the “middle” are environments – and as ecologists would argue, “environments are media.” Like the fish who cannot understand the question “what is water”? – we do not simply swim “in” the water of our medium – our environments – we are “of” them. 

John Durham Peters wrote in a wonderful book “The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media” says this to introduce the concept of media – they are “agencies of order… containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible.” And this is how we are framing “enabling configurations” – we hope that you can hear the resonances of similar languages and approaches to creativity. The medium is creative… (and we are of the medium).

Today, in our age defined by mounting entangled environmental crises, it is critical that we understand the linkages between our condition and the contrasting sensibilities of “in” and “of.” Far too much of how we are “addressing” these crises – and the failures to shift things – is related to the failure to understand how we are “of” environments and not simply “in” them. 

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Final Thoughts on Constraints and Causality

Well that brings us to the end of our writing of the newsletter for the week. It might seem like we have detoured from the promised discussion of constraints and causality. Hopefully, one can begin to sense the emergence of an alternative approach to causality taking shape... Our hope is that what is emerging is a broad and sweeping alternative to both causality and the claims of “constraints” to be an alternative. But that is not our worry now. We wish you a week of gathering honey mid-stream or as Saigyo put it: 

Scaling the crags
where azalea bloom…not for plucking
but for hanging on!
the saving feature of this rugged
mountain face I’m climbing

Till next week

Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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