Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 146! Meditations of Surfing: Towards a New Sensibility for Creativity...
Good morning surfers and wavemakers of creating-enabling configurations,
Summer has officially started (and for others, it is winter that has officially started). Where once the start of summer was an unmitigated joy – school ending and time outside. Now it is equally a time of worry – heat bubbles, storms, and fires.
The joy is real and so is the worry. We hope that you had a moment to dwell on this seasonal transition via some practice. For us, it was nothing fancy – staying up late into the night and watching the sky change (and then going back to work on last week's newsletter).
THREADSUNS
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree–
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
Paul Celan (trans. P. Joris)
Over the years, we have been using NYC informally as a key component of how we infrastructure processes of creativity with our clients. In coaching sessions, we will take people and groups to various museums, spaces, and events.
We are always in the city alert to the interesting and the new – sleuthing things out. We are visiting colleagues and their innovation centers, labs, studios, and galleries. As well as simply drifting, going to new places and seeing new music, practices, and pretty much anything that has us curious. We then, if it makes sense, fold these into our work. Most often, it is in our one-on-one work or with small teams.
More recently, we have started to develop these into very specific creativity exercises. Where we take advantage of certain spaces and objects to build out a fully enactive experiential exercise to allow participants to feel, sense, and act in different ways that open up new approaches to creativity.
This week we had the chance to try out some of these urban enactive creativity exercises on our colleague and friend Curtis Michelson who came up from Florida to spend the day with us:
“I palpably experienced non-bifurcated creativity this week as lain Kerr and Jason Frasca guided me through their custom tour of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. I got to play 'student' and see what these Profs are actually up to when helping people stretch and open to other worlds and ways of world building.
I was jet lagged and sleep deprived, it was all a bit dreamy, and after some beers at the Central Park boathouse I had the sense of floating down Fifth Avenue. My feet struck ground again when I heard a young woman say "Jason! lain! how are you?". And then I watched gobsmacked as she gushed over the pleasure of reconnecting with her teachers from 7 years ago... She too had experienced The Met the way I did a few hours earlier. I asked her, "what was the impact for you?". Unhesitatingly she said, "it changed my life".
Wow, I don't get that from my students or my coaching clients every day! #professional #jealousy.
Proud to know these blokes and I heartily recommend their definitely unconventional and aesthetic entry point into opening the doors of perception into other worlds.”
We have some really unique coaching and creativity practices that go far beyond what can be done in a discussion. These are also some of the best ways to be introduced to some of the key aspects of our approach – especially in regards to the enactive nature of creativity and the fundamental logic of creativity = worldmaking.
If you are curious about radically reframing your approach to creativity and innovation – why not come and spend the day with us in NYC?
We had the good fortune to appear on Mickey Bahrat's podcast, The Hidden Heroes of Tech - Unleashing Imagination - Rethinking the Boundaries of Creativity. Mickey is a good friend and colleague focused on disrupting sales cycles through creativity. We enjoyed a truly stimulating conversation with him where we explored: what is creativity, how do you innovate, if creativity can be learned, or more importantly, can creativity be taught? (YES!), reflected on the future of human creativity in an increasingly AI-driven world, and more.
Yes, we swam in the pool of theory, and we dove into the deep-end of practical real world examples too… Bonus - Mickey got us discussing some personal questions - and so now the world knows Jason's controversial – and quite possibly absurd sports opinions (listen to find out), has eaten eggs almost every day for 35+ years (which is partially why we love to write about cooking and eggs so much), and Iain's favorite food is the one he's never tried before. If you give the YouTube video a watch or give the podcast a listen – please let us know how any of this stimulates your work.
Over the last few weeks we have been exploring the merits of an alternative creative sensibility. One in which we actively feel, sense, and engage with the larger space of creativity quite differently from our historical and current Western sensibility.
It is an alternative sensibility that approaches creativity as an ongoing, ubiquitous, worldly process of emergent differencing. It is a process that we can learn to skillfully join but we are never the initiators or heroic authors. And, quite importantly, it is one that is better approached from a non-causal perspective – we are so to speak skillfully “making the most of the configurations”.
At the core of the historical Western sensibility in regards to creativity is a suite of roughly fifteen interdependent, mutually reinforcing, and supporting features/practices:
The Western Creativity Matrix:
Now it is important to stress: these practices are not inherently wrong – far from it – they exist because they work. Rather, the question is one of generalizability: will these practices be of use across all conditions of creativity? And while they certainly have value in cases of creativity-as-improvement (e.g. something exists, we experience an issue with it, and we set out to incrementally improve the thing so that the issue is solved). The question is do they have any real pragmatic value in situations involving the emergence of something truly radically new. Can you really work in a future backwards causal planning manner to achieve what cannot be known – what does not exist? Here is where this sensibility fails us entirely. Having a clear goal, following an abstract model, developing a clear plan of the means to get to the ends, and using a heroic model of human individual centered action will utterly fail us if our interest is in disruptive innovation:
But – our argument is that we cannot stop here and just be satisfied with having two incommensurable realities: If your creative question is incremental, then stick to the existing historic models, and if your creative ambition is more radical, leave it behind. Here we are left split in two in a very discombobulating manner.
What if the actual space of efficacy of the Western causal sensibility is in actuality, far less than we generally assume? Why?
Our Western causal sensibility is one that was made for a different world than the one we actually inhabit. It does still work to a limited degree. But ultimately, as Bruno Latour put it so succinctly – we have never actually been this way. We imagine that this is what we are doing or should do – have ideas, models, goals and clear plans – but it is never actually what we are doing in our creative practices.
What if you did not need to go through the charade of wracking your brains to ideate, develop a future backwards plan, impose a generic model upon reality via a heroic action? What if we could shift to a sensibility that is closer to our dynamic reality and what we actually do in our creative practices – especially in the practices that involve disruptive forms of creativity?
What if because the world is dynamic fields and processes – dynamic creative-enabling configurations and emergent propensities that things in general require a very different sensibility?
Perhaps what is needed is a sensibility that is far more engaged, sensitive to the circumstances, collaborative with what is emerging and responsive to the unique circumstances in the lithe, nimble manner of a surfer?
Ideas do not need to proceed action and come solely from us – they arise in the doing. As we slow down and put aside one set of practices and habits, we can sense this in our daily lives. Creative ideas are not coming out of our heads but emerge from the middle of an environment of which we are an active collaborative participant.
And when we meditate on novelty, it becomes clear that we cannot know the radically new in advance and work towards it as a clear and distinct goal. The radically new can only co-emerge from the circumstances of a particular creating-enabling circumstance and its contextual propensities. The historical edifices of goals, causality, future backwards models and planning all begin to feel far less essential.
Order – that reality has a shape – that things exist and interact – is not something imposed on the world from the outside. Rather, order is synonymous with the creativity of reality – that the world is regular, and patterned is because of the creative enabling relations between what is. Order is creatively immanent in the configuration of reality and not outside of it. Chaos is not the enemy of order but rather the source of its novelty.
If we were never fully doing what we thought we were doing – why not shift away from this problematic sensibility?
So how does one begin without an idea, model or goal oriented plan?
Here is a loose scenario: First we concentrate our attention on the configurational logics of the concrete situation we find ourselves within. Our goal is to sense its logic, coherence, and current propensities: What are the creating-enabling configurations and their multiple stable propensities? This cannot be sensed abstractly by viewing things from a distance, it requires direct active change-making engagement: experimental probing. And probing involves shifting configurations – adding and subtracting as well as changing intensities. Probing is far more active than just poking things. You cannot sense what a configuration is capable of without acting. This is the creative meaning of sense-making. Sense-making is a collaborative creative activity of making. Sensing, knowing, doing and creating are of a piece. All knowledge, even well established knowledge is “in the making” – things are far more dynamic, and variable than we give them credit. It is embodied, felt, distributed, relational knowledge – a know-how that is slowly developing towards a “know-what” – hunches, vague novel concepts and nascent novel ideas…
One is moving from experimenting with configurations – the relational dynamics – and what they creatively enable as propensities and back to the configurations. One is always experimenting with a double situation (configuration + propensities) and its effects (the consequences of its realized propensities).
The analogy to surfing is apt. Surfing is a creative act of making the “most” of the circumstances (propensities). Which is to say, as a surfer, one creatively makes the most of the configuration that gives rise to wave conditions and the propensities that this allows in dynamic relation to your body+skills+board etc. One is actively experimenting (probing) with changing these dynamic relations – it might be some combination of bodily capacities and skills plus the shape of the board and the techniques being developed in real time plus what conditions and location one is surfing, etc. Know-how emerges and stays within and of the context – it lives across your body-environment coupling. And it only slowly emerges into concepts.
And while things will stabilize around particular propensities and these could feel like they define the identity of the activity. E.g. “surfing is __________” (we are falling back into the causal essentialist sensibility). Rules can form, board shapes can stabilize, wave locations can become fixed, organizations formed. But from the perspective of creativity, this cannot be confused with a fixed condition (for example, some management models would want to define this as a “clear” condition that is tightly constrained with little freedom and in which one has to default to “best practices”). To fall into this illusion is to confuse abstractions with experimentation (what Whitehead called so aptly “misplaced concreteness”.)
But we need to extend this analogy to get at the logic of this alternative sensibility for creativity – for unlike surfing where it can seem like one has little agency in the shaping of the creating-enabling configuration that gives rise to the waves – in creative practices one is both the “surfer” and a collaborator in the production of the waves.
The skillful activity of creativity is articulated in two directions: making the most of the consequences of the configuration and its propensities, and actively engaging in the collaborative shaping of the creating-enabling configuration. The key is not to confuse this collaboration with authorship, control, or origin. This is to fall back into the causal approach. Rather, we are being carried along and transformed by what co-emerges via our judicious engagement.
We are surfing the logic of the unfolding – the propensities that are circumstantial. And we are always active – participating as the helpmate to emergence to the wave we are surfing.
As we end the newsletter, it is important to remember that other sensibilities exist outside of our historical Western approach to creativity. There are long – many thousand year long traditions in South and East Asia that have been developing relationally dynamic approaches to creativity. And new sensibilities are possible. It can seem like we might be throwing the baby out with the bath water when we try to experimentally put aside the fifteen interdependent aspects of the Western tradition – but here it is important to remember we never were in actuality practicing these logics as fully or as deeply as we might have imagined.
New creative sensibilities are possible.
Till next week – keep surfing and participating skillfully in the making of waves.
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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