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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 148! 9 Key Concepts for Creativity...
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Good morning becomings of the event of the morning,
Here, Newark is beginning to awake. The earth is turning such that the sun is becoming visible behind NYC. Hawks are beginning to call and gulls circle. Traffic is picking up – the planes are in flight, and trains, cars, and scooters of all sorts are all starting to merge into a wonderful complex symphonic soundscape.
This week was a big workshop week – we facilitated four workshops. Long exciting days with many early mornings. All of the workshops this week focused on how to teach creativity – we were introducing and workshoping practices with teachers to teach creativity at the kindergarten to sixth grade levels. And next week we will do it all over – but this time focusing on grades seven through twelve (as well as leading a “curiosity as an embodied practice” tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Every summer we like to take some of our newsletter writing time to revisit and improve things in our world, and for us this summer, it involves revising our websites glossary. It is one of our favorite parts of our web site and we have put great effort into making it useful.
The most common words and concepts play a critical role in understanding and practicing creativity. And these common words – like “creativity” or “change” for example can be taken for granted. We can all too easily assume we all share the same use of these words.
This week we revisited nine key terms from our glossary that are really critical to all creative practices and rewrote them:
What is Creativity? Creativity is the process by which any novelty arises. And novelty in this context is simply a new difference. This difference could be incrementally different (a difference-in-degree) or it could be a qualitative difference (a difference-in-kind).Because creativity is a process, it is not a thing, and thus it is not some unique internal human capacity. As a process, it is an emergent outcome of many distinct things coming together. In this way, creativity is ecosystemic.As an ecosystemic process, we find creativity happening everywhere, all the time, at all scales. We can see it in the formation of stars, continents, volcanoes, new species, social revolutions, giving birth, and the making of tools by crows. Creativity is an unexceptional, ubiquitous quality of all reality. This is something astonishing and worth celebrating. As humans, we are not the origins of creativity (it is not emerging out of our heads or originating in our ideas); rather, we can skillfully join and modify ongoing creative processes. Creativity is something we “surf”. Human creative processes are thus always more than human—and especially more than and very different from ideas. Our creative processes are enactive; they arise from and are creatively enabled by the relational dynamics of tools, environments, embodied practices, histories, and a dense weave of human collaboration.We can summarize some key aspects of creativity:
Surprisingly, the concept of creativity in the west has a very short history: the concept was first developed and used only in the mid 1800s. Speaking very broadly, prior to this era, creativity—the ability to make something new—was understood to be only something god could do. And that all forms of human action were forms of copying god's plan.
This model – what we like to call “the god model"—has led to a series of compounding problems in how creativity is both understood and practiced. By the mid 1950’s this approach had led to the development of an essentialist orientation to creativity, which shortly thereafter turned into an industry, especially in America. To engage successfully with creative processes, we need to critically confront, unlearn, and move beyond this history and it’s essentialist approach to creativity, which is no easy task. Here is a good overview of this issue.
Here is a helpful contrast between the historical western essentialist approach and an ecosystem + emergent approach to creativity:
Read More About Creativity
See: Difference, Change, Emergence, Feedforward, Exaptation, Process, God Model
The “god model” is our vernacular term for the historical western approach to creativity. The approach can be traced back to the classical Greeks and early christianity:
The God model of independent ideation and then willing it so is very much the implicit operating model of most of the creativity and innovation consultancy landscape today.
This model has given us a human centered, idea driven, essentialist, and causal approach to creativity. This approach gets everything wrong about creativity: Creativity is not a human attribute but an ongoing worldly phenomenon.
And it is one that we can skillfully participate in, but we are neither the authors nor the controlling agents of its emergence. The God model is a causal model of the most transparent form: the innovator ideates and then makes it so.
This approach to creativity is part of a long “essentialist” approach to understanding action and change that is part of causality. The assumption in this approach is that for something to happen, there must be a cause, and that this cause comes from a deep and singular source.
Innovation is creativity by another name. A lot is made of the difference between these two terms. For some, creativity is more “free” and innovation is more “practical"—it has to solve a problem. For others, “creativity” could involve any process, but “innovation” is exclusively human. But these forced dualities are not something we find helpful.
What is nice is that each of these terms stresses a different and equally critical aspect of the process: creativity puts a stress on the making – the creating. And innovation places the stress on novelty – that something new is emerging. But it is important to remember: there are not two processes – all creativity involves innovation and all innovation involves creativity.
Ideas are thoughts, we are participating in their emergence all the time, and they are wonderful things. Some of these thoughts can become very clear and others are far more nebulous: feels, hunches – perhaps even just a pull. The important questions for us are: (1) where do ideas come from? and (2) how do ideas relate to creative processes?
The common assumption is that ideas come from our thinking and that this happens exclusively in our brains. But this approach to cognition is now understood to be false. Cognition is a distributed process that is (1) embodied (our unique skilled social bodies play a critical role), (2) extended (the tools we use – from language to smartphones transformatively shapes/enables thinking), (3) embedded (the specifics of the environment and the others that are in that environment all catalyze and enable the specifics of thinking), (4) enacted (what we are doing, and how we are doing things as an ongoing meaningful activity give rise to cognition as an activity).
To get at this enactive approach to ideas we like to say: “no ideas but in making”. Thinking arises from the middle of activity.
This changes how ideas relate to the creative process. Very often, it is assumed that ideas are what are needed at the beginning of the creative process. And that after we have a novel idea, only then do we come up with a plan and make it real. This “ideate-plan-make” approach to creativity is a direct consequence of the role the “god model” has played in the development of western approaches to creativity.
Novel ideas emerge during creative processes – but they are not there at the beginning, nor do they initiate and drive the process. New ideas emerge as feelings provoked by actions, circumstances, and context. To have a new idea, we need to do things in new ways—to experimentally probe. New ideas first emerge as “know-how"—as practices that cannot be clearly articulated (and often cannot be articulated whatsoever!). And then some aspects of know-how can be (with great skill) transformed into articulable concepts (or “know-what”).
The fundamental problem with putting ideation at the beginning of any creative process is that if something is genuinely new, there are no words, concepts or representations for it. And if ideation requires some very loose form of concepts or images, then one can never ideate the radically new. Ideation is an inherently conservative practice. We term this “the creativity paradox”.
All creativity is intimately connected to difference. But what is difference? When we say “something is different,” we mean that it is “different from” something else that we already know and recognize. This use of the term difference makes difference a secondary quality. First, we have “something” that is known and recognized, and only then can we say that it is "different.”
But this begs the question: how did that “something” first come about? And this is the critical question for creativity. There had to be some difference that was irreducible and incomparable to anything else. Such a difference would be a “pure difference"—a difference that continuously qualitatively differed and preceeds any “sameness.” Thus, creativity involves two forms of difference: (1) pure difference and (2) relational difference.
Pure difference exceeds in every possible way identity, representation and knowledge, and as such, it is radically new. It is not following a model, emerging from a pre-existing idea, or copying a loose template. It is always and in all ways, qualitatively different.
Creativity is a process by which something new emerges. The question for us as humans is, “By what process do we help make the new emerge?” And the very common answer is that the best process will involve a three step process of Ideating, Planning, and then Making.
But the problem is that thinking—ideating—relies on words, concepts and images. And all of these necessarily refer to existing things. But if something is radically and totally new, there will be no image, concept or word for it. So how could the racially new be ideated? This is the creativity paradox: you cannot ideate the radically new...
If we cannot ideate the radically new, then we need to have very different approaches to creativity than ones that rely on some form of the Ideate-Plan-Make approach. The problem is that most contemporary approaches to creativity follow this model.
Change is everywhere. Everything flows. But this does not mean that there is no stability or constancy in our reality. We see things staying the same. Your dining room table will still be there looking pretty much the same tomorrow. So what does this mean for the idea that “change is everywhere” and that “everything flows”? It is just that some processes of change are nearly repetitive—that the process of change is stable.
Our reality is composed of processes of change. Some of these are very stable and there is little change; these processes are termed “changes-in-degree.” And other processes of change lead to qualitative ruptures, which are termed “changes-in-kind.” If either of these involves novelty, then we have a creative process.
Understanding such processes as being distinct but connected is critical to any creative practice.
While change is everywhere, not all change is the same. Much of the change we experience on a daily basis is that of slight variation. From one day to the next, our coffee is a bit stronger or hotter. This form of change is termed a “change in degree”.
Most of our innovation practices are involved in this form of change. We term this “developmental innovation.” It is incremental, developmental, world expanding, involves continuity and existing possibilities. We see this in the innovations around improvements and variations of what exists: better chairs, cars, phones, etc.
It is critical to recognize that change in degree and developmental innovation are not the only forms of change. In addition to change in degree and its incremental logic, there is also a change in kind. Change in kind refers to forms of change that are qualitatively disruptive. These require entirely distinct innovation practices.
Everything flows and changes, and most of it is unnoticeable. But sometimes change can be radically disruptive. When these disruptions are not simply more or bigger but involve a fundamental difference, they are termed “change in kind.” A change in kind is always a qualitative change. We use the everyday expression “you cannot compare apples to oranges” to get at the qualitative nature of this change.
Change in kind involves a discontinuity with other things. And hence, we refer to the innovation practices associated with change in kind as “disruptive innovation.”
When a change in kind is novel, it is something that is radically and disruptively new. It is giving rise to a novel world and, not a simple discreet novel thing. This form of novelty cannot be understood based on what is known. This means that techniques such as ideation and imagination are not helpful as they fundamentally rely on the known. Many of the most popular current methods for innovation (such as Design Thinking) in that they begin or focus on ideation are not helpful for creative practices that are seeking to make something qualitatively new emerge. The techniques that lead to a novel change in kind are directly experimental and involve blocking, exaptations and feedforward logics.
An example of a change in kind is the transition from horses to cars as a form of transportation. This transition was a shift in worlds, from animal powered transportation to combustion engines (an entirely new and different world.)
Disruptive innovation requires very different practices, environments, and sensibilities for developmental innovation. This is often not recognized, and the techniques of developmental innovation are used universally, as if they will lead to disruptive innovation outcomes. But this is never the case. Critical to being a good innovator is recognizing that there are two forms of innovation and that both require their own unique set of practices.
That's it for this week! Keep engaging with differences that will make a difference! Stay cool and curious.
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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