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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 170! How the Past Perishes Is How the Future Becomes...
Good morning processual attentional attunements,
It's almost the middle of December, the Cold Moon is high in the predawn sky, and we’ve been enjoying the long darkness of this night to write.
It’s the holiday season and a time of gifts. Do you need a final gift for someone special in your creative ecology? We have a simple gift for you (free) that you can give as a great gift to the fellow experimenters in your life. We have prepared two images that make great posters. One is our “Be Like a Crow” image and the other is our “Keep Difference Alive” image from a few newsletters back. They’ll make gifting easy and fun: download, print, add a frame, and wrap – done!
These are great in the home office as a daily reminder to keep engaged with creative processes. (Perhaps while you are at it you might want to add one to your own work space?)
The details: You can download these, print on good paper – the size is up to you – but we like Legal to 11x17 or ISO B4 to A3. Mount in a decent frame – we have used Ikea RÖDALM Frames with great results. (If you put them up in your office – send us a pic!).
We’ve had great response to our call to join our first “Mastermind” group – it makes the perfect gift to yourself. It is an ongoing deep conversational dive into our unique approach to creativity and innovation applied to your areas of interest and curiosities alongside vetted creatives such as yourself. Curious? just take the plunge to apply.
Last week in the newsletter we were focused on defining and exploring concepts around “worlds.” And this week those concepts came into a few discussions around questions we were having with organizations about “how do we sense the new?” And interestingly, the example of how often we can’t even see what is right in front of us, kept coming up…
You probably know the stories about missing gorillas. You know the ones – those studies where people simply can’t see the gorilla?
We are familiar with two famous versions of this experiment. In one students are asked to watch a monitor playing a basketball game and they are tasked with counting the number of passes made. Half way through the game a big person in a hairy gorilla suit walks right through the game. This is seemingly impossible to not see. But, when asked after the game ends if they noticed anything odd, just under fifty percent of the students report seeing the gorilla.
In the second study, rather than using average students, professionals who make a living by being highly skilled observers of anomalies were chosen. The profession chosen was radiology. Radiologists were shown scans of lungs where a very out-of-place, small, but noticeable, gorilla had been superimposed:
If because of our reproduction of the image you did not see it – here it is:
For a professional – it should be glaringly obvious:
But what percentage of radiologists saw the gorilla?
You might be inclined to say that it must be more than the fifty percent of average students – because, after all – these are professionals who are trained to look at lung scans for anomalies.
In actuality the percentage of radiologists that miss the gorilla is much higher – eighty percent!
Just to be clear, it is not that they did not look right at it. The researchers used eye-tracking technology that showed that it was not that they did not look at the gorilla – they did, they just did not see it.
The answer that the researchers behind these studies give is:
"They look right at it, but because they're not looking for a gorilla, they don't see that it's a gorilla,"
And in a wonderful short story from NPR on these two experiments, the author concludes:
“In other words, what we're thinking about — what we're focused on — filters the world around us so aggressively that it literally shapes what we see. So, Drew says, we need to think carefully about the instructions we give to professional searchers like radiologists or people looking for terrorist activity, because what we tell them to look for will in part determine what they see and don't see.” (From NPR report).
The phenomenon, that most people see only what they are looking for, is termed "inattention blindness.”
This way of framing and answering the problem of “why can’t people see the unexpected?” has led all sorts of business and creativity consultants to see these studies as being very relevant to creativity to which they offer their own closely related solutions.
A now classic solution of business/creativity consultants to “discover the new” is to recommend various strategies of noticing and acting on “weak signals” by “giving agency to the outliers."
Why? Well, in each case some people – the outliers, saw the gorilla – it was just not most people. Thus the correct answer is in the “weaker signal” that can be found if the sample size of participants is large enough and the outliers (those that see something different from most) are given voice.
This is an aspect of an important statistical phenomenon, the “wisdom of the crowd." Which is a discovery that goes back to the birth of statistics. A founder of statistics, William Galton, was observing farmers participating in a contest to guess the weight of an ox at an English country fair in the early 1900s. After the close of the contest, he gathered all of the 700-plus entries and analyzed them. All of them were wrong – which is to say, no one had exactly guessed the correct weight of the ox (1,198 pounds). But when he averaged all the answers – the average was remarkably accurate (1,207 pounds). This answer was astonishingly within one percent of the correct answer. And, as such, it was both better than experts at the fair, and nearly all of the seven hundred-plus answers (only one was slightly better).
Thus a crowd can be “wiser” than any one individual – even experts. This is pretty remarkable, but we should remember that this was a case where, as Galton notes, most of those in attendance were farmers generally skilled in estimating animal weights, were able to directly observe the ox, independently vote, and the modestly high cost of entering disincentivized both wild guesses and the inexperienced from participating.
This phenomenon obviously has important ramifications for how we should work with experts and collectives. But that is something for another newsletter.
We have observed that there is a general consensus amongst innovation and management consultants (especially those with some connection to complexity) on how inattention blindness can be overcome via the wisdom of the crowd to foster creativity. The process goes something like this:
1. The new will be something seen or sensed by some people as a “weak signal” – like those few radiologists who did indeed see the gorilla.
2. If we have a large sample size of participants, and we map responses accurately, we can recognize both the weak signals of novelty, as well as where the normal (non-creative) patterns of behavior and response are:
3. With this information, we can act: by using various techniques from nudges to lessening the effort to move in this direction (changing the “energy gradient”) to get the system to move towards and develop the weak signal of the new into something more robust, clear and actionable.
This now standard approach to noticing and acting upon the new is tied to a popularized version of the evolutionary concept of the “adjacent possible." This concept, first developed by the theoretical biologist, Stewart Kauffman (though it must be said the concept was already far more expansively developed by the likes of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and William James for over a century). Kauffman defines the adjacent possible as where novelty emerges. The adjacent possible is “the subset of all possible worlds that are reachable within the next step and that depend strongly on the state of the world." He goes on to say,
“It just may be the case that biospheres on average keep expanding into the adjacent possible. By doing so they increase the diversity of what can happen next.”
Kauffman’s original evolutionary biology concept has been popularized and generalized in unfortunate ways. One of the key figures in this is Steven Johnson and his book, Where Do Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Here he sums up the concept in relation to human innovation as:
“The history of cultural progress is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time.”
And it is in this form that it is most utilized: “Weak signals” of the new from outliers discovered via qualitative analysis become taken as these “doorways” leading to the next room (the new) – which is the “adjacent possible."
As comforting and rational as this approach seems, it is ultimately of very modest use in engaging with creative processes. The metaphors are mixing, and the errors of surreptitious substitution and misplaced concreteness are running rampant. The analogy between inattention blindness (not seeing what is there) and the problem of seeing the new, in regards to disruptive innovation, simply does not work. The qualitatively new is categorically non-existent – there is nothing to see or sense, no matter your outlier status. Seeing and sensing as an outlier is still to be of a world and the way of life of the other possibilities – you are still sensing one of many existing possibilities. The radically new is ontologically distinct from what exists.
The radically new does emerge from what exists – how could it not? Creativity is not a theological miracle of “something from nothing." It does depend, as Kauffman notes, on “the state of the world." But the phase space (the space of all possibilities) cannot be known in advance because reality is always “in the making:” The new is not “discovered” – it is not, despite what Steven Johnson claims, a story of going from one doorway to another exploring the palace… It is a story of emergent making. And yes what is created is “adjacent” to what exists historically – but, as an emergent phenomenon, it is irreducible to it. It comes from a history and it escapes history (continuity, progress, development).
(And Kauffman in his more recent work does develop this, see for example: Kastner, Ruth E.; Kauffman, Stuart; Epperson, Michael (2019). "Taking Heisenberg's Potentia Seriously". Adventures in Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality.)
“There is no work of invention that does not call on a people who do not yet exist” (Gilles Deleuze)For creativity, it is never enough to start with how things are and just look for the outliers who might notice or sense differently. Too much is already in place and assumed. A world, a people – a way of being alive (along with its tools, practices, habits, concepts, and environments) is stabilized. and ultimately it takes the subject – us – to be a given. But, from the perspective of creativity, we cannot take our personhood and sense of reality as a fixed universal given. The new has to be made alongside the making of new ways to sense it. This is a question of creating new forms of ecological attunement.And sensing differently – attuning differently – attending differently – calls for “a people who do not yet exist.”
Novel attunement, worldmaking, the changing of who we are, and the emergence of radical novelty go hand in hand. Human creativity is a world-making practice and process in which both subject and object transform.
This wonderful phrase is from Alfred North Whitehead. And it gets at what the actual work of creativity involves. No, we cannot simply attend to weak signals via collective sense-making practices, nor can we go from door to door exploring adjacent possibles. Creative worldmaking involves practices of collectively disclosing what exists, deliberately and actively refusing/blocking key aspects of it – this is a caring for “how the past perishes." It involves disrupting who “we” are – as bodily embedded and extended intra-subjective beings. Such a disruption is not an “expansion of the self” – to embrace such a logic is to fall back into a developmental approach to innovation – and ultimately a false universalism and reduction of difference to one world. The “we” becomes other. The “I” becomes other – in attending to the perishing of habits, practices, tools, and environments. Making is unmaking.
Attention – the noticing of gorillas – and the not noticing of gorillas, is always of a world. For creativity, it's not going to be the weak or alternative signals and noticings. Or, to be more precise, differing forms of attention will emerge as we actively constructively refuse the past and experiment with creative ecologies for the becoming of novel attention.
Other worlds are possible…
Don’t worry about the gorillas.
Our active creative care for how specifically the past perishes is of the utmost importance to a creative practice. The ultimate passivity of the seeing and sensing and trusting that the novel adjacent possible will come from the state of the world is never going to be adequate.
The past is not ever past – it extends far in time ahead of us. And it waits for us there – until we actively work on exactly “how” it perishes…
And from this, a co-evolution and co-emergence of the future becomes… – or rather futures become.
And we, become other – a people who do not yet exist…
Well – that is it for another week – enjoy the full moon tomorrow – ever more so if it is on the other side of a fierce local storm! Get outside…
Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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