Emerging Futures - Volume 69: 23 Ways to Practice Innovation and Creativity

Greetings, sustained revelers!

Happy Gregorian New Year to you! We hope your holiday break was filled with joy and love.

We enjoyed some downtime away from work with family, friends, good fires, some travel, experimental cooking, great walks, and reading.

One particularly good book was The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayer. It is a book about the nature of consciousness in the 21st century. A story of alien meetings between humans and other species on a planet radically impacted by the ravages of capitalism. The aliens in question are not some exotic extraterrestrial but octopuses and AI systems. And the setting is not a far-off planet but the South Pacific Ocean. The book does an astonishing job of digging into the relation between embodiment and environment – what differences skeletons and land-based niches make in contrast to the skeletonless bodies with distributed brains in oceans make for the form of being alive.

“There is good evidence that octopuses truly think with their arms. That their central brain is not in control all the time – that in fact it may not be in control much of the time at all. The octopus's arms are constantly exploring its environment… It’s one of the ways in which the octopus is so extraordinarily different from us. It's smart – very smart – and we already established that. But it's about more than that: its intelligence is strongly attached to curiosity and exploration. And one of the most intriguing things about the octopus is that much of that curiosity may, in fact, reside in its arms. It may be an animal with almost no top-down control much of the time – a mind navigating the sea that consists, primarily, of a set of exploring limbs only incidentally and intermittently controlled by a central “core” intelligence. Even the way we think about core and periphery is incorrect, when we apply it to them. We’re just using our own metaphors, but being within that system would be something entirely different. A completely different way of being in the world”

The book is an astonishing story that we cannot do justice to (here is a great review by Steven Shaviro that does a great job of this).

If your dark nights need a companion, it is worth bringing this creaturely book to your chest.

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The New Year

This is a fascinating cultural week of ritualized transition from restful recharge to relaunch propelled by goals, aspirations, and <gulp> resolutions.

Resolutions at the New Year are near mystical acts of individual improvement. A model of a promise of evolution and betterment that is designed for us to fail. And so we are – we're quick to forget and ignore – the average resolution doesn’t last long, just 12-30 days, depending on the area of interest.

Let’s be honest; few people have the “fortitude” to cold-turkey anything, and the model was always more about blame than success. It is an odd and ultimately problematic way to think about humans and ultimately, change.

While change is constant — it has many speeds and patterns happening every day in all directions and at many levels, rituals like the new year are good to help us pause and reflect.

For us, we prefer to see the transition between years as a moment to remind ourselves of our ongoing curiosity to engage with practices over the hard and fast logic of designed-to-fail plus blame of “resolutions”.

Experimenting with practices, for us, are free of false promises, exaggerated expectations, and a logic of blame.

While experimental practices don’t wait for any particular day – You/us/we are always evolving, changing, and being changed by events, environments, and others – the arbitrary transition of the Gregorian calendar can be a moment to simply remind ourselves of practices we do and further ones we can experiment with.

So today, in honor of the daily joy of practicing with the ongoing creativity that is all around, we are offering you 23 ways to continue to explore the creative practices swarming all around and through us.

These are not limited to the beginning of 2023… but to be changed by the practice of creativity - every day - always.

With all of that - we wish you all a successful 2023 filled with practices, growth, and novelty.

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23 Ways to Practice Innovation and Creativity

1. Begin in the world and not in your head.
2. Collaborate with others from the beginning
3. Be a follower and not a leader. Join, follow, co-shape, and ultimately transform with what is emerging. Focus on this over founding, visioning, authoring, and owning.
4. Favor experimental doing – over removed ideation.
5. Do and Act: New meaning comes from doing. Novel ‘know how’ leads to novel ‘know what.’
6. Ideas come from actions. Thinking comes from doing. There is no waiting for an idea to come, nor is there a divide between theory and practice. There is only doing.
7. Trust experimental processes: develop and adhere to experimental processes and procedures. What makes a process experimental When the outcome is non-knowable because it is truly non-linear and emergent. How to do this?
8. Pay attention not to “what it is” but to “what can it do” – with curiosity. This is a key active disposition for a truly experimental approach. How does one do this? Remember the question“what can it do?” can only be answered with an experiment – it cannot be answered in your head. Refuse (block) the known answers/outcomes. Then ask: “and what else can it do?” Don’t stop at one or two options; figure out 10 or more (this is where and when it gets interesting).
9. Utilize the non-intended capacities of things (the novel “affordances”) and betray their original purpose (exaptation).
10. Repetition over reflection: Do it again differently. And then do it again differently. Then see the patterns and frameworks. Now step outside of these (block them) and do it again. You are looking to move across the threshold from quantitative to qualitative difference.
11. Become both dumb and smart all at once because only dumb people are capable of doing something qualitatively new, and only smart people can recognize that they have done something new.
12. Keep track: Notate. Document. Collect. When novelty emerges, it will surprise you and others (it will not announce itself –rather it will be nearly invisible and hide in plain sight). Collectively review your artifacts. Let others rewrite/reinterpret your notes.
13. Suspend judgment of good or bad – limit moral or factual judgments –. Follow practices and ideas with an “open” mind (non-mind).
14. Orient practices to a future. One makes for “a people still to come” -- and that includes you.
15. Don’t solve problems before you create them. Problems don’t pre-exist in some objective realm. They must be made. The question is: what is the problem that is worth having for a world worth making?
16. Embrace fear and non-knowing – we think afraid of being judged for doing something new, but really we’re afraid of the level of betrayal that the new involves.
17. Redefine failure as both the necessary act of betrayal and the possible beginning of something qualitatively different (a novel world).
18. Diagnose and experimentally block your biases, frameworks, and worldviews.
19. Treat things as being active and having agency. Things shape us. Tools make us. Commit to how this works.
20. Everything is collective. Become actively collective and allow every part to be equally active in this “assemblage”
21. Develop pirate projects – probes into the unknown – open-ended – perturbing a field – activating emergent unknowable (in advance) potentials – and then transforming with them…
22. Overcome your sense of self, especially when you feel inadequate: “I’m not creative.” Reality is creative. We are more than ourselves. It is not about you.
23. Leave space for the unknown: John Cage talks about how we “must always return to zero in order to pass from one thing to the next” – give the nothing its place as “emptyfullness” in all of our practices.

Till Volume 70,
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
We’re How You Innovate

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