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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 171! The Dark Night Creativity Reader...
Good morning dark hours becoming quickly evening,
It is, in the northern hemisphere, the week of the longest nights. And for us this is a time of great celebration. Creativity thrives in darkness – it emerges from a grounded form of radical non-existence to become a real but non-knowable line of flight. And this is worth celebrating.
One of the ways we celebrated was by seeing the great Tanya Tagaq perform. Coming from Nunavut and the high Arctic where darkness is not measured in nights but seasons – it is a darkness of another order – another cosmology. Her unbroken polyvocal singing gave voice to persons that are mountains, animals, humans, the weather, institutions, and beyond in an all-encompassing event that left us changed beings. (All her records are all masterpieces in their own right. But, her work is best experienced live. If she is performing in your neck of the woods, go – and if she isn’t – help make it happen!)
It was wonderful to hear from many of you who downloaded, printed, framed and mounted our two posters. It was also wonderful to see photos. If you are still thinking about gifts or want to add something to your workspace – check out these two posters.
In years past we’ve used these end-of-year newsletters to recap what we’ve done over the prior 365 days (see volumes 120, 70, 16). This year, it's our fourth year of writing the newsletter and we thought we’d tack in a different direction.
Preparing for these end-of-year newsletters requires that we get down in the creative undergrowth and glorious weeds to sift through every newsletter we wrote this year (a quick FYI – you can find all of our newsletters on our website, and they are searchable by topic). It was a wonderful experience to slow down and traverse the last year via the newsletters. The experience of going through volumes 120 to 170 was like the way one reads a geological cut as one drives through a mountain range. And on a winter's day, it felt nice to slow down and just read with the darkness outside, and the wind, rain, and sleet beating at the windows.
This experience led us to develop a “Mid-Winter Creativity Reader.” We chose eleven newsletters that struck us in differing ways. With each, there is something special that stood out about what they contained (as well as the way we presented our emergent innovation concepts and practice with you). Some incorporated a diagramming aesthetic we’ve tried to evolve to make our images more valuable in understanding the points we are trying to convey. Others because they were practical and less theoretical. Others because they riffed on graphic novels as a medium of storytelling and, others because of something perhaps more ineffable (you get the idea). Most importantly, in each, you will gain insights into an alternative paradigm-shifting approach to innovation and creativity.
We thought of them in sequence, and some are part of a series – but we suggest following what draws you in:
It's Not About the “Innovator's DNA” or an “Innovation Culture”
(Volume 134). Here we take on Clayton Cristenson and some of the most common methods of innovation and concepts for how to become creative. This is a great introduction to what is wrong with so many approaches and where we begin to develop an emergent alternative.
Innovation: Not Knowing & What You Can Do Now (Volume 135). This newsletter lays out a pragmatic experimental approach to innovating beyond and without knowing. It has a number of great examples and discusses the key technique of “blocking”.
All Creativity is Artificial: On the Other Side of AI and Creativity (Volume 140). AI is ever more present in all of our lives. We wrote a number of newsletters on AI. This is a great introduction to an alternative way to approach AI in your creative work.
Meditations of Surfing: Towards a New Sensibility for Creativity (Volume 146). Over the summer our newsletters took on what we call “The Western Creativity Matrix” and the concept of causality. In these newsletters, we were perhaps at our most speculative and prophetic of any newsletters this year. This one lays it all out.
9 Key Concepts for Creativity (Volume 148). We spent some time this year defining key concepts. This newsletter gets into the thick of things by defining creativity and contrasting the west’s historical approach to creativity: essentialist creativity with our approach: Ecosystemic and Emergent Creativity. Essential reading.
Creativity’s Other Name (Volume 150). This newsletter takes you on a journey with us through museums, time, and worlds to explore “creativity without a creator”. And finally, arrive at “creativity’s other name” – what is it? Well, it is a surprise…
Too Much! (Creativity) – on the Emerging Revolution (Volume 158). A dive into the transdisciplinary nature of creative practices. Or our attempt to challenge the overly narrow and thin approaches to creativity found today – even in the spaces you would expect to be different (i.e. the Complexity Sciences).
We began the year with a critique of the individual as the agent of creativity and laying out a far more distributed, ecosystemic, and emergent approach (Volumes 122-127). And we ended the year with four related newsletters that explore how we are organized, what it is to be organized, and how this relates to organizations. These make a wonderful continuous read and contain some of our favorite diagrams, images, and graphic novel-style sequences. And – lest we forget the last one ends with a bang! We take on the fixation with the Wright Brothers as true exemplars of innovation (and we offer an alternative that Lynn Margulis would have enjoyed):
OK! We wish you a glorious week of darkness (if you are in the northern hemisphere) or a week of blinding brightness (if you are in the southern hemisphere). In either case we hope that there is down time to read, nap, putter and do very little that could ever be understood to be “productive.”
Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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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.
