Emerging Futures - Volume 164: Creativity Requires a Murder

Good morning distributed and individuated problematizers,

A happy Diwali and New Year to everyone.

Last week we were encouraging everyone to be and not to be like the Wright brothers.

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We received great feedback from this newsletter—it really struck a chord with many readers, and it led to some wonderful discussions. For some, it was a bit of a cliffhanger—we left you hanging, wondering what are the key lessons from the larger story of the creative emergence of human flight?

In our conversations, we explored how to work as an organization at the level of ecosystemic creativity, which is what we take as one of the key insights from the story. And this is in strong contrast to the usual “be the Wright Brothers” narratives that populate the world of creativity consultants (here is yet another one that came into our feed this week). 

But it is not just about the Wright Brothers; the problem with this essentialist approach in general is that it ascribes to the individual powers, attributes, and actions that are actually the emergent result of a diverse organized ecosystem operating in a non-linear manner: 

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We put our focus in the wrong place—we are searching for a singular essence that puts us at the center of the story, when we should be paying attention to a far more broad sweep of time and the vast landscape of ecosystems evolving.

We, in the west, like to tell this story, like most innovation stories, as a type of hero journey.

We are using a type of “tree model” of development that goes something like this:  Many people are struggling to solve a problem, and while contributing important insights, nothing happens until one person perseveres against all odds and succeeds (the hero). Then their great work leads to the opening of a whole field, from which we all benefit immensely.

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In this story, we could replace the Wright Brothers with Davinci, Steve Jobs, or whomever—the model and the story are the same. 

But, as we saw with the story of the emergence of human heavier than air-powered flight, it does not come down to the individual success of one or another person or team; it was the outcome of a highly entangled and highly dynamic ecosystem.

We need to move from the individual and the essentialist model of creativity to a far more entangled, ecosystemic, and emergent approach. Trees as models of innovation are not helpful. We can learn a lot from evolutionary theory and how it struggled to overcome similar models—after all, Darwin proposed a tree version of evolution. But evolutionary theorists have come to realize that the tree of life is actually a type of “thicket"—a densely intrawoven thicket of diverse bushes. From which we can take an alternative approach to the process of innovation—there is never a tree—it is always something far more entangled:

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The Wright Brothers are one important event in the emergence of flight, but the invention of flight does not directly emerge from their unique efforts:

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We can see how they are part of one approach. And as we noted last week, the Wright brothers' design approach, wing warping, was a dead end. And while others used some of their concepts in new ways—within a decade of being the first to fly, they were no longer directly involved in the evolution of flight. This is not a tragedy or a problem in the bigger story of the invention of flight—that is how innovation works.

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Abstractions

It is worth pausing to emphasize how our models, habits, concepts, and visualization tools—our abstractions—can radically warp experience. The aborescent model is a serious hindrance to grasping innovation processes—and alternatives exist:

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But this is not the only problematic visualization practice; it is part of a set of essentialist logics: trees, onions, pyramids, and icebergs—all of which warp and distort our engagement with creative processes.

To effectively approach how creativity is organized and how it emerges in organizational settings, we need to radically shift our practices of abstraction to far more entangled, distributed, and emergent approaches:

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Some general creative practices

So what can we say in general in regards to organizational creativity? What are the big takeaways for organizations? Here we want to take a moment to go back to our previous newsletters on Organizational Creativity (Volume 159, 160, 161, 162, and 163). They make a great series and are worth returning to… 

1. Everything is organized; “organizations” should be understood broadly—all human life is organized, intra-dependent, and collective. We, and all creativity, are the emergent outcomes of creative enabling and stabilizing configurations. 

2. Individuals are one type of individuation: We need to focus on the process of how all things become discrete and individual—this is the process of individuation. Individuals are the outcome of a process of individuation; so too are organizations, and so too is the world of human flight. 

3. Groups are not a collection of individuals: Groups are not simply a collection of individuals following a collective plan or goal. As individuals sync up in coordinated practices, new group capacities (affordances), behaviors, and outcomes emerge that are irreducible to any individual's contributions.

4. Groups make individuals: Emergent group capacities and behaviors have the ability to directly transform the individual members. This system causation transformatively shapes the individuals that gave rise to the system. Thus distinct individual behaviors now originate as an outcome of group effects. 

5. Thinking emerges from the middle of the group: Cognition (thinking) is distributed across people, equipment, and environments. This means that the thinking is not found inside any one individual. It has to be understood at other levels in relation to emergent outcomes of distributed coordinated embedded practices.

6. Groups are more than people: We need to understand what constitutes a group to include more than human agents: it necessarily includes tools, environments, rituals, rules, histories, etc.—and that are all active participants in groups and their outcomes (in ways that go far beyond scaffolding or support). Groups are both dynamic and multiple—coming in and out of synchronization at multiple scales and forms of nesting. 

7. It's not herding Monkeys: Organizational creative processes are not about managing individual creatives. It is about how dynamic ecosystems lead to novel outcomes—and that is an entirely different problem...

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Some Specific Creative Practices

We can also look more closely at the story of the creative emergence of human flight for insights into creative practices for organizations:

8. Organizations should focus on developing a creative ecosystem: Creativity is not a moment. It is not about ideating and picking the next great thing, and then just doing it. Novel outcomes emerge from the right ecosystems. Creative ecosystems have to be brought into being, cared for, and nurtured.
9. Organizations should focus on being a part of a creative ecosystem: Everything will not happen inside any one organization, no matter how big or great it is. Develop into and with a larger ecosystem. This is hard work to make horizontal linkages across silos.
10. Great diversity is required. All innovation surfs the co-opting of things for novel usages. It is not possible to know in advance where these “exaptations” might come from. 
11. Many independent teams with autonomy: without independence and agency, nothing novel can emerge. 
12. The failure of many teams is necessary (and leads to transversal movements)—it is a requirement.
13. Don’t tie too much to success, of any one approach.
14. Transversal sharing needs to be built into everything: build many links and bridges—this will allow theft, borrowing, co-opting, and repurposing in unexpected ways—also a necessity.
15. Time pressure (a race) and limited resources (but great freedom)
16. Worldmaking as an emergent organizing logic (not a preset goal). Don’t have a specific, predetermined, clear goal. Allow the directions to emerge and coordinate activities. 
17. Keep difference alive: Great effort should be made to understand the distinct emerging approaches. These need to be tracked, and their differences nurtured and developed. Approaches should be kept distinct—and make more of them.
18. New knowledges need to be developed. Novel theory and practice co-emerge and co-inform.
19. Making and experimenting must be favored: genuinely novel knowledges require a rigorous hands-on experimental practice
20. Environments & practices co-emerge: approaches need to co-construct environments and not just things.
21. Don’t bet on winners. Love equally all of the odd and distant relatives.
22. Develop and support a diverse ecosystem
23. Shape the overall propensities: pay close attention to the metastability. What are the approaches that are emerging? What is closing or narrowing? What are the new novel propensities? 
24. Keep the ecosystem open, communicating and repurposing
25. No goal—only a general horizon (that can change and evolve)
26. Focus on novel worldmaking, not simply individual things (no matter how successful)
27. The game continues after the “winning”: The game does not stop with “winning"—e.g., the “first” to fly 
28. It is about an “art of living"—you are in the collective business of making possible genuinely new ways of being alive. Care for these and live them into becoming.

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Well – the sun is up and the day is underway. We wish you a wonderful week being organized, extended, and experimental! And remember, creativity requires a swarm—a vast multiplicity—a murder (of crows)...

Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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