MasterMinds
Courses
Resources
Newsletter
Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 167! Words as Lures for the New...
Goodmorning weather systems stabilizing out of fields of difference,
This week we want to start off with a couple of announcements:
Now, if you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you know this type of name, “Master Minds” would never resonate with us – we are neither big on masters nor on minds.
But we are interested in small peer-to-peer discussion groups. And when we mentioned starting such a group to others, they all say “Oh you mean a Master Mind group!” – the name is new to us, but the concept does fit – if not the name! So Jason naturally wanted to name this “Murderers Row” in honor of our crow friends…
The puns aside, as good as they are – this just doesn’t fit the convivial and creative spirit we are interested in fostering – we certainly hope we will come up with a better name by the time we officially launch – but we will see…
All that aside – we are excited about launching this project with you. A small curated peer-to-peer discussion group.
So, here is what we are thinking: we speak to so many of you on a regular basis and these conversations are really astonishing, productive, and insightful. And this got us speculating: what would happen if we brought together a group who could all converse and support each other's growth, learning, and experimentation around disruptive innovation, creativity, novelty, emergence, complexity science, and organizational leadership? We would lead this discussion, prepare specific materials in advance, add to the conversation, and then afterwards we would send out a follow-up “podcast” to the group of our thoughts and reflections (both a sound file and a text version).
From our own experiences and that of others we trust, our strong sense is that such curated small discussions:
Now if any of this interests you in any way, please complete this application form. The purpose of this form is to understand your individual creativity goals, industry, availability, communication style, etc. so that we can curate a diverse and supportive group that can catalytize your creative life. Ideally, we will launch this program in January 2025. But, to us, more important than speed is getting the right mix of people together. So we will flex on the launch date and keep everyone who shows interest in the loop.
With an exceptionally warm, dry autumn (we have wildfires burning) and all the distractions of the day, the holiday season has leapt up on our laps like a scared dog in a thunderstorm.
The good news that comes with all the jingles and ungodly glitter is the downtime spent with loved ones (more-than-human and the odd human one), glorious discordant music playing, the fire burning, warm spirits pleasing our senses, and a good book.
If you don’t have a good book or have been contemplating ours: Innovating Emergent Futures - for yourself or as a gift — now might be the time to purchase. We are offering our newsletter subscribers 30% off. Use promo code HOLI2024 at the checkout - good till Dec 15, 2024.
And a final whisper – we have been dropping hints about our next book… and like everything in the creative universe, it will pull us into the future to meet its unexpected arrival… (which means we cannot promise a date just yet).
But, here is what we can say: it is very close, we have a title now: The Becoming of Creativity – the final edits are underway and we hope to have it for December… stay tuned for what the winds and tides might deliver…
Now, back to the usual Friday morning programming...
It is both easy to fall into dogma and to become dogmatic
– to start to argue with everyone, “this is what is true” – “no intelligent or rational person could think otherwise!”
– and while there might be some important aspect to the dogmatic’s argument, the practice is ultimately one of a type of blackmail against the adventure of thought.
What is always left unspoken in these arguments is that thinking is always a risk.
Why?
Because thinking is not regurgitation—thinking is always a creative act.
There is no way to immunize thought from going astray.
To believe otherwise and to err on the side of a conservatism of only thinking “true thoughts” is to fall into what Whitehead called “the fallacy of the perfect dictionary." He saw this as believing the assumption that humans have somehow “consciously entertained all the fundamental ideas which are applicable to its experience"—and so now we can just sit back and debate what is really true, what are the best and necessary practices for any and all occasions... from a certainty that there is nothing new under the sun – and that there are no new suns… But as Octavia Butler pointed out, the first part might be true, but that means very little…
As a newsletter, we are engaged in experimenting with creative processes, and because of this, ultimately we are interested in what Whitehead called elsewhere, “the adventure of thought."
We live in a spontaneously creative universe that is radically contingent. We are an experiment that is experimenting. This is the risky adventure we are fated to. The great author of speculative fiction, Ursula Le Guin, said it this way:
“To not know whether we know or not.”
~ John Cage
Risking, in thought, involves a willingness to speculate. and this requires the development of new concepts, languages, and rhythms of dialog. This week we have gone back (again) to our existing online glossary to further experiment and transform the set of words that make up our glossary.
In an open and experimental universe, where new suns are possible, our words will never be static—they are forever in a state of ongoing revision and creation—fragmentary probes:
The dead man burns everything he writes, but pieces survive.
The fragment is more than the whole.
The Book of the Dead Man, Marvin Bell
We have curated a set of ten more definitions that we felt needed some further attention, experimentation, and development—and that together make an argument that can challenge some current orthodoxies and dogmas—while giving us new ways of being pulled into unexpected creative processes.
Perhaps in this regard, there is no better word to begin with than “Proposition”, because for us, following Whitehead, words that act as propositions are “lures for feeling” rather than strict definitions—they pull one towards an adventure...
A proposition is the articulating of a tendency sensed in an experiment (an event). In creative processes, as the new first emerges, it is something fully a-conceptual, and as such, it is not directly accessible to ideation or a clear and distinct language. The new in this state of becoming is something we sense as a tendency, something pulling us into the darkness, in a new direction. Here, the word "proposition,” used as Whitehead defines it, as a “lure for feelings,” is helpful to contexify our words. We are developing a language alongside the pull of the a-conceptual new to support this propensity. Here the goal is to keep novel qualitative difference alive with a language that does not bend back to the known.
Propositions like “other worlds are possible” are not statements to be judged as true or false but as “lures” — a thing that draws the willing into a new way of sensing and feeling radical contingent possibilities. Sensing and feeling matter here, for our sensing goes “deeper” and wider than our conscious forms of knowing. And ultimately, our conscious and reflective forms of knowing grow out of our embodied sensing and feeling—out of these lures. Any creativity interested in the qualitatively new needs to go deeper than conscious forms of knowing and imagining—and to develop a novel eccentric propositional language that could give it a necessary catalytic support.
Propositions: “The proximity of things is poetry." (Emmanuel Levinas)
…And this then leads us to a critical paradox that haunts the modern approach to creativity...
Creativity is a process by which something new emerges. Beginning in the 1950’s in the West, creativity has been defined as a process of coming up with new ideas. And it has consequently been focused on internal, individualized thinking. In this approach, we are called upon to “think outside the box” and utilize techniques of “lateral thinking” to “brainstorm” the new. Some researchers even purport to be able to measure a “creativity quotient” (CQ much like IQ) via tests for “divergent thinking."
But if creativity is focused on both producing the radically new and in doing so via first having ideas of what the radically new is, then we run into a problem: 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 radically new be first ideated? It cannot be.
This is the modern creativity paradox: you must ideate the new, but you cannot ideate the radically new, so how do you think the new—that which cannot be thought?
To do this, to cut the Gordonian knot, we need to have very different approaches to creativity than ones that rely on some form of the classical western creativity process of (1) Ideate, (2) Plan, and (3) Make. The problem is that most contemporary approaches to creativity faithfully and unwittingly follow this model.
Put simply, we need a far more engaged, experimental, emergent, and world-involving approach to both creativity and thinking.
Reinventing a creativity that has nothing to do with this paradox involves grasping what thinking is and this takes some radical work, putting aside the dogma of what “thought is” and carefully following the experience of how thinking is engendered…
Ideas involve the clear and distinct use of language to articulate a concept, abstraction, or plan for action. They play an important role in thinking and creativity. Often ideas are proposed as both a critical part of the definition of creativity and as the beginning of the creative process. Neither is true.
Creativity is the process by which anything new comes into being. This, such as in the case of the creative process of the Big Bang, does not have to involve ideas of any kind. And as the creativity paradox has shown, ideas can only emerge late in the creative process (if at all). Ideas are never at the origin of newness or radical creativity.
The idea of the new comes later in the creative process — often quite late or even enters the process mistakenly...
To get at how ideas only come later in the creative process, we like to say, "no ideas but in making."
Thinking arises from the middle of activity. This understanding 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.
To effectively understand the important role ideas do play in the creative process the first key question is: how do ideas emerge in thinking? (See “Know-How”). And to answer that we need to first explore the question: what is thinking? (See “Thinking – Cognition”)
As theories of thinking (cognition) developed during the Cognitive Revolutions of the 20th century, they all focused on internal brain states, their connections, and a representational model as the basis and location of cognition (Anderson, 2014). This approach follows a long-standing western tradition of what and where thinking is and occurs (The God Model).
This approach has been strongly challenged by an enactive approach to cognition that proposes that thinking is inherently:
Because of these four "E's," this approach is also known as 4E Cognition (or the 4EA approach, the “A” standing for Affect).
The Enactive approach to cognition views one’s knowing not as an internal representation of an external, pregiven objective world, nor as the external manifestations of personal inner subjective states. Rather, cognition is an emergent phenomenon that arises within a biologically and culturally constructed world brought forth through goal-directed, embodied, and enacted collective practices. These enacted understandings are determined in relation to one’s histories of prior worldly interactions.
What is critical in this shift is that thinking is not the internal representational activity happening in the brain of a solitary individual learner, but it is rather a distributed and emergent process that draws upon environmental affordances, and the specifics of each learner's embodied beings as active agents (Gibson). These distributed processes are non-linear, unfolding, and ongoing events.
By viewing knowing as emergent from the interactive enactive practices via a process of nascent “know-how” developing into "know-what," the enactive perspective contrasts strongly with the conventional view of knowledge as a static accumulation of facts, strategies, and ideas that one may call on in order to select what is appropriate for the problem at hand.
Yes, thinking is a collectively distributed emergent process, but the question remains: what is the role of thinking in the creative process if ideation is not there in the early stages? Is thinking involved in early stage creativity whatsoever? To get a grasp on this, we need to dig into these two odd terms: “know how” and “knowing-what”.
Ideas—those clear and distinct concepts—are abstractions that are a big part of our more clear and distinct thinking practices—and living in general. We are interacting with these kinds of abstractions all the time—they are wonderful, important, and necessary things.
This form of thinking that involves the clear and distinct knowing of things—facts, concepts, and abstractions of all kinds—is a type of thinking and knowing that we can term “Know What.”
This form of thinking is not representative of all thinking but only the forms of thinking that works with things that are definable, that are clear abstractions—here there is a clear “what.”
But, most of the time, our thinking is far more vague and nebulous—much of thought is more like a feeling—a pull—what we might understand as a “hunch” or an “intuition." And the problem becomes when we (1) conflate the “know what” forms of thinking with all thinking and (2) when we no longer connect this form of thinking to its genesis in embodied worldly activity.
“Know what” emerges from far more tacit and implicit forms of doing-thinking. And we need to trace back “know what” to its creative genesis in the form of thinking called “know how.”
The common assumption is that ideas come from our thinking, and our thinking involves ideas—and all this is happening via representations in our heads (brains). This is a circular logic that fails to reveal to us the creative conditions from which abstract thinking emerges. And ultimately, this exclusively brain-centric approach to thinking is now understood to be false and profoundly misleading (see: Thinking, Enaction).
Thinking is always a distributed process that always involves activities, others, tools, and environments (“no thinking but in making”). And much of the thinking that is happening in these contexts is not something that could be explicitly articulated in any way whatsoever. It is a-conceptual and held in actions and relations between bodies, tools and environment. We can term this extended form of a-conceptual thinking “know how.”
Novel ideas (know-what) do emerge during creative processes – but they are not there at the beginning, nor do they initiate and drive the creative process. What might eventually become the things we call “wow ideas” first emerge as feelings—a “pull” provoked by actions, circumstances, and context. To have a new idea, we first need to do things in new ways—to experimentally probe and co-evolve with a novel ecosystem. New ideas first emerge as “know-how"—as practices that cannot be clearly articulated (and often cannot be articulated whatsoever!). And in this process there is the possibility that some aspects of know-how can be (with great skill) transformed into articulable concepts (or “know-what”).
This background introduction can bring us closer to practices critical to engaging with creative processes. But having an enlarged understanding of thinking alone is not enough. We need to begin to explore explicit practices critical to engaging creative processes. One of the most common and powerful of these is "blocking"...
If creativity is the process by which something new comes into being, then the new needs to confront the existing processes of repetition of the same and the similar. We live in a dynamic and spontaneously organizing world of ongoing processes which mainly involve repetitions of the similar (change-in-degree). These processes are quite robust and resilient. Often try as we might to catalyze change and the new and the already existing and the similar come back...
The question for those engaging with creative processes is: How do we disrupt these stable propensities to allow for the emergence of qualitative novelty (change-in-kind)? A key technique to stop the repeating of what is known is blocking.
Blocking is a technique of developing and putting in place experimental negative rules to not do something. Creativity is often mistakenly defined as being about “complete freedom” or “no rules,” but this is the very opposite of what is needed. Innovation requires strong rules to refuse existing rules, patterns, practices, processes, tools, habits, logics, concepts, environments, bodies, and dispositifs.
Because blocking involves the refusal of existing things, it first requires knowing what exists across multiple levels and logics. Thus, blocking is necessarily preceded by the task of disclosure.
Blocking some critical aspect of what exists forces affordances to unintentionally exceed their worlds—this is the process of exaptation.
Blocking is a refusal and the beginning of a process of experimentation:
Blocking, while it might sound simple or even crude, is a sophisticated form of what can also be called “enabling constraints." It enables a difference to be nurtured by radically constraining the norm, but only if the choice of what to block is well chosen.
Here is a simple example of blocking to try right now: When you go to cook your next meal: Choose a vegetable that you have in abundance -- say carrots or onions. The goal is to make a dish that only uses this one ingredient (plus, water, oil, salt, and heat as needed). Here we are blocking the concept that a dish involves multiple ingredients.
How many distinct and different flavors, textures and forms can you experimentally coax into emergence and stabilize as something unique from this one vegetable? Now assemble a dish that uses all of these in differing ratios. At a minimum, can you experiment to get three unique qualities to emerge, which then can be combined in various processes and ratios to make a dish?
This is a term that is used in a number of ways in distinct contexts. Today it is often used interchangeably with the term “constraint” in the complexity sciences. We strongly feel that this is a poor usage of this term (see “Constraint” below for the detailed argument).
We appreciate how this term is used by Erin Manning & Brian Massumi for rules that limit actions to enable novelty (e..g. “Blocking”).
The term “constraint” has been a critical term in the sciences (especially ecology and evolutionary biology) since the 1930’s. It has slowly emerged as one alternative to the classical ways of discussing (linear) causality. Recently, the complexity sciences, with their focus on non-linear causality, have picked up this term to great effect.
What is a Constraint? First, it is important not to think of it as an object—a straight jacket or a prison cell, for example. Rather, it is an emergent relational property of a system that moves it towards a unique, particular, limited statistical pattern of organized possibilities. Because the outcomes are creatively limited, the term “constraint” is considered appropriate. One example is the flushing of a toilet bowl: the situation both “enables” a unique collective behavior (the whirlpool phenomenon) and “constrains” the individual water molecules statistically to this pattern.
Given this, what is the problem with the terms “constraint” and “enabling constraint”?
What is most importantly missing in the term constraint and even with the term “enabling constraint” is the fundamental creativity of the disposition of the configuration. Let’s consider our flushing toilet: the water molecules involved in the flushing of the toilet are not being merely “enabled” to take on a universal, pre-established ideal form. Nor are they being “constrained” in the sense that this is imposed upon them from the outside, as if they were ever separate from some relational configuration. Not at all; they are a fundamental creative player in a fundamentally creative situation; they are creatively agential in a situation of immanent co-construction.
The concept of constraint, despite how it is defined, continues to suggest a causal and non-creative condition (e.g., act as a “lure”...). “Constraint” does not suggest creativity—rather that the water molecules are subject to an outside causal force—the constraint. It makes it seem that some “thing” is acting upon something else. But this is not the case. All the aspects are part of a configurational dynamic that is creative.
"Constraint," as a term, makes sense if you are approaching things from the perspective that creativity is both rare and a disruption to order. But neither is true—creativity is an unexceptional ubiquitous quality of reality, and it spontaneously generates order on an ongoing, continuously constructing basis via the creative enabling configurational agency of the context. It is always a question of the creative potentials of the situation that we are in and of.
When we shift our sensibility to focus on reality from a creative, dynamic, configurational, emergent, and inherently relational perspective where creative agency is always only of and in the configuration, then “constraint” seems like a less than useful holdover from another sensibility and world.
At any and all moments reality is relational. We only find things in patterns, networks, fields and processes—nothing has any intrinsic wholly individual and independent identity or meaning. The relations that emerge between processes have agency in transformatively shaping their parts (which are also irreducible to the parts that gave rise to their emergent agency). In short, what matters is the configuration of configurations (see Emergence)
At every moment, everything is part of a dynamic system, and its full and total reality is determined by the emergent logic of the creative and enabling configuration. While this reality is often defined by the Complexity Sciences with the terms “constraint” or “enabling constraint,” neither of these adequately captures the inherent creative nature of the process (see “Constraint”). Rather, it is fundamentally a question of configuration—and what the specific configuration creates (via emergence) and then stabilizes a set of novel processes (the part that might be considered “enabled” and “constrained”).
How might this come into play in our everyday creative practices?
Here, the analogy to “surfing” is helpful to understanding the joining and experimenting with configurations as the fundamental practice of engaging with creative processes:
Surfing is a creative act of making the “most” of the circumstances (propensities). Which is to say, as a surfer, one creatively makes the most of the configuration that gives rise to wave conditions and the propensities that this allows in dynamic relation to your body+skills+board etc. It is important to understand that “the most” is not a fixed limit. One is actively experimenting (probing) with changing these dynamic relations—it might be some combination of bodily capacities and skills plus the shape of the board and the techniques being developed in real time plus what conditions and location one is surfing, etc. Know-how emerges and stays within and of the context—it lives across your body-environment coupling. And it only slowly emerges into concepts. And at every moment qualitative novelty could contingently emerge to beckon—"pull"” one towards new suns...
Well, that is it for this week! We hope these ten words can act as “lures for new feelings” and pull you into the becoming of novel creative forces.
Have a wonderful Indigenous Peoples Day next week—giving thanks and being engaged with the struggles to make this a world in which many worlds can thrive from wherever you live to everywhere else—from the middle, east to Inupiat, and Aotearoa.
Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
+++
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.
