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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 169! Creativity is Worldmaking...
Good morning worldly becomings of worlds becoming,
Suddenly it is December! Snow, wind, rain – all around glorious!
The year in the Gregorian Calendar is coming to an end in a few short weeks. We hope that if this is a period of celebration in your world that you have some great plans brewing. In our New Jersey corners of the world, our next celebration will be with the last full moon this year – the “cold moon” (December 15th), and then the Winter Solstice at sunset on December 21st.
There is also Bodhi Day (December 8th), Hanaukkah (December 25th - January 2nd ) and Fatemiyeh (December 12th) among the celebratory moments in differing worlds.
Speaking of holiday celebrations, we are back from our brief Thanksgiving holiday escapes. Jason did change his t-shirt and Iain did shave as we jumped into a busy week of coaching, consulting, and leading discussions on creativity processes and practices. As ever it is really wonderful to speak and work with so many of you.
December is full of astonishing possible futures:
Friday: Today if you are in the region, our dear friends at Blank Forms are hosting PAUL ARÁMBULA AND THE KEEPS: STILL’S KEEP RELEASE PARTY out in the suburbs of NJ – Brooklyn. We don’t know anything about Paul or this work – but that is part of the joy – to welcome whatever comes next, as John Cage would say…
Saturday: Just down the street at the Newark Museum of Art is the Newark Zine Festival and Dense Magazine Issue Two Release Party.
Newark is home to the great poet and visionary Amari Baraka (whose son is the current mayor). It is a city of radical worldmakers in the written word. There will be over 70 zine publishers and many events. We will be there talking briefly about our dear friend, the Newark native and someone we had the privilege of collaborating with, Pope.L whose project “The Black Factory” is featured in Issue Two of Dense. Please come and join us and all the celebrations! (4:30pm - 6pm Saturday at Newark Museum of Art).
December 18: The absolutely brilliant Tanya Tagaq will be in the region performing at the PAC NY. Please, wherever you are, she is on tour – if she is in your neck of the woods – please go! (And speaking of t-shirts, Iain has not taken off their t-shirt since he got it in 2018…).
And, we are still accepting applications to join our Creativity mastermind for innovation leaders. If you want to join us and transform your creative leadership practice in 2025 - apply here - we’d love to welcome you.
But this is just us in our corner – let us know what you are up to over December – we would love to share more possible futures.
This week is the last installment (for a while) of our series on definitions. Over the last few weeks, we have added 16 words to our glossary (which has now over seventy-five terms). These all come out of our research and work in developing an alternative approach to creativity (the Innovation Design Approach):
It seems fitting that as we come to the end of the Gregorian year we are writing about worlds and worldmaking. We have seven worldly words for you this week.
Where to start? To write about worldmaking and creativity is to talk about large sweeping forms of change. This is often referred to as Paradigm Change:
Large scale systemic change is now almost ubiquitously understood as being a form of “paradigm change." The concept and the term “paradigm” comes from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). A book about how qualitative changes – “revolutions” – ruptures – happened in the history of the western sciences.
While “Paradigm” was pretty much a new word in 1962 when Kuhn first used it— now it is ubiquitous and has come to mean something different than he intended. Now paradigm means something more like: “the mindset out of which the system arises” or the shared ideas, and unstated beliefs that underpin the actual operating of any system.
And developing from this the term “Paradigm Change” is now the near-ubiquitous term for a deep change of mindsets. Donella Meadows captures this idea of a paradigm and paradigm change quite well when she writes:
“You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system… But there is nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click of the mind, a falling of the scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing…”
This way of understanding the term is highly problematic and pulls us back into an essentialist logic of giving ideas and the concepts in people's minds the primary agency in innovation and change-making.
Additionally, as the enactive approach to cognition shows – thinking does not develop in this manner, nor is anything ever reducible to something like a “mindset." Ideas, views, perspectives, and concepts all emerge from the dense weave of embodied practices, the use of tools, habits, collaborations, and environments. Paradigms do not change because of a “click of the mind” – they change because embodied practices, tools, habits, concepts, and environments change…
This concept that changing the mind is how everything changes has a long problematic and unconsciously accepted history in the West. It involves a double mistake: (1) making thinking purely internal, personal, and immaterial, and (2) separating thinking from the ecosystem of tools, embodiments, practices, and environments that gave rise to it.
Kuhn was interested in a different approach to change and this leads us to what we are calling Paradigm Change 2.0:
While Paradigm Change has come to mean a deep change in a cultural mindset (see Paradigm 1.0), this was not the original intention of the term. The concept was developed to explain how revolutions happened in the sciences. What made a change a “revolution” was the emergence of an “incommensurable” rupture — a change-in-kind in practices.
This approach is critical of the idea that history is progressive. History, especially regarding the sciences, was not one of a linear development towards “the truth." History, in general, and in the hard sciences in particular, neither follow a singular line of development (contrary to the likes of Yoval Noah Harari, and this brand of reactionary explanation) nor is history mere improvement — the march of progress — but always involves the emergence of a qualitatively different world. Here the concept of Paradigm Change shares similarities with the important method of Genealogical histories as developed by Michel Foucault.
The paradigmatic example of this form of rupture is the historical process of change that happened in the move from an earth-centered science to a sun-centered science in Western Asia (Eurasia). From this, paradigm change is defined to have four phases:
Anomalies, which first go unnoticed, lead to innovation. This is an important insight for the practice of innovation. While in this model of change, anomalies are just spontaneously emerging in the everyday practice of scientists, from the perspective of innovation – we can deliberately fabricate anomalies. This is the process of developing and co-opting unintended affordances (what are called exaptations). If one blocks key aspects of “Normal Science” or the “normal” underlying ecosystem of any stable process one can produce an experimental situation where exaptations emerge that can be stabilized and treated as novel exemplary forms (paradigms).
This is a powerful practical hands-on technique for developing qualitative changes. And the hands-on experimental nature of this highlights one of the problems with the more theoretical view of change found in the historical use of the concept. While theoretical speculation plays a very important role in the sciences, so do the independent traditions of experimental and instrumental research. With the focus on theory, what is missed is what actually happens in the daily practices of Normal Science and how change does not only emerge via conceptual anomalies but also via the invention of novel tools (and the emergence of new affordance landscapes), and experimental exaptations.
In normal practice, novelty is continuously emerging at the fringes of practices. Unintended possibilities are always present and haunt all practices. We do not need to wait for theoretical law-like crises to emerge. Anomalies — exaptations are ontologically ever present — and while they cannot be seen, we can join them in experimental practices of blocking purpose and co-developing novel affordances. This is a non-theoretical practice — it involves embodied and enactive doing.
One can see how Thomas Kuhn’s focus on the theoretical aspects of scientific practices and change led to the modern development of an understanding of paradigms and paradigm change as being about mental transformations and mindsets.
Ultimately the logic of Paradigm Change is too theoretical and does a poor job of taking the distributed and emergent logic of processes into account. But the term, if taken in its more modest form is very useful:
A “paradigm” is an “exemplary example." In the context of creativity and innovation it is a exemplary example of an exaptation that when abstracted might suggest novel world opening possibilities.
For innovation, we need novel paradigms — novel shared sufficiently unprecedented examples of exaptations that suggest a possible path to creatively make experimentally. It is an important tool for the emergence of novel worlds.
What ultimately is being challenged by these logics of Paradigms and Paradigm Change is the mistaken belief in historical continuity. Especially the false concept that how something begins determines how it continues and where it ends up (e.g. that there is always a direct line from what something is today to how it began in the past). But if human history and evolutionary history teach us anything, it is that it is all ruptures and discontinuities. We need to actively challenge this false logic of continuity and origins for the sake of understanding creativity:
An origin is a postulation of how something came into being. And in such an origin the essence and purpose of the thing first emerges and from this moment forward it develops. An origin “is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities; because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession” (Foucault).
Origins, as careful genealogical histories show us, do not determine the meaning, purpose, or possible use of things. Rather history is full of ruptures where things are co-opted, repurposed, and transformed towards qualitatively new purposes and uses.
Purpose is never tied to origin or “essence." The meaning of things is only in their use – what they can do – and this is open.
As Michel Foucault says “The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin.”
A second important aspect of these approaches to historical change is that they are ultimately only mental and subjective. That change is only about changes in “views”:
A term that conflates a cultural mindset with the complexity of practices, tools, habits, concepts, and environments that make total societal way of doing-thinking possible.
Revolutionary disruptive social change, like the shift from an earth-centered universe to a sun-centered solar system in an open universe, is not a mindset change or a change in “worldviews.” The change is ontological and not subjective. It involves a change in “worlds” (see below). Thomas Kuhn, in his history of the shift from an earth-centered universe, is quite explicit about this stating that “after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world… [and] after the discovery of oxygen, Lavoisier worked in a different world.”
With an approach to large-scale social change where change happens in “worldviews” — only our “view” changes but the “world” stays the same. In this approach, change amounts to “seeing things differently.” But, how we see things emerges from how we do things with things. And in this, we are shaping our immediate environment and in turn, our environment is shaping us. Our world is not separate from us — it is not something “out there” to simply be seen one way or another. This is the very core of the Enactive approach to cognition.
And this brings us to the critical concept of “worlds”:
In the modern west a consensus has developed across the sciences that humans are deep down the same the world over — we all have the same essence and needs— we all have the same unchanging essence. And that while we are differing culturally, this is only in how we “view” the same unchanging reality or world.
The problem with any model that assumes we are all deep down the same — is that it cannot come to terms with actual differences – and from the perspective of creativity, it cannot come to terms with new emergent qualitative difference. For example, such an essentialist perspective would explain a culture that holds that rivers and mountains are also people as either “superstitions” (e.g. mere “beliefs” to be overcome), or as elaborate “metaphors” that are not meant in any literal sense. What such a perspective misses is that the unique practices, forms of embodiment, concepts, tools, habits, and environments that are part of this way of being gives rise to more than a unique way of seeing – they give rise to an ontologically unique world. We call this assemblage a world (here the concept of affordance is critical).
We should not conflate worlds with “worldviews." Nor should we conflate reality with worlds. To do so is to confuse change-in-degree with change-in-kind – and to reduce creativity to mere variation. It is impossible to engage with qualitative change (fully half of creativity) if we do not have a model of difference that is willing to recognize difference in kind and not just in degree. Any and all forms of universalizing creativity or design practices are ones that ultimately do not adequately come to terms with difference in kind.
Other worlds exist, and yet other worlds are possible.
A world is:
The shift from seeing large-scale societal difference as merely a question of differing worldviews to recognizing it to be one of ontologically differing worlds is a profound ethical question. And it is equally a profound question about how we should conceptualize creativity. Ethically universalizing styles of judgment erase the other. They involve a colonial perspective — they subsume or colonize (erase) ontological difference to be simply one perspective. And from the perspective of creativity, they colonize the future to make it mere variations of the present.
It bears repeating: Other worlds exist, and yet other worlds are possible. World is always plural: worlds.
If other worlds exist then innovation and creativity practices have much to reconsider. Here are some preliminary thoughts:
Universal practices and assumptions cannot continue: practices like Human Centered Design are problematic forms of a universalizing (colonial) practice that we need to move out of.
Well – that's it for this week. We hope that you can entangle in worldly ways of difference differing with great joy, wonderment, and beauty – and can take advantage of all that is being experimentally celebrated this week.
Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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