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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 163! Wright is Right, Wright is Wrong...
Good Morning timely transversal becomings,
A few weeks ago we were on a call with someone really interested in talking with us about creativity, and organizational design. They had a background in architecture, and so we got talking about the role of spatial planning in creativity. At some point in the conversations the Wright brothers came up, I can’t exactly remember how, and they shared with us part of a presentation about how organizational innovators should emulate the Wright Brothers.
Their focus was on a few key features of the brothers approach, mainly how they chose their site and their particular experimental method.
Now we are very interested in the invention and development of flight in all its forms, from flying spiders to human forms of flight. And so we really got into this conversation—geeking out on various materials, techniques, and technologies that were critical to their experiments. All stuff we have written about in the past.
But when we mentioned in passing that the Wright Brothers cannot be taken as an exemplary model of innovation from an organizational perspective because they failed, he was perplexed.
“Were they not the first to fly? – Is this not what an organization needs to do in terms of creativity and innovation?”
Sure, they were the first to fly—but not in any meaningful way from the perspective of how flight evolved. And within twenty years of being the first, they were no longer making any contributions to flight; they had closed up their business and moved on to other things. Ultimately, by the dawn of the “golden age of flight” in the 1920's, none of their once groundbreaking concepts and designs were being used. So why would we want to closely emulate them?
This came as a shock to our new colleague. He had never considered what happened after they got into the air that first time. He knew all the details of the famous rivalry between the Wright brothers and Langley, as well as what Langley got wrong and many of the key innovations that led to the Wright Brothers success:
This meeting got us thinking in regards to what we have been talking about: organizational creativity, abstractions, misplaced concreteness, and surriptious substitutions. Have you noticed that there is a fascinating pattern to all of these innovation stories, like how the Wright brothers story is told? They all follow a clear pattern: Let's take a quick run through the standard telling of the Wright brothers story of being the first to fly as our new colleague laid it out:
If we just consider the broad narrative, it seems like there is always a type of tree model at work. If you consider how these kinds of stories are told, they always begin:
So if we now draw this out as a simple diagram, we can see this tree logic very clearly:
And this is the abstract meta-model that our new friend was unconsciously explicating in his presentation. Now, what is so interesting is that, in this case, we know that it is simply untrue. The Wright brothers are not at the base of the trunk from which modern aviation developed. And ultimately, what happened cannot be accurately visualized with a tree.
Here we have another case where our abstractions (the tree model) have surreptitiously replaced the actuality. We need to be more like Dostoyevskian idiot—willing to be ignorant far longer and assume nothing rather than jumping so quickly to existing abstractions.
So where is the tree abstraction coming from? Let's quickly jump back to Volumes 160 and 161 where we detailed how organizations, in their quest for creativity, often take on the profoundly flawed god model of creativity that has a long history in the west:
A model that is hyper-individualistic and involves the “imposing of form upon inert matter by an autonomous subject (whether god, individual, or organization) who commands the process by a pre-established plan and purpose” (M. Shalins).
The problem with this approach is first and foremost that it ascribes to individual powers, attributes, and actions that are actually the emergent result of a diverse organized assemblage operating in a non-linear manner.
And then this is applied to the individual and organizational scales:
Now the short answer is we need a more ecosystemic and emergent approach that once and for all moves us away from the “essentialist” approach to creativity and action that is the god model:
The logic of that makes the god model essentialist is that it is always reducing and essentializing creativity to a singular essential idea and singular essential moment. And this plays out in relation to today’s discussion in regards to how the essentialist approach to creativity visualizes things in contrast to an ecosystemic approach:
Essentialism always begins by determining the core—the essence, or base—and then it moves outward from there to the mere surface...
And it returns time and again to the same four ways of visualizing its logics: the onion, iceberg, pyramid, and tree. The tree being its grand model of creative process.
And as we witnessed with our friends' presentation on the Wright brothers, all of these abstractions have been problematically transformed via surriptious substitution into fact. Such that our friend never considered looking closely at what actually happened after the Wright brothers first flew! For him, and far too many others, it is a foregone conclusion what happened next: everything radiated out from their essential catalytic success.
But, lest it seem we are picking on easy targets (management consultants), the problematic tree has haunted everyone from the early writers or the biblical genealogies to Darwin, who from the very beginning (incorrectly) imagined evolution as a tree:
So how should we be telling the story of the human innovation of flight?
This is what is so critical to realize: no one individual or team was working alone in a vacuum. They all swam in a rich ecosystem that had a long, complex history that they built upon and modified. And from this richly entangled ecosystem, many distinct approaches emerged, each having a unique logic while still being interwoven with others. Of course there was competition, but the competition was grounded in a shared culture, history, and network.
In this global network, it was never just about two innovators—the Wright brothers vs. Langely. In fact, they were themselves mixtures and hybrids of other researchers and approaches.
The Wright brothers were the first to fly, but nothing stopped. Others kept developing their distinct approaches, and in many ways the speed of innovation and diversification picked up.
Let's continue with the story:
A world of flight emerged from the middle of a vast ecosystem of inventions (many of which had little to do with flight). It did not originate with the Wright brothers or any one innovator. We can be certain that if the Wright brothers had not succeeded when they did, some other team would have had a quite different approach. And many did. And equally many, like the Wright brothers, failed to get much further.
While it is easy to fixate on individual stories and to place all of the agency inside the heads of individuals, it is important to resist this urge and look at this as an ecosystemic event where agency emerged between and across networks, groups, environments, and practices.
Being this far into the story, we can return to our organizational focus:
Yes, the Wright brothers were the first to fly a heavier than air-motorized plane in 1903, and by 1905 they had something like a real plane—something that was reusable, reliable, held more than one person, and was actually controllable. In 1909 they started their own company; it built just over a hundred experimental planes and stopped in 1916 when Orville got out of the business (Wilber had died of a fever in 1912). It merged with Glen-Martin to form Martin-Wright. That company dissolved within three years, reforming as Wright Aeronautics. And Wright Aeronautics did not make planes but rather focused on engines based on non-Wright Brothers designs.
Why did they disappear? Were the great innovators just bad at business? That is the common story. And, while they made many poor business decisions (their secrecy, poor marketing, the patent wars, lack of openness, etc.), their approach to innovation is what ultimately did them in. How?
They developed an ideal experimental design around their most critical innovation: wing warping. Wing warping was a highly innovative approach to steering and control that involved the warping (the three-dimensional bending of the complete wings) to turn. But the problem was that wing warping worked best at slow speeds, required great skills, and was nearly impossible to scale up to larger wings. Now none of this was a problem early on—in fact, it was a great advantage in their early experiments that led to the first successful powered flights. But, this approach ultimately became a dead end, and because they had all of their eggs in this one basket, they failed to have any lasting, unique impact on the actual design of the world of flight.
So, yes, we could and should emulate many of the great practices the Wright brothers developed in regards to creativity (we have written extensively on these elsewhere). But we should also be fully cognizant that any one approach could lead to a dead end. And that as an organization, creativity is not about being first or focusing on one approach; it is about developing robust ecosystems that have the capacity to spontaneously generate a field of networked but distinct approaches with a focus on novel worldmaking.
Now is where we could get into more specifics. But that will be for next week. The night is late and the morning is early.
We will leave you with a question: what would your organization look like if it understood that its creative logic should involve developing an ecosystem “rich enough to support something like the total development of flight”?
Oh! – And lest we forget about Darwin and his problematic tree... what replaces it? As Lynn Margulis suggested, life emerged from a bush (and so does the new):
Well, that is it for this week—it's all far more horizontal and intrawoven—let's all try and keep it that way this week! Till next week, stay distributed!
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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