Creativity and Action

There’s a lot of talk in business about creativity. Sadly, most of it is just talk. Creativity is a process that takes time. New ideas, new ventures, new ways of thinking don’t happen in a flash of inspiration, but they more readily surface after a period of incubation.

The life cycle of organizations, people, businesses, and products have predictable stages. Each stage is in conflict with other stages. This life-cycle model can be applied to a variety of situations from personal decisions to the rise and fall of empires. But let’s look at how this applies to an idea that turns into a business.

Our founder enters the slow zone. She conceives of a vague idea, a gut feeling, or intuition. Once the “half-baked” idea surfaces, she mulls it over. This stage is necessarily purposeless: it’s discovery, not goal orientation. The idea may even be forgotten, but there are underlying processes going on all the time. Guy Claxton, author of Hare Brain Tortoise Mind: How intelligence increases when you think less, coined the term Undermind for this intuitive way of slow knowing. He contrasts this with what he calls D-mode (deliberate-mode). Remember that sort of getting-to-the-right-answer-fast thinking you were praised for in school? Of course, D-mode is necessary, but not here, and not yet.

Incubating ideas is similar to how a writer might go through several drafts before really knowing what he wants to write about. An artist may make multiple sketches before deciding on which direction to take a painting. It’s the process that gives birth to the new.

Once the business is born, then management by the seat of the pants is the name of the game. Everything is in flux. Our founder may hire people who thrive in a chaotic environment. Roles have not yet been defined. Everything speeds up. New ideas are welcome. The business is still malleable.

As the business succeeds, professional managers get hired and systems are put in place. Now the focus is on speed, efficiency, and productivity. There is little tolerance for anything that can’t be measured.

Everything is results-driven. If time is not allotted to the “slow zone” then the company starts to look inward, and becomes a rigid rule-based organization detached from a dynamic marketplace. By now the creative talent needing a flexible environment has left. The company goes into decline and eventually dies.

Creativity doesn’t survive long in a hierarchical environment, and fear is a creativity killer. Creativity will flourish where people are allowed to be wrong. This is why most ideas don’t come from mature businesses. The focus of the mature business is productivity which is all fine and dandy when when the goal is defined and still relevant. But what about when things change?

Our world is dynamic. And as the financial pundits say, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. We have all experienced technological products that have the shelf life of a cream puff.

Businesses need a method of generating new ideas. I’m sure there are valuable ideas that could be harvested from employees, but new ideas are almost always incomprehensible at first. And adopting something “unproven” is simply too threatening for businesses in the mature stage. The new is disruptive but essential to the survival of commercial organizations.

Longer article here…

Tags: Creativity by Christopher
1 Comment »

I came across the title of a book called, Never Check E-mail in the Morning, by Julie Morgenstern. After reading the reviews I decided that this wasn’t the book for me. However, the title offers quite a challenge for avioding distraction.

Of course, the bold and the brave can get down to it and will be able to ignore the phone, and email. I do both of these things when I’m engaged on a commercial writing project because I’ve sold time to someone else who gets my full attention. So why is self-discipline for my own writing more difficult to honor?

The work of creation is work. It’s about regular action. It’s a habit, a custom. But habits, like obsessive email checking, can be mindless and monstrous as Shakespeare says (I do believe he refrained from checking his email or he wouldn’t have been so prolific.):

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on.

Hamlet Act III, Scene IV

Getting the habit to block out uninterrupted time is necessary for concentrated work. Sales managers understand that salespeople can’t make customers buy. The results are not in the salesperson’s control, but her actions are. It’s the same with any creative discipline. You show up and do it. Sometimes the results are appalling. Sometimes they are mediocre. Sometimes, just sometimes, they are wonderful.

Steven Pressfield’s inspiring and insightful little book, The War of Art, is about battling resistance, although he spells it with a capital R. Resistance takes many forms and certainly one of them is to check email in the morning. The act of checking email is an invitation to be distracted. For me, the morning time sacred. It’s when I can write at my best. Or at least that’s the story I tell myself.

I am susceptible to the stories I tell myself too (more about this later). And right now I’m going to tell myself that I shall not check my email until mid-morning. Let’s see…

Tags: Creativity by Christopher
6 Comments »

Here is an article published yesterday on iMedia Connection on slow and creativity.

Tags: Creativity by Christopher
2 Comments »

Art critic Robert Hughes aptly titled his book and BBC documentary The Shock of the New. It’s a long time since I picked up this book, or saw the series. The book is about contemporary art. Many people scratch their heads when looking at a work of art hoping to understand its meaning as if it were a signpost the understandable. It’s not unusual for some of us to get quite upset when we encounter a concept or object that doesn’t fit into a pre-existing category. The new is destabilizing. We have to make room in our conceptual system and reevaluate what we know. Scary stuff!

To understand is to put the object of our attention in context. We can’t make sense of the new.

Fine art is purposeless. Commercial art used to be called the servile art because it was seen as inferior, only serving a secondary purpose. Yet art, whether music, dance, sculpture, or painting, has no other purpose than to exist: to be what it is. However, art of the fine variety influences everyday commerce. Those dazzling Op Art creations of Bridget Riley soon became high fashion for women’s clothing in the 1960’s.

Most of us consume art as a finished product. We don’t see the process, the rehearsal, the innumerable wrong turns of the storyline, the throwaway sketches. To engage in this purposeless activity, taking time to manipulate a medium, requires courage. The blank canvas, the white sheet of paper, can be terrifying. This is true if we are goal oriented, or in managementspeak, “results driven.” Being focused on the outcome can destroy the creative way. Not knowing and acting despite despair is the subject of Rollo May’s classic psychological text, The Courage to Create.

Innovation, by contrast, is limited to a purpose. It improves something already in existence, or creates an alternative. David Edgerton’s, The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900, cites many examples where old technology, once seen as obsolete, has been put to innovative purpose. The condom lost favor as a birth control device when the pill became available. Now, the condom has a new purpose as a barrier against new sexually transmitted diseases. Edgerton believes that the most innovative time came in the early twentieth century. Those inventions continue to have a continuing impact on the lives of people around the world.

According the Economist this week, Sweden, Finland, and Japan were the only countries out of the 30 rich countries of the OECD last year who spend more than 3% of GDP on research and development.

Actions that lead to a clear purpose are easy to accept. But encouraging the messy creative process that could well generate value (or not) is a much harder sell.

Tags: Creativity by Christopher
1 Comment »

There are things we know. There are things we know we don’t know. I know I don’t know how to speak Chinese. And there are things we don’t know that we don’t know. So we can’t say much about those. But there is another category of knowing how to do something without knowing how to do it. We just do it.

We know how to pump blood through our veins, and how to inhale and exhale. We can be aware of these things. We can influence them by our actions. But we don’t really know in the sense of “how-to” do these things. Yet we can observe them.

In mythology the muse whispers in the ear of the creative person. The creative mind listens and observes. I don’t believe creativity is an act of will. But you can use willpower to form habit likely to put you in the creative state of mind. This is fundamentally what  slow is about for me. What do you think?

Tags: Creativity by Christopher
2 Comments »

How do you see this image? What do you think is going on?

The artist Cézanne spent a long time looking at an object in order to see it in a new way. It’s a way of slow knowing. The longer you maintain your concentration you see beyond the obvious. If you haven’t tried staring in the way Cézanne did (and everyone who learns to draw does), you may have repeated a word over and over until it becomes meaningless. Only then do you become more aware of the sound, or its rhythm.

Normally, we navigate the world by signs. We only need to identify an object in order to ascertain its danger quotient or usefulness. Then we move on. The scientific mind categorizes, judges, evaluates, analyzes, but the artistic mind sees.

I was walking on the beach with a physician friend of mine who has an interest in the inhabitants of tide pools. He was interested in identifying small crabs and nudibranchs. His scientific background led him to see the world in a certain way. I was trained as an artist. I had no interest in taxonomy. I was enjoying the colors and the shapes. Two of us were supposedly looking at the same thing, but what we saw was very different. How have you seen things differently?

Tags: Creativity by Christopher
11 Comments »

First, thanks to all for the participation on the intuition question. I’m sure we’ll come back to that. How something comes into being is one of those mysteries of life. Why it comes into being is equally as mysterious.

Thrownness

Martin Heidegger coined the term “thrownness.” He thought humans are completely shaped by the culture they are thrown into. While we are born with capacities, it’s through our interaction with environment that possibilities are realized-or not. There is evidence to support our innate ability to use language will atrophy if not nurtured by onset of pubescence.

But whether or not we can understand how ideas burst into being, or the how the illusive nature of any electro-chemical state in the brain can be reproduced, we can perhaps get better at looking and listening for emergence. In other words, it seems reasonable to understand the likely environment, or way of perceiving changes in personal mood, energy, focus, curiosity, action, and awareness of an external environment that will lead to a creative act.

Language is the medium of thought

When we speak we don’t think first in some kind of meta-language that gets translated into language. Language is the medium of thought. I’ll modify that to be, language is the medium of conscious thought. There are those processes incubating of which we are not yet aware. As we discussed earlier, this is the wellspring of intuition.

It’s curious how, when writing, we see our words on the page or screen often with surprise. It’s as if someone else wrote those words. Isn’t this idea embodied in the Muse? She is the one who speaks and the writer is merely the channel, or so it seems. Many fiction writers report their characters having a life of their own. What happens next is suggested by what has gone before. The writer is listening to his or her Muse.

Serious imaginings

Children play “let’s pretend.” Actors take on roles as if they were someone else. Economists and planners consider “what if.” All of these things require imagination and the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist.

We don’t necessarily have to shine the laboratory light on the mystery of how emergence works. But we can learn to be better prepared to listen to what is emerging by working with and developing our imaginative faculties. If ever, “Use it or lose it,” were true, it’s true when it comes to imagination.

***

And just for good measure, here is Wikipedia’s definition of emergence.

Tags: Creativity by Christopher
19 Comments »

This blog was started in September of 2007, so it’s still new and yet to attain critical mass. But even if you come across this post at a later date, I’d appreciate your thoughts on some of these questions. The last thing I want for this blog is to be didactic and dogmatic. Thanks.

1. What do you think intuition is?

2. How does intuition occur?

3. Would you say your actions are (normally) driven by emotions or the end process of rationalization?

4. What is the process of your deciding to respond, or not respond to this post?

Tags: Creativity by Christopher
19 Comments »

The fool has a central place in creativity.

For centuries the king had his fool. It was the antidote to being surrounded by yes men. The fool can stand conventional thinking on its head.

Most corporate employees focus on short-term, time-critical, functional, and results-driven events. We say things like ‘results-driven’ all the time as if it is a virtue. But within a creative context, results are not guaranteed. They are a side benefit. This is like the mythical Scottish village of Brigadoon. If you go looking for it, you won’t find it. But value emerges out of the creative process.

Creativity needs a completely different mindset. More than that, it needs a different way of being-in-the-world than operational management. Business schools aren’t practicing academic birth control because they churn out graduates who think alike. This is not surprising. Typically management consultants are valued by the school they attended and the quality of their education. These people may be very intelligent, but are they successful in adapting to a world that thrives on the new?

New ideas look foolish.

Tags: Creativity by admin
1 Comment »

I just moved this site from www.blog.christopherrichards.com to www.creativityandaction.com. I seem to have lost some of the comments during the transfer. I haven’t deleted them intentionally.

Christopher

Tags: Creativity by admin
No Comments »