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Good morning travellers, criss-crossers, and voyagers into the familiar that is also at any moment other. In our movements the relations of configurations can change – and in an instant, water can go from liquid to solid as we slip across a relational threshold of vertical distance.
It is also true that as travellers we travel in one world that is fully, if invisibly, interwoven with other qualitatively different worlds. For us, something is experientially one thing, and for others, it is experientially another. We most often voyage through diverse worlds poorly equipped with the logic and practices of the subjective and the real. But these practices lead us astray into the limited metaphors of the blind persons and the elephant, or changing versus unchanging aspects of our environment. It is a problem of not understanding that change is relational. And it is a set of historical practices that has made us “world blind”s.
To explore this in a simple manner, we always return to the water example – if you are standing a few feet off a deep and wide pool of water and as a swimmer you jump in, the water will meet you as a liquid that affords your body floating and moving. But if you jump into the same water from five hundred feet, it will meet you as a hard surface that will break your bones. Nothing has changed in you or the water whatsoever! Your body and the water is composed of the same molecules as it was before. All that has changed is the relation. The very same water is (acting as) a liquid and a solid at the same moment.
Yes, if you are always jumping into water from a few feet, it is reasonable that you might consider that the water “is” a liquid. Just like you might think that a large rock outcropping is the one unchanging thing in an environment. But that liquidness you experience as an unchanging reality is a relational property. It is as changing as relations are changing. Looking at the cliff from the same distance, or touching the elephant all over will not help us sense how qualitative relational differences exist and might emerge – that only happens by meaningfully changing relationships. Touching the elephant will not tell you anything about all that the elephant is or might become. This approach misses worlds entirely.
For a mite, the elephant is entirely a different thing – why? Because it participates in a different relation. It is not a subjective thing. The fact is that many worlds exist – and it is we who can confuse our relational perspective with THE perspective. The starting point for a creative practice is, for us, that “many worlds exist” – and “yet other worlds are possible.”
For us it’s been a busy week of changing relations and the visibility of differing worlds. Walking through NYC yesterday – all the traces are visible: the deflated red balloons and rose petals of Valentines Day, the glitter and bright remains of the Lunar New Years fire crackers, the spontaneous meals and celebrations of Iftar as darkness falls. Under the finally melting snow, rye is sending out its tender shoots in the fields. The rivers are rising as mud season begins – and the frogs and turtles are thawing out of muddy river banks and slipping back into the flowing waters…
Globally, it is a busy month ahead of changing relations and worlds: Over the next forty days, almost 10 billion human trips will be undertaken – the busiest days of the year are underway. It is an almost unfathomable number but speaks to the importance of connection and relations.
We, too, have been travelling quite a bit in the region – not that far afield, but to many interesting research centers, sites of experiments, and friends who are active in ecological change-making projects. It’s all part of one of our favorite weeks of the year. This is the week that we facilitate the first of two intensive workshops on green change-making. In two weeks, we will be doing the next part in Graz, Austria. It is a really unique program that we do with Montclair State University – and it has left us exhilarated – and quite exhausted.
As night falls in New Jersey – and we get out of our wet and muddy boots – we are taking a moment to reflect on some key concepts that helped us this week. Which means it is an ideal moment for our newsletter’s theme to lean into our occasional series on new experimental tools – the glossary.
In this newsletter, we have five interesting propositions/terms. All of these terms touch on key aspects of creative experiments (our Newsletter topic over the last month).
A Creative Experiment can be many things, but the defining features are twofold: the outcome cannot be known in advance, and is a co-emergent outcome of the creative process.
While the classical definition of an experiment is a form of a hypothesis test: will this work? Or: Can this be proved or disproved? A creative experiment, because it is interested in the new (that which does not exist) – does not – and cannot share this logic. It is an experiment in production – in construction, in the making of that which does not yet exist – the new (and is as such non-knowable). Because of this, no hypothesis can be generated, and other qualitatively different practices are required.
Because of this, we can develop at least seventeen propositions in regards to creative experiments:
Creative Experiments…
See Also: Affect, Blocking, Emergence, Exaptation
Further Reading: Volumes 229-231
When we consider the organization of any context, the configuration of the extended and embedded world of tools, architectural environments, institutional habits and practices, daily job requirements, the divisions of labor, reporting structures, and feedback loops produces a very powerful set of directly experienced action-intuitions and system-wide propensity that act like a “ratchet effect” to move a system far more in one direction than in others.
The concept of “ratchet effect” is critical to understanding how propensities for action (affordances) play out in concrete organizational contexts.
A ratchet is a type of gear that only moves in one direction– as the wheel turns, the arm moves to allow the forward movement but braces against the cogs of the wheel to stop it from going backwards:
And a “ratchet effect” refers to how, in many organizational contexts, because of how they are configured, no matter the input, only certain outcomes can ever be developed. In short, the system almost always moves in one direction.
Perhaps the most oft cited example of the ratchet effect in the American context is one of political organization: if there is a two party system in which one party (the “left”) tends to be the party of “moderation” and centrist in their orientation such that they always marginalize their extremes – and the other party (the “right”) tends to push towards their core which is inherently right of center – then the system can only move to the right – such that “moderation” and the “center” are on the whole ever rightward moving propensities.
Now our interest is not in deconstructing the systemic failings of any political system – these are already well documented in great detail. Rather, we wish to bring attention to an ecosystemic quality of organizations: organizations and their practices are not simply path dependent (what has been done in the past is more likely to repeat in the future). They are also organized in ways that most often, no matter what the inputs, certain outcomes are far more likely than others. We could, in relation to creativity, term this type of ratchet effect: “stable negative enabling configurations” (or what our colleague in WorldMakers, Mark Stolow, terms “disabling constraints”).
Now it does not take radical and extreme configurational conditions to produce such ratchet effects: We see the ratchet effect of negative enabling conditions for creativity in organizations when (for example):
This is by no means intended to be a complete list. Rather, we present these examples to highlight the ubiquitous nature of these highly directed negative propensities (in regards to creative outcomes). It takes very little to have a ratchet effect move propensities in this manner.
When we ask in an organizational context, how should we prepare to engage with creative experiments? – If we do not begin by experimentally disclosing and coming to terms with ecosystemic ratchet-like effects of certain organizational configurations, creative possibilities will simply never materialize as anything more than a cultural aspiration.
See Also: Configurations, Propensities, Feedforward
Further Reading: Volume 220
Often, in approaching a creative undertaking, there is a tendency to begin by addressing a “problem” – something that has already been clearly defined and has a related solution space. This inevitably tends to overly narrow the space of possibilities before any experiment is underway. That said, it is important to have something at the beginning that helps ground and focus the experimental undertaking. As we begin engaging with an area of interest experimentally, we try to collaboratively and experimentally reframe this area of interest in a pragmatic manner that avoids the narrowing predefinition of “problems.”
We call this practice of generative early reframing: A Matter of Concern (or A Matter of Curiosity).
A Matter of Concern is a generative, open-ended, loose framing that animates our engagement with the world. Unlike a problem—which is a specific, structured approach to a situation—a matter of concern is a broader, more ambiguous issue that invites curiosity, care, and creative involvement.
With a Matter of Concern, it is not simply a question of focusing on a solution, but developing experimentally a living context that draws us in, co-shapes our actions, and evolves as we interact with it. Matters of concern are not fixed; they are dynamic, emergent, and inherently relational, requiring ongoing attention and participation.
A matter of concern is the underlying, often diffuse, issue or field that gives rise to specific problems, challenges, and opportunities. It is the background hum that calls forth our attention and engagement, providing the conditions for creativity and innovation. Problems are one way of organizing and approaching a matter of concern, but they never exhaust their potential. Matters of concern are shaped by, and in turn shape, the assemblages of relations—social, material, conceptual, historical—that constitute our worlds.
See Also: Problems, Paradigms, Propensities
Further Reading: Volume 84
Switching When we engage with things – when we do things – we meet a creative relational reality as neither objective nor subjective – it is neither fully separate from us (objectivity) nor is it reducible to us (subjectivity). Rather, we are of it – and it is better understood as what Veraeke and Mastropietro term “transjective”.
“What is relevant to an organism in its environment is never an entirely subjective or objective feature. Instead, it is transjective, arising through the interaction of the agent with the world. In other words, the organism enacts, and thereby brings forth, its own world of meaning and value.” (Jaeger et al)
An example: If you think about the crow story – our favorite one – where they are using an intersection with a traffic light to crack nuts. The reason that we humans do not see the intersection as affording nut-cracking possibilities is because it’s not relevant to us.
Relevance makes things show up for us in the way they show up. This happens because we are precarious, specifically embodied beings that always find ourselves in a concrete environment with some general active concern. For example, we are biking down the street – now that crack, bump, or pothole shows up as relevant and significant in a new and very real manner.
This is equally true for the crow. When they have a nut in their beaks, the world looks and feels different. Now the car shows up as relevant in a new way. Now the traffic lights show up in a new and relevant manner.
Relevance is created and realized by our exploratory actions in a context. Relevance is not something objective or subjective or pre-given. It comes into being via our embedded actions. Relevance – and from it, meaning – and from this, knowledge – is all a transjective creation of an engagement.
It is highly context sensitive. It is a fundamental form of our mundane everyday creativity. It’s a creativity you sense and see when you are in the thick of some activity – how you improvise in nursing your baby, cutting vegetables, or rushing across the street in the rain. Your elbow just turns inward to cradle your baby's head. Your knife and wrist spontaneously change angles with the softness of an eggplant. Your feet find a unique purchase on the crack in the sidewalk to push off in a way you would never have considered – or noticed. A word comes out in a new way in the middle of a deep conversation…
It is a critical aspect of creativity that cannot happen outside of action – outside of engagement. To engage with this critical aspect of creativity requires that we do things. Which is why we love the axiom from John Cage that Bruce Mau articulates so well in his Incomplete Manifesto for Growth:
“BEGIN ANYWHERE.John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.”
What matters is that we begin – we do something. We engage. But it is more than that: for creativity, we need to show up in a very unique manner: We need to “act like crows” – we show up with a nut in our beaks in an odd context (so to speak). And now novel things begin to happen – to become relevant.
Our creative lives involve relevance, invention, and, more importantly, creative relevance switching.
Think again of our crows – cars already had a relevance to them, perhaps in how cars skillfully killed creatures that they could then pick at and eat from the relative safety of the side of the road (the glories of roadkill). And the powerlines and traffic lights also had a relevance to the crows as safe places to perch and observe roads for roadkill. The move to cracking nuts involves an experimental creative activity of relevance switching: once the crow has a nut in its beak, now the stopping and starting of cars has a new and quite different emergent relational relevance – different qualities spontaneously emerge as relevant in the midst of this new event.
See Also: Affordances, Values, Enaction
Further Reading: Volume 221
How do we find our way through the world, not by calculation or detached observation, but by a kind of attuned, embodied sensing—a feeling? What is it to be pulled, nudged, or even unsettled by the world, and how does this underlie creative action? Feeling, in this context, is not merely an internal state, nor is it simply the sum of our emotions. It is the ongoing, relational, and embodied process through which we are moved by, and move with, the world in the making.
Feeling is the embodied, pre-conceptual, and relational experimental attunement to the world—a dynamic process of being affected and affecting, of caring and being concerned, that underpins all our actions and sense-making. It is not reducible to discrete emotions like joy or anger, nor is it simply a passive reception of stimuli. Rather, feeling is the active, enactive, and ongoing appraisal of situations: a primordial sense that things matter, that we are never indifferent, and that we are always, in some way, pulled by the affordances and solicitations of our environment. To feel is to be in the midst of a world that is always already in the process of becoming, where our actions, perceptions, and very sense of self emerge from cycles of meaningful engagement.
See Also: Enaction, Sensing, Emergence
Further Reading: Volume 182
As you continue your own creative experiments, we hope that pulling these tools back into your attention can be of assistance. This week, they really served us well – and led our collaborators in very interesting co-emerging directions of novel relevance creation. We cannot say what will come from them – the next weeks will give us more of a sense – but it is only in the on-going engaged experimental activity of making that anything will emerge.
Now we are off to take a nap! Have a beautiful week of engaged experimental concerns co-emerging with novel differences – and remember to keep them alive!
Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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