In help people be creative John Cleese advocates a “tortoise enclosure where your tortoise mind can come out to play”: boundaries of space and boundaries of time; an oasis in which to ‘play’.  Creativity comes from our unconscious so we need to ensure we are not interupted.

I was also struck by David Bohm (On Creativity, 1996: 48) writing about the relationship between art and science. He reflects on the significance of new ideas disrupting preconceptions about the world.

… in the long run it is less important to learn of a particular new way of conceiving structure abstractly, than it is to understand how the consideration of such new ideas can liberate one’s tought from a vast network of preconceptions absorbed largley unconsciously with education and training and from the general background. It seems to me that with regard to this question of preconceptions the situation should be baskically similar in every field of creative work, whether this be scientific, artistic, or of any other nature. For by becoming aware of preconceptions that have been conditioning us unconsciously we are able to perceive and understand the world in a fresh way. One can then “feel out” and explore what is unknown, rather than go on, as has generally been one’s habit, with mere variations on old themes, leading to modifications, extensions, or other developments with the framework of what has already been known, either in one’s own field, or in a closely related form in some other field. Thus one’s work can begin to be really creative, not only in the sense that it will contain genuinely original features, but also in that these will cohere with what is being continued from the past to form one harmonious, living, evolving totality.

All this serves to remind me of the importance of structuring time and space in ways that avoid, at least temporarily, the tyranny of the routine and the well worn track; to develop and maintain strategies to systematically pause, abandon the drive to perform or deliver, and permit heterodox thoughts, images, or feelings. And to find ways to stimulate and fuel heterodoxy through deliberate admission of the products of the worlds of others’; thinking from other discourses and constructions built on alternative sets of assumptions.

Daily I experience and observe the lack of such disciplines.

He said (something like), “While they are there they will be concentrating on the sport that they are there for.  … NZ … aren’t sending people to China to protest about what is going on in Tibet … the expectation [of the New Zealand public and those who support the athlete]  will be that they do well at the Olympics.   What I would expect … that they go over there to do their best for their country on the sporting field and leave the polititics to the polititians.”  (emphasis mine)

What a dangerous and odd point of view.

Quite apart from the absurdity of Dick Quax imagining that no part of NZ society expects its representatives at the Olympics to hold and express views critical of the Chinese government in relation to Tibet (and other matters), and quite apart from his implied narrow view of what it would mean to “do well” at the Olympics; Quax seems to be suggesting that politics is not the business of citizens.

Of course the other extreme is that politics is far too important to be left to polititians.  I think that is true, although I do not mean this as a put-down of polititians; it is simple an affirmation that politics is about, and the business of, all of us.  Indeed China there has been a tradition of politics being seen as the exclusive realm of those in power; but we do not support that view of the world in NZ, and we should not expect our international sporting representatives to forget their democratic and justice values just because they are in Beijing for their sport.

I do completely understand that some athletes will simply focus on their event and neither consider nor comment on issues of politics or justice.  That is their right and it is easily understood when a person has prepared for the Olympics as their focus for several years.  The athletes did not choose for the Olympics to be hosted by China, they are simply participating in what for many will be a once in a life-time event that could be anywhere.

But to justify that focus on sport by proposing some principle that politics should be left to polititians is to dishonour all who work for change within NZ, within China and throughout the world.   We simply must not leave politics to polititians, and we normally don’t in this country.  We elect polititians, we lobby polititians and we hold polititians accountable.   We also recognise that we are each ethical beings with personal and collective choices that can make a difference.  All of that is politics.  Dick Quax, chose to focus on the sport in isolation if you wish, but don’t undermine the political ecosystem that includes robust protest and considered participation and that provides the context of freedom for you and your fellow athletes.

It was heartening that the programme on which Quax voiced his opinion also had other voices that recognised that some athletes would make other choices, and that the Beijing Olympics could not be isolated from the political context in China and the world.

It is also heartening to hear of some athletes (in Australia at least) seeking information and resources in preparation for their visit to Beijing.

The Australia Tibet Council said it had had inquiries from some current team members as to how they could best protest China’s treatment of Tibet.

The radio interview with Quax and others can be found (at least for a while) as an mp3 download or podcast, here.
Graeme

Positive Psychology News Daily has an interesting review article on “Psychological Capital” (Psycap):

Psychological Capital (Oxford University Press, 2007), by Fred Luthans, Carolyn M. Youssef, and Bruce J. Avolio, introduces both a significant stream of research and an important framework for the application of positive psychology to organizations. The stream of research involves a construct they call “PsyCap” — a composite construct made up of self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resiliency.

And more recently, the Gallup Management Journal has linked this work to business. As Skip Reardon comments over at Be Excellent,

It’s this new focus on “human factors” that will revolutionize the business excellence industry.

Key questions that indicate our psychological capital might include:

• How well do I think I will be able to meet a future challenge?
• What sense do I have of goals and the means to attain them?
• How positively do I respond to and interpret set-backs?
• When beset by problems and adversity, how well do I keep going and bounce back to attain success?

We need to explore further how to recognise, reinforce and stimulate such “psychological capital” in our selves, colleagues and organisations if we are concerned to shape and contribute to the future and not be simply fatalistic or victimised in the face of change and possibility.

Because each individual neuron is so slow, [Ray] Kurzweil explains, “we don’t have time to think too many new thoughts when we are pressed to make a decision. The human brain relies on precomputing its analyses and storing them for future reference. We then use our pattern-recognition capability to recognize a situation as compatible to one we have thought about and then draw upon our previously considered conclusions.”

This raise two thoughts for me in quite different directions. The first is that Kurtweil seems to be alerting us to a neurological dimension to prejudice; and this may give us some clues as to how to deal with undesirable prejudice in ourselves and society. The second thought is that Kurtweil seems to offer a way of understanding the importance of forms of slow thinking and collaborative dialogue.

If prejudice, at its etymologal and conceptual root, is about expressing a judgement based on a position already arrived at, then perhaps, following Kurtweil, we do this all the time and need to; it is the way we are made. We cannot think quickly enough to assess each situation on merit in the moment and so we follow an existing path in our mentality. We act or speak out of our pre-judgement, prior patterning, prejudice. This is not culpable, but it is dangerous. It does expose us to the possibility of getting dissimilar things confused because they become associated with each other in the convolutions of our minds.

Confused associations could result from an accident of our own history, associating some incidental detail with a traumatic or impressive experience. A confused association could result from inadequate, inaccurate or biased information. A confused association could also result from a superficial and irrelevant similarity between some earlier experience or knowledge and the current situation. In any case it comes close to what psychotherapists may recognise as transference; the acting in a present relationship or situation as a response to a prior relationship or situation.

So if our brains function routinely by the prejudice of pattern recognition what hope is there to avoid the danger of confused association and consequent injustice and missed opportunity?

For me, this insight encourages me to practice that pause between stimulus and response that is a feature of various spiritual and psychological disciplines. Knowing that I am bound to be responding according to precomputed patterns, let’s check the pattern recognition; what is similar and what is distinctive about this situation? what informed my existing patterning? what other patterns might match?

I know that in the heat of the moment this will not always happen and sometimes cannot; but if I am going to turn experience in to learning, something I am committed to doing in my own life and encouraging in others, then the better I get at that pause the more refined my pattern-recognition will become. And if I need to do the reflecting after the fact, then so beit; let’s learn anyway – even if with embarrassment and/or apologies.

And perhaps this links to my second thought about Kurtweil’s observation. Perhaps humans are slow in individual response and need to use precomputed pattern recognition, but that we also can use one another in mutual, respectful and robust dialogue to build more complex patterns and practice pattern recognition in an atmosphere of mutual challenge and accountability. I am not conscious of my own patterns (prejudices) of thought, they are embedded assumptions – my worldview; I need to be in honest dialogue with others to surface and explore assumptions.

Slow thinking seems to be called for. Slow thinking that includes extending the reflective pause between stimulus and response, and that includes disciplined dialogue, a community that is safe enough and committed enough to help me discover that “it ain’t necessarily so.”

Then I came across research done at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s by Donald W. MacKinnon. He had examined what made people creative, and he found that the professionals rated “most creative” by their colleagues displayed two characteristics: They had a greater facility for play, meaning they would contemplate and play with a problem out of real curiosity, not because they had to, and they were prepared to ponder the problem for much longer before resolving it. The more creative professionals had a “childish capacity” for play — childish in the sense of the total, timeless absorption that children achieve when they’re intrigued.

The title of the article is taken from a book it goes on to refer to: Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less, by Guy Claxton, an academic psychologist.

Claxton uses the phrase “hare brain” to refer to the sort of deliberate, conscious thinking we do when we apply reason and logic to known data. “Tortoise mind,” on the other hand, is more playful, leisurely, even dreamy. In this mode we are contemplative or meditative. We ponder a problem, rather than earnestly trying to solve it, by just bearing it in mind as we watch the world go by.

It seems persuasive, but counter cultural; which means that we probably need to cultivate and practice some deliberate habits to enjoy the fruits of creativity possible.

Thanks to Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog for pointing me to the Cleese article.  It has set me thinking, slowly.

… Key to the whole event is that it’s not a conference; it’s an unconference, in effect user generated/created at the event. The approach with Foocamps/Barcamps is contribution/involvement. In short, no spectators and no hierarchy…Oh yeah, and enjoy yourself. So sessions are about discussion/debate and as a result learning, not about attending a “losing your will to live due to powerpoint” set of presentations. I think I saw two powerpoint sessions all weekend, and basically just a few slides to help with some information flow to support discussion. …

That’s what I was imagining and trying to convey.

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Too often we gather for a purpose and the purpose dominates, or particular experts or presentations come to define a sort of orthodoxy and so limit thinking, or the structure of gathering requires or encourages posturing and reacting. It is hard for anything new to come in such settings, and yet this is what most professional and academic conferences take as inevitable. If we gather around a purpose it may surpose that we already know what matters. If we gather around an expert or acclaimed expertise it may surpose that the thinking has been done. Peer review and scholarly debate and questions rarely recognise the limits of the accepted paradigm, and rarely bring expertise from different disciplines into a dialogue of equals.

We have recently had a NZ version of FOO Camp. It got some good coverage on Radio New Zealand National. The interviews are worth listening to. They can be found for a short while here (Kim Hill interviewing Nat Torkington and Ian Wright live at Kiwi FOO Camp.

FOO stands for “Friends of O’Reilly”, as in O’Reilly publishers. The background can be found on Wikipedia here. Basically this is a limited invited crowd of interesting people who take the space and time to interact and share. Stuff happens.

As the Wikipedia entry says:

Foo Camp is an annual hacker event hosted by publisher O’Reilly Media. O’Reilly describes it as “the wiki of conferences”, where the program is developed by the attendees at the event, using big whiteboard schedule templates that can be rewritten or overwritten by attendees to optimize the schedule. The goal of the event is to reach out to new people who will increase the company’s intelligence about new technologies, and to create opportunities for cross-fertilization between people and technologies that are on the O’Reilly radar. Some have described it as a meta-birds-of-a-feather session, that gets smart people together to discuss technology issues. This style of event has also been described as an unconference.

The model that they use seems to draw on an approach I have used in the past and found very creative. It is called Open Space Technology. This is a way of organising that allows participants to go where the energy is.

Here, in NZ, Nat Torkington collaborated with Russell Brown to organise the NZ version of FOO. Russell has reported on his blog Public Address | Hard News

It’s nice that the Bar Camp model has been established here without rancour. Anyone can do it. The trick is to put away the hierarchies — the new kid is as important as the head of department — and to invite people like you’re planning a big dinner party, and let them set the agenda.

This approach to conferencing takes some courage, but it can produce a quality of dialogue, creativity and innovative learning that is very hard to do in the conventional conference model. To give some idea of the flavour, have a look at an extract from Tim O’Reilly’s invitation posting to participants: HomePage – Kwiki

We’ll put the program together on Friday evening at about 7:30pm, so if you want to lead a session, sign up for a slot then. Don’t worry if you arrive late, there should be enough sessions to go around. We’ll have a variety of spaces–conference rooms, open areas, and meeting-room-sized tents outdoors. Several of the rooms have projectors, but we could use more, so if you have one to lend, do bring it along.

The idea is that participants bring ideas, stuff to share, topics to explore; there is a way of linking these offerings to a space and time and then “marketing” the ideas so people can chose where to go for each ‘session.’ It is also a good idea, although I don’t know if they do it at FOO, to have a way of gathering together insights and loose ends from the sessions. I think that the FOO ideas were gathered in a dedicated wiki.

Anyway, what excites me are any ways that help generative dialogue to happen. I think the FOO Camp / Open Space approach is a great framework for this. I have been enthusing about and trying forms of dialogue for some time, mainly influenced by the work of David Bohm and the development from that work by people like William Isaacs and Daniel Yankelovich.

Yankelovich identifies three components without which he would not think of an encounter as dialogue.
His three are:

• equality and the absence of coercive influences
• listening with empathy
• bringing assumptions into the open

I would add to this the significance of establishing the expectation and practice of enquiry. The work of Argyris and Schon on balancing advocacy and enquiry is relevant here. To present an idea and/or to engage with another’s thinking in an environment of effective equality, attentive empathy, intentional enquiry and an exploration of assumptions requires a quality of gathering not found in most conference programmes. It needs people from diverse disciplines and none. It requires naive questions as well as expert questioning. It requires an environment open to high levels of self-organising as themes emerge and thinking develops.

I delight to think of the FOO Camps as modelling such a space and hope that the high profile that these events have won will spawn new ways of gathering and thinking.

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He thinks that what has been a shortcoming of American actors, namely, that while superb at naturalism they find artificiality difficult, is now the case here [UK] …

Bennett goes on to comment, with Gill, “today’s generation of actors are better at imitation … but what they lack is fantasy…” Bennett gives examples of actors from lowly backgrounds who have been very successful both generally and at portraying a range of characters.

… all of them had some sense of their proper position in life, a fantasy of what they wanted to be which these days would probably be disapproved of or discouraged, fantasy frowned on as some sort of escape.

This all got me thinking. Perhaps we have so exalted the expert and technical knowledge that we fail to value the contribution that imagination and fantasy can make to our lives, personal and corporate. If the only standard against which we measure ourselves and others is established expert knowledge, or orthodoxy then there can be no real innovation, only adaptation; no entrepreneurship or leadership, only management. If we are measured against some agreed sense of ‘reality’ then what we must do is imitation rather than creativity.

I think this is important far beyond acting and the arts. It has relevance to how we shape education, what we value in business and what we bring to major global environmental, social and political thinking.

As Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge has shown in his development of the Cynefin Framework, the realm of experts is in the ‘complicated domain’ where the relationship between cause and effect is still knowable, though it needs some investigation or expertise. Once we attempt to live or intervene in the ‘complex domain’, where relationship between cause and effect is inherently unknowable because there are multiple agents acting and interacting, then expertise, imitation and application of established knowledge becomes much less useful. Engaging in the complex domain requires imagination, to try things that have no proven outcomes; perception and imagination, to notice and tentatively identify emergent patterns; and courage, to respond without certainty of outcome.

Our (NZ) polititians have begun the long countdown to our national elections; and the opening gambit has been on youth. Both sides of the political divide have ideas on what to do to improve skills and reduce youth crime. All good stuff for us to consider. My worry is that education will become so instrumental that it will devalue even more imagination, fantasy and that sense of position in life (that is not conditioned or constrained by so called ‘givens’). What if our anxieties about skill shortage and delinquancy lead us to normalising the complicated domain – educating/training people to know and apply stuff while under-nourishing and undermining fantasy, imagination and creativity?

Someone has written in to Radio New Zealand National saying of Ed Hillary, “No one like him will pass this way again.” I think that this is understandable sentiment on the day of his funeral, but actually undermining what Ed stood for. He challenges all of us to live life as well and as full as he has. Of course he was unique, but only in the same sense as each of us.

And:

Dean Peter Beck emphasised (in the funeral eulogy) the phrase, he was an ordinary New Zealander. Elsewhere in the tributes what was emphasised was Ed as an exemplar human being. It seems to me that we are helping define the concept of “ordinary” when we use a person of Ed Hillary’s accomplishments and call him ordinary. In other words, Ed embodies what we can be. This is much healthier than the kind of accolades that make a hero into something quite unattainably different than the rest of us. We claim Ed Hillary. We are not prepared for him to be so different that he is not one of us. He redefines in many positive ways what it means to be human and to be a New Zealander. That is why he is important to us. That is why we have and needed to pause to honour the man. He is us, and so we can be more than we would otherwise consider being.

Perhaps this is part of what we mean by leadership.

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Social enterprises put their purpose before their profit while recognising that profit is essential to their survival and growth; it is, as they see it, a tax on the present to pay for their future. More conventional businesses may one day begin to see things the same way.

It is surprisingly rare, in my experience, for business and management leaders to look to the not-for-profit sector for insight and best practice. I recall telling some learning and development colleagues once that I was on a course on aspects of “not-for-profit” management; they retorted with amusement and the question, how hard can it be to not make a profit?

Handy has identified one of the crucial issues in a social enterprise. The commitment to purpose, while living with the reality of needing to ‘trade’ at a profit in order to sustain that purpose.

The other area that is very acute in social enterprises is the question of ownership. In a community organisation or not-for-profit enterprise there is often quite intense expressions of ownership; sometimes, indeed, expressions of ownership that seem obstructive or counter-productive. Ownership is typically distributed among a loosely or unorganised group of supporters who may make up for what they may lack in structure or formal processes with passion and integrity of purpose. One of the challenges I find working with social enterprises is that sometimes individual or sub-groups of supporters may confuse their commitment to the purpose of the organisation with the established ways of pursuing that purpose. Working for change in these organisations requires clear articulation and strong reinforcement of the fundamental and enduring purpose before it is possible to negotiate practices, structure or branding. If the ‘owners’ suspect that the vision has been lost sight of, no amount of promise of greater ‘success’ or profit will be allowed. It is as if these ‘owners’ feel a solemn trust as guardians of a long-term quest and they will not allow that trust to be broken on their watch for any short-term goal or gain.

Charles Handy reflects on some of the destructive aspects of our concept of ownership of businesses and compares it with the sense of purpose in social enterprises.

The old idea that companies exist to make money for their so-called owners is slowly going out of fashion. A business is, properly, a servant of society, a society of which the owners are a part but not necessarily the main part. …

If we don’t own things like land and companies but only hold them on trust for society, for their members and future generations, then, just perhaps, we might begin to think differently, less selfishly and short term, more considerately of others.

….

Then, just maybe, corporations will begin to be seen as the trustees of our future, which the best of them already are.

Handy seems to emphasise that it is the very concept of ownership as it functions in business that leads to short-term thinking and management, unethical practices and disregarding social, environmental and personal costs.