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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 165! Creativity: Groups without Individuals, Agency without Agents...
Good Morning bilateral processes,
It has been quite a week, especially here in the US. Many of the emerging trends are certainly not good on any level for the flourishing of life and difference. Here in NJ, the work goes on – our boots are firmly planted in the mud working at many levels and in many ways to collectively make change happen, and to help create a world where many worlds can thrive.
If you are in Chicago, the University of Chicago is having a two day celebration of the life and work of our dear friend and colleague, the great artist and changemaker Pope.L: CAMPAIGN: A Celebration of Pope.L (November 10 and 11). We (iain) worked with him over the years on a number of projects, starting with The Black Factory in 2003. He is very much missed, and we are pained that we cannot be there.
On a lighter note, in talking with some of our international readers about last week’s newsletter, there was some puzzlement about the title of the newsletter: Creativity Requires a Murder. Why a "murder,” they asked?
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A quick explanation: first it was Halloween – so it seemed a good moment to bring in a little goulish humor. And secondly, it was a play on the odd term used in English to refer to a swarm of crows – which is called a "murder." Perhaps coming from their scavenger practices. In English there is a vast collection of diverse collective nouns for groupings of birds: from Rafts of Auks, to Murals of Buntings, to Wakes, Broods, Chatterings, Confusions, Mobs, Curfews, Trips, Flights, Flings, Tremblings, Leases, Kettles, Screeches, Mischiefs, Sords, Huddles, Gulps, and Chimes of Wrens!
For those new to our newsletter – we love all things involving flights, birds, and especially crows.
And creativity does require a swarm – an ungainly, diverse, open and dynamic collective of unlike agents – something like what one might witness when hanging out with a murder of crows. Murder, while a violet term, also does illuminate the nature of ruptures involved in creative practices. Something is being “killed”, betrayed, put aside, radically transformed, blocked and refused when we engage with practices that led to the emergence of qualitative novelty...
This week has been another week where we have been busy working on preparing for the imminent launch of our creativity learning ecosystem and our next book. Both of these are taking up quite a bit of time and bandwidth—creativity is, as they say, in the details. The development of this project is something we are very excited about – our goal is to set up a learning space that can grow towards a rich, diverse collaborative community, fostering an alternative set of approaches to creative practices grounded in complexity and emergent logics. Stay tuned, and if you have any thoughts, please reach out (we had a long talk with our colleague Curtis Michelson on AI and learning ecosystems that was very illuminating. We would recommend connecting with him if you are exploring AI questions.)
This newsletter is the last in our series on organizations and creative processes (Volume 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164). And as we were reviewing and discussing these six newsletters as a team and with clients and colleagues, a couple of connected concepts stood out to us in need of stressing. And these were around group agency and creativity.
When we are working with organizations, we will often use the easy to remember shorthand – “groups without individuals” and “agency without agents” to make these critical points memorable. While these statements are intended to be polemic and challenging—that is what will make them memorable – they are also true – and more importantly, critical to organizational creativity (which is, in a general sense all creativity).
We like to stress that groups come before and are very different from individuals – a group is not a collection of individuals. And organizations are not a collection of groups of individuals. Of course, groups and organizations can be rightly understood to be in part composed of individuals. And of course individuals matter. But the focus on the human individual as the locus of agency, creativity, and autonomy is in itself a mistake, and it is especially problematic when we are trying to come to terms with groups and creative processes.
We tend to think of group agency to be the direct outcome of the collective action of individuals — primarily the internal thinking of the unique individuals who come together to make the group. The story goes something like this: Individuals have internal ideas, these are shared and debated, then agreements are formed, and finally the ideas are acted upon, and that is group behavior. And then, when it comes to helping groups collaborate, this view puts most of the onus on teaching forms of collaborative listening and turn-taking to allow each individual's internal ideas to be shared, heard, and considered effectively. This approach rests upon a number of problematic assumptions:
We need to challenge all three of these assumptions if we are ever to move towards a more effective pragmatic approach to organizational creativity and creative practices in general.
We know from many studies that agency is in and of systems—we see this across scales from Gaia theory to superorganisms such as bees and the study of social movements. In a very simple sense, this is what is meant by the term Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) – the system has an agency – it can adapt – creatively respond to changes independent of the responses or actions of any component. And in doing so, it is creatively transforming those components (which in social systems can include us).
Collectives are everywhere and define everything: from organizations to groups to individuals. We as individual human beings are literal collectives—composed of a highly diverse symbiotic network of creatures. And this extends back into deep evolutionary history: the very cells of all complex life are the outcomes of symbiotic relationships fusing into organelles within the eukaryotic cell. We, even if we draw our boundary at our skin, are more like ecosystems than individuals being composed of billions of bacteria and fungi.
But our collective nature does not stop at our skin, nor with the living. We are constitutively (intra)dependent on others—humans, tools, environments, practices, habits, concepts, systems, etc. All of which are themselves interdependent collectives.
These collectives are (semi)stable processes that have individuated at differing scales: ecosystems, organizations, cultures, individuals, and movements. And these all have unique forms of creative agency that are irreducible.
Now, none of this should be taken as some generic feel-good “we are all one” theory that, while sounding nice and all, has no practical application.
Perhaps one example can help ground this. Edwin Hutchins, a cognitive anthropologist, has studied extensively how groups think independent of the thinking of any one individual. In one case, he researched how navigational agency emerges on an aircraft carrier. There are many components to this, from distributed equipment (radar, satellites, buoys, maps, etc.) to many individuals performing distinct tasks. The key to why this system “works,” is, as Chemero summarizes, “this works, even though none of the individual humans might know how to complete the whole task or what role their activities play in the task; the task and the knowledge of how to accomplish the task are distributed across the whole cognitive system.” And what is meant by the “cognitive system” includes tools, environments, and practices—not simply the internal contents of people's heads. “Thinking” – the act of recognizing patterns and responding to them, is the outcome of a distributed collective.
Thinking is distributed. All thinking is distributed. This is especially critical to understanding organizations.
But, this distributed logic to thinking can still be understood in a very individualistic manner in organizations: yes, there is some form of “group think” happening – but it is ultimately only because of the contribution of individual thoughts and ideas. All of this “distributed thinking” could be explained by reference to the contributions of individual members working collectively on some predefined top-down goal. Which is to say the individuals are the ones that have the thoughts, the agency, desires, and beliefs. Thus, it is really not the “group” – but a group of individuals working together on a shared task...
But all of this rests upon one more assumption that must be challenged. And that is that:
The standard contemporary approach to thinking (cognition) is that it is both internal to the individual (happening in the brain) and that it involves the manipulation of representations. From this perspective, thinking can be supported and augmented by outside things—tools, habits, environments, and other people—but the thinking is ultimately all internal to the individual because it involves representations.
But, the question and challenge that Hutchins (and enactive cognition in general) poses to this view is: for some coordinated activity to happen in a group, do all or even any of the group members need to have an internal representation of what is happening in their heads? And the answer is no.
The enactivist, Anthony Chemero, proposes a simple and commonsensical approach to this question:
“If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a part of a process which, were it done by an individual biological organism, we would have no hesitation in recognizing it as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is part of the cognitive process.”
We do not need the shared representational assumption to explain thinking.
Thinking is an activity that dynamically loops through the body, the environment, and others.
It is important to notice how “Thinking” is being reframed in all of this: Thinking is more about agency – the collective ability to do things—than the manipulation of internal representations. Agency (the ability to do something in a coordinated fashion) and thinking must be conjoined as a single practice. It is not that we think and then act. Thinking is an action – a distributed form of collective action. Thinking is doing. And doing is ecosystemic.
The divide that Aristotle introduces into western thought between thinking as a private internal immaterial matter and action as a material outward (and lesser) activity of labor is fundamentally wrong. Agency and thinking are always conjoined—something that can be best expressed in the term sensemaking. And sense-making is not a practice of internal representation making. Another example about now would help:
A good example of this is what happens in improvised music – bodies, actions, and frequencies are coordinating, and synergies are emerging that cannot be traced back to any internal representational state. While some might be uncomfortable in calling this “thinking” or cognition, we can at the very least recognize that the collective agency—the movement of the music—is not reducible or even directly traceable to the internal thoughts of any individual or individuals.
Agency – the skilled doing of some task—is more about how practices and processes are aligned in a systematic manner. Richard Dale frames these forms of collective action as forms of alignment systems. All activity involves multi-scalar, multi-modal, multi-object, multi-practice alignments that are adaptive and responsive.
Considering all of this, we can go further: in regards to organizational creativity (which in a general sense is all creativity—in so far as all creativity involves collectives) we must move away from both individualism and representationalism.
Putting this simply: creativity is a collective activity that is not about the production of internal representations. Rather, creativity is a collective activity of making new practices come into being and gain agency and autonomy.
When we carefully attend to experience, we can sense this—practices emerge as activities emerge and coordination emerges from across distributed fields of individuals, systems, and things. And in all of this, agency and ideas emerge in ways that are irreducible.
This is especially true and important for creativity. For creativity is a practice of creating the new, and if it is new, there are no pre-existing representations, ideas, or anything to go on. The new is not coming from an idea, an internal representation – it is always an emergent phenomenon of a group—a swarm, a murder, a collective. That unlikely thicket of unlike things, practices, scales, environments, and peoples that is itself in becoming.
As we come to the end of this week's newsletter, let's bring this back to the issue of organizational creativity and agency. Eziquiel di Paolo in a wonderful piece, Does Agency Come in Levels? argues this point: when we think of agency at one level—say, at the organizational level—we should not expect it to depend constitutively on any other level (essentialism). Which is to say, organizational agency cannot be explained by the behaviors of the individuals who compose the organization. Rather, agency, or creative agency, is an emergent phenomenon that can happen at any scale without the reference or explanation by way of individual internal representations. In groups and organizations, we do have creativity without creatives and agency without agents.
Well – that is it for now on organizations.
Next week we will launch a new series.
Till then, stay collective and stay active—things do not need to be the way they are; things are not limited by our imagination, nor is the horizon of possibilities—other worlds exist and new, different worlds can be made. Active radical creativity is needed now more than ever…
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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