Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 162! Creative Agency Of and Despite Organizations...
Good morning cuts creating novel becomings,
The full moon has risen and is drifting with us towards the morning as we write. This week we continue our series on organizations, but before we get into this, we would like to give you a peek into what we have been cooking up:
Our Silences and Emergences
We have been quiet on social media over the last couple of months (mainly LinkedIn), and we wanted to give everyone an update on what we are up to:
Our silence has mainly been because of bandwidth—there are only so many hours in the day. In addition to working with various clients on very interesting projects great and small, we have been busy in the background exploring, experimenting, learning, and developing something special, which we hope to launch by the end of the year.
We are very excited to share that we have been working hard on standing up a new learning community for emergent creative processes. This will be more than a site to take online courses; we have been developing it as a space for an ever-evolving learning community to form around a new emergent approach to creativity, innovation, and changemaking. It will have its own app and will offer many distinct ways for community members to communicate with each other in open and ever-emerging manners around topics. We will host conversations, courses, and all sorts of real-time as well as designed asynchronous offerings. It is all still in development—we hope to have something to offer for the winter holidays.
Additionally, we have been finalizing a new book to also be out in time for the holidays. This book is a set of about 100+ shorter meditations on the larger space of emergent creativity. As aphorisms, these mediations can be shorter, pithier and to the point—which allow, by accumulation, a unique way to explore and probe the wide disjunctive and various spaces of creativity without having to bring it all together under a false singular narrative. We are also excited that this book will include full-color illustrations and feel really special. If you have been engaged and excited by our LinkedIn posts, you will be in for a treat!
So stay tuned and be on the lookout for more news as the leaves fall, the winds pick up, squalls become more frequent, and snow appears in the forecast! (In the northern hemisphere anyway... for all of our dear friends and colleagues south of the equator, perhaps we could say, check back when Matariki is rising.)
Organizing the Organized
Last week was week three of our series on organizing and organizations in the newsletter. And in it we took a detour into the role abstractions play in experience. We ended with a set of rules-of-thumb for how to creatively and effectively engage in the critical process of developing abstractions:
How We Get to Effective Abstractions for Creative Practices
We need to first recognize that abstractions are part of experience. They play a constructive (e.g. creative) role. But that our experience is also paradoxically irreducible to our abstractions and their operations. This leads directly into the next practice:
We need to recognize the historical abstractions that we inherit. And the assemblages (configurations) that they are part of. We can, in advance of practice, bring to awareness problematic abstractions, such as the God model. Critical anthropologies of the present are helpful in this.
We must actively avoid, refuse, and mitigate against the operation of surreptitious substitution that conflates the tool (abstraction) with the experience in advance. How do we do this? Don’t take given abstractions as shortcuts to explain experience (see #2 above). Abstractions must always come from/emerge with experience (and look back into experience).
Seek simplicity, but actively (with an experimental curiosity) distrust it!
Trace novel experiences as you participate in them: are we surreptitiously allowing abstractions into this experience that do not come from it? Are we surreptitiously erasing the difference of experience?
Experiment, probe, test: where and what configuration constitutes the novel “difference that makes a difference." What tools of abstraction help in keeping this difference “alive”?
How Do We Apply This?
This is all well and good, but how do we apply this to understanding creative processes in organizational contexts? Let’s start with digging into a very helpful analogy from last week:
So What Should Be the Big Takeaways From This Story for Organizational Creativity?
The way to understand creative events in an organizational context will involve that we:
Recognize that understanding events is a process of abstraction (e.g., creating relevant concepts, determining salient "things," articulating processes). some text
This can seem like a waste of time—"we"already know what things are! Why do we need to go through all of this effort just to confirm what we already know?” But as this story shows, these assumptions are what get us in trouble—and more to the point, keep us from actually engaging with what is happening.
Abstractions play a creative role in shaping experience and events (they are not just passive representations). some text
There is a critical need to get the abstractions right or we will not even experience what is happening—never mind effectively participating in it. (This was last week's point in the newsletter about “misplaced concreteness” and “surriptious substitutions”).
Begin by being skeptical of existing abstractions. For example, we see this in the story by the need to be skeptical of our assumptions that a person is a “person"—e.g., they begin and end at their skin...some text
This means in practice: Start with a strong skepticism towards all the big generalities (the org chart, the generic logics of leadership, alignment, strategy, structure, assigned roles, existing processes (the double diamond, design thinking), etc.—e.g., all the purported sites of agency, identity, and universal best practices).
Start by putting into question the identity of the organization (this is what we are doing with the blind person—we are putting in question where and what is “them”).
Abstractions should emerge only in the context of a question; they cannot be generic. For example, if we wanted to understand how the blind person eats lunch, then, as Bateson says: “when the blind person sits down to eat their lunch, their stick and its messages will no longer be relevant—if it is their eating that you want to understand..." Our perspective into the organizational context is one of an interest in understanding “creative processes.” We need to stop asking universal questions such as “What is the mindset of creative people?” and follow actual, specific experiences of creative processes!
Abstractions are ultimately of networks and processes (what we call assemblages or ecosystems). For example, to understand the blind person walking, we cannot begin and end our inquiry with them as a discrete entity. That would be to draw the boundary in a way that cuts through differences that make a difference. To understand their walking, we need to consider the total dynamic network (the properties of their embodiment + stick + environment + practices “round and round”...). And it is this network, as a temporary holistic “thing” that has autonomy and agency, that we need to understand. some text
From this example, we can generalize (abstract) that such networks (assemblages) are:some text
temporary, contextual, and self maintaining
composed of unlike things
relation dominant (see below)
have emergent properties
have an agency/perspective that is distinct from their components
this agency/logic of the network creatively transforms components over time
the configuration is creative, enabling and stabilizing (creatively constraining)
The components in the network do not have a fixed meaning. For example, with the blind person, the “stick” under other circumstances might be a toy for a dog, a weapon, a weight to keep a picnic blanket down on a windy day... The meaning/purpose/function/effect of components is relational—it is given by the event it participates in. Identity emerges (this is what the term “relation dominant” means). some text
In practical organizational terms, a person's identity/function cannot be predetermined, nor can it be fixed (e.g. “Oh, it’s Camille from HR")
as the assemblage stabilizes, it “individuates"—becomes a “thing”, takes on an identity, and gains a coherant agency
That the blind person is sometimes in an assemblage with a stick and at other times in other assemblages (they are never not of an assemblage) means that we need to consider them in terms of meta-stability.
We need to follow all the strands of the network. This means turning our focus away from an exclusive focus on people and minds to tools, environments, temporary assemblages, differing scales, etc.
We need to experimentally make “cuts"—e.g., boundaries where there are fewer differences that make a difference. This gives rise to autonomy, "identity," and agency.
Creative Processes Organizing Organizations
Let's quickly look at an organizational example:
The classical assumptions of an organization consist of a clear boundary, distinct internal units with clear functions, and a semi-hierarchical and linear flow of agency and output:
This is what we have been terming a “body with organs” model. This model might be effective in understanding who is responsible for cutting checks... But when we track an actual activity of who and what is involved in a creative project, things look quite different:
In the above organizational diagram, we can see that:
The clear boundaries of an organization are “broken"—various outside entities are part of the network. This will vary in a dynamic manner depending on the activity and time in the activity.
Activities, like creative processes, are not the purview of one department (R&D) or specific people (the creatives). They are the emergent property of an assemblage (network).
An assemblage/coalition emerges that connects unlike components across differing scales (in some cases one person is part of the assemblage and in others it is a departmental group, and in others it is an environment, or a tool, etc.)
The roles of the components is determined by the emerging activity
This pattern is an "entity.” To cut it in departmental terms, or in terms of just humans, would be to lose the differences that make a difference.
The network as a dynamic emergent unit (something that is not decomposable without losing its logic) has an agency that is irreducible to any of its components. E.g., “creativity” is not the product of some person or some idea.
The identity and activity of the components are, over time, transformed by the emergent agency of the process. E.g., the agency of the assemblage is “making” the individuals. Or, to put it another way, “leadership” is in/of the assemblage/process rather than in any one person.
But we need to also consider this one activity in time and in relation to other activities:
If we consider this creative process in time (see above), we will see that the overall process does not fall apart (it has "metastability"), but the components and the dynamics will vary across time.
This has many implications for an organization:
How do people shift into and out of novel roles in a dynamic fashion?
How do new units emerge, and how are they supported?
How are tools and environments allowed to shift “ownership” and be transformed? etc.
How does metastability emerge, stabilize, and maintain itself?
Now, additionally, we have to consider that in organizations, in relation to emergent creative practices, roles change depending on the activity:
The same components (people, groups, tools, environments) play very different roles in different activities. Both these activities and the effect/role of the components cannot be fully prespecified; it is an emergent outcome of the process.
Activities are processes in time, and agency is an emergent outcome of these stable processes. All of this again has implications for organizations:
How does an organization develop an ecosystem that can allow components (people, groups, environments, tools, etc.) to play diverse and at any moment unknowable roles in emergent creative processes?
How are the multiple emergent creative activities tracked, and how are the diverse assemblages that reuse the same components to differing ends supported effectively?
At what point are things stabilized and transformed into more established organization structures? What is the process to do this that does not lose the agency of the assemblage?
Following Differences That Make a Difference
These questions and this analysis are not meant in any sense to be taken as complete. Rather, it is to suggest that we need to be asking very different questions from the classical organizational and leadership questions. And we need to be developing new abstractions, tools, processes, and approaches to organizational creativity.
If we want to know how novelty emerges within the organization (e.g., how do creative processes emerge, stabilize, and have an effect), we will need to approach things differently—if we do not want to cut things in ways that will render them ununderstandable.
For us, from the perspective of creative processes in an organizational context, the key question we are interested in experimentally exploring is: how do creative processes emerge, stabilize, and continue in larger organization contexts—what needs to be considered “inside the boundaries”?
This is a question that requires us to develop new approaches—ones that involve dynamic assemblages, processes of ongoing dynamic individuation, process agency, creative emergence, feedforward loops, and metastability (to just name a few). It requires us to trace experiences in new, far more careful ways and pay attention to very different scales and forms of agency (beyond the individual and the human)...
That's it for this week; dawn is approaching, the full moon is moving lower to the horizon in the southeast, and earth is turning such that the sun’s rays are putting NYC in shadow. The local Peregrine Falcons are screeching and out hunting from their perches high on the apartments of downtown Newark.
Next week we will take up these questions again. We are going to look at “Why creative organizations should not emulate the Wright Brothers”! It is sure to be contentious and entertaining!
Till then, have a great week tracing out organizational dynamics in relation to emergent creative processes.
P.S.: Looking to connect more deeply with our work?
Have a look a our book, or hire us! Innovation workshops, corporate talks, webinars, one on one coaching, innovation facilitation, + more… Something else in mind? Great - let's chat.
