creativity, complexity talk

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Creativity, Innovation and Ants its nature its environment its benefits to the organisation

Creativity in its most basic formHow it permeates our worldHow it brings resilience to our orgs and satisfaction to the workplace

Creativity & InnovationSpace Shuttle & Hubble Telescope footage

Space flight: Such a complex arrangement; systems built upon systems....Whizzing along at 27,000kphBut if I was up there, Id be thinking what if something went wrong?

Something did go wrong, 300,000 kilometers from earth on April 11, 1970, when an oxygen tank on the Apollo 13 service module ruptured catastrophically.

Apollo 13 footage

A short circuit resulting an explosion in an oxygen tank, entirely depleting the service module air supply, cutting off its power. Back on the ground, the flight controllers scrambled for a solution: The crew aboard Apollo13 had limited oxygen, and carbon dioxide levels were becoming toxic. They had no contingency for such an unforeseeable situation, so they improvised. Under pressure of time, they looked at what the astronauts might have in their tiny craft that could be refashioned to scrub the building levels of carbon dioxide from the air. In the end, they managed to craft together; cardboard from a check list, a plastic bag and duct tape into a simple but effective CO2 scrubber, and relayed exacting instructions up to the astronauts on how to build and install the devices.Under tight constrains of time, the NASA ground crew found all of their contingency plans where useless. What they resorted to instead, was creativity.

Recombinant Conceptualisationexisting elements into something new adapting, combining, modifying, minimising, maximising or substituting Creativity, Innovation and Ants

Creativity of this sort comes under the name of recombinant conceptualisation, the act of adapting, combining, modifying, minimising, maximising or substituting existing elements into something new, and its the real power of human creativity and innovation.

Recombinant ConceptualisationTaken for granted elements that can be transformed into noveltyRadio

+Toaster=

Toaster-radioCreativity, Innovation and Ants

Opportunities for recombinant conceptualization are all around us.

They are the taken for granted elements of our lives, hidden value, if only we could see it.

To do so, we need to make ourselves shift our modes of thinking. For those of us not habituated to creative process, re-learning to see the world in new ways just takes practice. Everything we see around us, everything that takes our interest or has application to us, stands to be innovated. But we have to work at seeing the connections. An idea from another industry, or from sport, or from nature might hold the key for the problems we are trying to solve. We just need to learn to see it.

Recombinant ConceptualisationTaken for granted elements that can be transformed into novelty+=

Playground

MenMens playground

Creativity, Innovation and Ants

Opportunities for recombinant conceptualization are all around us.

They are the taken for granted elements of our lives, hidden value, if only we could see it.

To do so, we need to make ourselves shift our modes of thinking. For those of us not habituated to creative process, re-learning to see the world in new ways just takes practice. Everything we see around us, everything that takes our interest or has application to us, stands to be innovated. But we have to work at seeing the connections. An idea from another industry, or from sport, or from nature might hold the key for the problems we are trying to solve. We just need to learn to see it.

Recombinant ConceptualisationCreativity & Innovation

A film for The Discovery Channel a 4 hour series on dinosaurs that showed them in a new light. For Episode 2, I looked at a group of huge, fearsome Daspletosaurs, the ancestors of the mighty T Rex.To avoid the clich of the fearsome brutality of these superb animals without betraying the science, I decided to go with a recombinant idea to turn fearsome ugliness, into its opposite, endearing cuteness.

Lil Pod dinsoaur footage

But how to make a tyrannosaurs endearing? I noticed a woman walking her two young children home from school, and the idea hit me; Show the Daspletosaur as a child. Protagonist Daspletosaur became little Das, the packs youngest member. Little Das was curious and impetuous... had to take care on outings not get lost, loved to play chasey, even if he got a little single minded in the heat of the game.

Recombinant Conceptualisation

StarWarsCreativity, Innovation and Ants

In film, we have Genres; the Romantic Comedy genre, the action genre, the Thriller, the Horror, Science Fiction, the Western, etc.George Lucas turned the industry on its head when he combined two genres and made a new one.STAR WARS of course is the blend of the Western and Science Fiction. Once again, Recombinant Conceptualisation.

here is a synopsis for george lucas Star Wars that I thought you might be interested to see

and heres one for Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone

Transitional objects


Creativity begins in our earliest years, as we begin our explorations of the world. Children often allay separation anxieties from their carers through what developmental psychologists Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott call transitional objects. Often these transitional objects take the form of a teddy bear or a blanket, but they are imbued in the child-mind with qualities of the carer, so that for short periods of time, the child is able to explore their world independently, but at the same time in the symbolic presence of their source of security.

Transitional objects

our first experience of symbols. our first use of ambiguity.Creativity, Innovation and Ants

Soon the teddy bear transitional object starts to represent anything they want it to, providing experiences of play that develop the imagination and strengthen creative powers. As they grow, they learn to invest symbols with ambiguity and paradox, where a thing can be one thing, but it can also stand for something else. The Christmas present wrapper brings more delight than the present inside. This playful engagement of the world continues to be a major source of learning throughout our lives, with our manipulation of symbols evolving into the development of culture, art and stories.

OrderDisorder

innovationcreativitygeniuspsychosisneurotic-defensivenessinsanitychaosentropycognitiveboundaryCreativity, Innovation and Ants

Psychologists also tell us that there is much in common with creativity and psychosis. When were being creative, were playing out a fantasy, making the world out to be what its not, playing with the universe by bending it to our inner schema.

When we play with our imaginations, we move toward a dangerous threshold between reality and unreality, a cognitive boundary where all possibility exists, and beyond which chaos reigns. We are most creative as we approach the boundary, moving away from the stability of neurotically defensive behavior. Here we can find CO2 scrubbers made from cardboard and plastic bags. But to cross the cognitive boundary is to descend into the disintegration of psychotic episodes, the mad vibrancy of artists like Van Gogh, and the realms of the insane. Genius is indeed close to madness.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.George Bernard ShawCreativity, Innovation and Ants

George Bernard Shaw once observed, all progress depended on the unreasonable man or woman, and some of the most creative people I have met in my career have appeared to be utterly unreasonable. And brilliantly creative. In reality, they are people so enamored of the process of creative discovery, that in their passion, they seemed oblivious to the opinions of their peers and the conventions of society. But the people Im talking about arent artists, theyre scientists.

Alexander Fleming1881 -1955Creativity, Innovation and Ants

Alexander Fleming was a young medical researcher who, in 1936, gave a talk to The International Congress of Microbiologists in London, in which he presented 2 things:

Penicillium notatumCreativity, Innovation and Ants

The first was this weird mould called Penicillium, which inhibited the growth of several different kinds of bacteria.


He would keep these agar plates for weeks after his colleagues threw theirs out. His painting was actually quite a difficult thing to do, because he had to get the acidity, temperatures, moisture and timing right. Each bacterium would be a different colour and require different conditions to grow. Each morning, he would drag out old agar plates and see if anything new had happened. He wasnt just a scientist who got lucky, this was all very deliberate play behaviour. He was pushing his science to edge of the creative domain. And of course the end result was to save the lives of countless millions.

"When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer," Fleming would later say, "But I guess that was exactly what I did."- Alexander FlemingCreativity, Innovation and Ants

But no one, including Queen Mary, thought that Fleming was quite the full ticket. He loved to make things difficult for himself. He would do things like playing a round of golf with only one club, and putt while lying on the ground. He continuously played. When asked what his job was, he famously replied Playing with microbes

This idea of creatively playing with novel concepts is what makes pure research so valuable and so exciting. In the area of science that Ive looked at most closely, the biological sciences, great insight has been borne through the process of passionate people seeing novelty in natural phenomena, imagining why it might be so, and playing around with various types of equipment to test the initial ideas.

+Recombinant ConceptualisationWhat have these two thing got in common?Creativity, Innovation and Ants

What have these two things got in common?Biologists might say a great deal. So might some management theorist.

Ant colony footage

Ants, along with termites and other social animals, have captured the imagination of people down through the ages. They often live in truly massive colonies, where high levels of cooperation and specialization are required. Yet individually, they have very meager intelligence.

Ant trails footage

To understand the power of self-organization, consider how certain species of ants are able to find the shortest path to a food source merely by laying and following chemical trails.

+Recombinant ConceptualisationCreativity, Innovation and Ants

Through the creative use of Recombinant Conceptualisation, scientists looked at the behaviour of ants and decided to apply the same behavioural model to an organisation.

Recombinant Conceptualisation


In 1999, an average Southwest Airlines plane was using only 7% of its cargo space. At some airports there wasn't enough capacity to accommodate scheduled loads of freight, while others were near empty. Employees were rationally loading freight onto the first plane going in the right direction. But workers were spending increasingly large amounts of time moving cargo around, and sometimes filling aircraft needlessly.To solve its problem, Southwest applied the simple rules scientists had observed in foraging ants. Ant logic revealed a counter-intuitive solution: It can be quicker and more efficient to leave cargo on a plane headed initially in the wrong direction, where sufficient capacity to handle it might exist, than to offload it and reship it by the most direct route. Applying this insight slashed freight transfer rates by as much as 80%, radically reduced workload for cargo handlers, reduced the number of overnight transfers, reduced the required cargo storage facilities and minimized wage costs. In addition, fewer planes were flying full, which opened up significant opportunities for the company to generate new business. Thanks to the ants, Southwest realised an annual gain of more than $10 million.

learn and adapt build in redundancy self-organize

evolve at all costsRules of social insectsCreativity, Innovation and Ants

Social insects have been so successful that they are almost everywhere in the ecosphere because of three characteristics: adaptive learning (the colony can adapt to a changing environment); robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks); and self-organization (activities are neither centrally controlled nor locally supervised).

Bird flock footage

Other behaviors where individuals make up a larger system, such as birds flocking, have similar simple rules;Separation - avoid crowding neighbours (short range repulsion)Alignment - steer towards average heading of neighbours Cohesion - steer towards average position of neighbours (long range attraction)And because all changes have to happen somewhere, a single individual changing its behavior, say a single bird experiencing turbulence in the air its flying through and banking slightly to the left, will have the effect of changing its neighbour behavior, as it adjusts its position by moving left, which in turn effects its neighbours neighbour, and so on, rippling through the whole system, and changing it accordingly. So it can be said of these complex and adaptive systems, that small changes can have large and unpredictable consequences. We might know all about the flock, the kind of birds, how fast they fly, where they roost, how many there are in the flock, etc, and we know their know their flocking rules, but even though there is nothing random in it, and yet we still cant predict how it will behave in the future.

Evolving evolutionary fitness

For all social animals, from flocks of birds, schools of fish, or even pedestrians crossing a busy intersection, teamwork is largely self-organized, and coordinated primarily through the interactions of individual members. Like ants choosing the shortest route to a food source from myriad possible pathways, complex systems are observed to develop their own inherent logic. They are also highly adaptable to their environments. Just as single, random bird can affect the flock, so in evolutionary terms, success in an individuals adaption to changes in the environment, can lead to the adoption of those changes by other members of the system, either genetically or behaviorally.

Complex adaptive systems contain a great number of interacting elements or agents... ...that interact with each other according to sets of rules... ...that might small changes in the basic conditions, but which can produce profound and unpredictable changes to the whole system......requiring robust systems to have built-in redundancy, making fail possible without destabilizing the whole system.

Complex adaptive systemsThe domain of evolution

We know that Complex adaptive systems contain a great number of interacting elements or agents

We know that they interact with each other according to sets of rules (that require them to examine and respond to each others behavior in order to improve their own behavior and the behavior of the system they comprise)

that small changes in the basic conditions, influenced by any number of unforeseen events, can produce profound and unpredictable changes to the whole system.

Prof. Stuart KauffmannKauffmann footage

But where this becomes complicated, is when we try to make predictions about outcomes. All complex adaptive systems, from ants to hearts, to immune systems, to organisations, are subject to the same laws. We can study the laws, but we cant be assured of the consequences of alaments impacting with the system that we havent seen come into existence yet. Eminent evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman asks, is that if we are all adapting in a process of continuous evolution, and if small changes can stimulate system wide effects, how can we know in advance what might create the conditions that will promote change, or what those changes might be? How can we predict how a system might act, from moment to moment?

Kauffmanns new biology discards much of what weve learned from the reductionist ideas of Newton and Galileo, where everything is made up of parts, and proposes instead a theory based on complexity science, which holds that everything is made up of interactions.

Fitness landscapeLoins and antelope footage

Kauffmann models the evolutionary progression of his system thinking in a form called a fitness landscape, which works like this;Imagine you are looking across the plains of the Serengeti. The dominant species on the plain are a pride of lions and a herd of antelope. The lions and the antelope enjoy a relationship in which the lions pick off the old, the young, and the ill amongst the antelope, because they are the easiest prey and offer the lions less chance of injury during the hunt. The benefit to the antelope is that the lions keep their numbers in check, preventing the food resources from being depleted through unsustainable increases in their populations, and by picking of weaker, ill or infirmed animals, they help to ensure the health of the antelope gene pool strong. Biologists like Kauffmann would see this balanced relationship as a relatively flat fitness landscape.

Fitness landscape


But suppose the lions developed an evolutionary adaptation that gave them a surprise advantage: Suppose they learned to ride motorbikes. With such excess speed, the evolutionary fitness of the landscape would soon alter in the lions favour, which biologists might represent like this, as a growing hill, surrounded by a deepening valley that represented the diminishing number of antelope that resulted from the lions more effective hunting strategy. Such as system would crash catastrophically.

The idea of fitness landscapes reinforces the notion that all systems need the tension that exists in the chaotic relationships with their environments in order to evolve and to avoid being stranded on an evolutionary fitness peak with no way forward.

Yet for our oranisations, maintaining the order required of large bureaucratic structures, and being open to change and influence from the outside, is paradoxical. Kauffmann proposed a possible solution not unlike the image of patches in a quilt.

Take a hard, conflict-laden task in which many parts interact, and divide it up to make a quilt of patches. Try to optimize within each patch.Although the patches do not overlap, there are couplings between parts of separate patches across patch boundaries. This means that finding a good solution in one patch will change the problem to be solved by the parts in the adjacent patches. These parts will themselves make adaptive moves that in turn alter the problems faced by yet other patches.The quilt is in effect a model of a coevolving system. Each patch behaves like a species, climbing toward fitness peaks on its own landscape. In doing so, it deforms the fitness landscapes of the other species that share its ecosystem.

In his seminal 1993 text omplexity and Creativity in Organisations, Ralph Stacey (1993) makes a key distinction between ordinary and extraordinary management. Ordinary management is required in order to carry out day-to-day problem solving to achieve the organisation established objectives. It employs a logical analytic process involving data analysis, goal setting, evaluating options against goals, rational choice, implementation through the hierarchy, and monitoring. This is planning and management based on a shared ideological consensus, with control at its centre. Competent ordinary management is necessary if the organisation is to deliver cost-effective performance.

However, it needs it counterpart, Extraordinary Management, if it is to stay responsive to a fast changing environment.Extraordinary management, is the ongoing process of creating renewal and change within the organisation. He sees rationalistic forms of decision making as largely unworkable, since they require as their starting point, knowledge of the emergent outcomes of complex situations, which as wee seen from Kauffmann work, is just not possible to ascertain.

Cells; Should be allowed time on a regular basis to come together to consider issues germane to the organisation in the most creative ways possible Should be materially rewarded for their work.Should be free to work in any way they see fit, and be allowed total freedom from any outside interferenceThe problems they look at should be high level issues, with the attendant responsibilities that entailsThey should be encouraged to be as creative as they wish, even if their ideas look hopelessly nave or unworkable. It should be a safe-fail environment, as opposed to a fail-safe one.The cells only report to management if consensus is reached about an idea or process, or at the completion of the cells work life.

But complexity theory teaches us that if were to manage uncertainty, we have only 2 choices: We can try to guess every contingency that may arise and plan to meet it, or we build the creative resilience into our organisations that spots changes before they become a surprise, and creates innovative solutions to meet them. The former takes enormous resources, most of which are going to useless, and all of which are easier to circumvent than maintain. The later takes very few resources, thats what it is going to require to make an organisation able to gain the flexibility to not just recognise threats before they become a danger, or to innovate new approaches in line with changing needs and mores in the community. And this might be a solution: Applying Kauffmanns patches to Staceys, organization as a complex adaptive system, using empowered organizational creativity, we could design a system like this:Organizations could offer interested parties the choice of forming creative cells, to help sport and suggest solutions for difficult issues.These cells should be allowed a certain amount of time on a regular basis to come together to consider issues germane to the organisation in the most creative ways possible, and they should be materially rewarded for their work.

When the cells are in existence, they should be free to work in any way they see fit, and be allowed total freedom from any outside interference.The problems they look at should be high level issues, with the attendant responsibilities that entails.They should be encouraged to be as creative as they wish, even if their ideas look hopelessly nave or unworkable. It should be a safe-fail environment, as opposed to a fail-safe one.The cells only report to management if consensus is reached about an idea or process, or at the completion of the cells work life.

But there are some very strict rules: The cells can not comprise more that 7 people, and ideally not more than 5. They are only allowed to communicate their work to 2 other cells, and only then if doing so involves the sharing of information likely to assist the other cells with their own creative issuesMembers of each cell should have diverse interests, and should not be friends or close working colleaguesEach cell should have a limited life, disbanding after a period of 3 to 6 months, with the members going into new cells, comprised of people who are not close friends or colleagues.

But there are some very strict rules: The cells can not comprise more that 7 people, and ideally not more than 5. The number 5 relates to the work of Christopher Allen, on Power Laws and Participatory inequality. Called the Support Circle, this is the number of individuals that you seek advice, support, or help from in times of severe emotional or financial stress. In most societies, the average size of an individual's Support Circle is 3-5. The people are the core of your intimate social network and most typically are also kin. In sociology papers this is often called the "support clique".They are only allowed to communicate their work to 2 other cells, and only then if doing so involves the sharing of information likely to assist the other cells with their own creative issues.Members of each cell should have diverse interests, and should not be friends or close working colleagues.Each cell should have a limited life, disbanding after a period of 3 to 6 months, with the members going into new cells, comprised of people who are not close friends or colleagues.Patching systems so that they are poised on the edge of chaos may be valuable for two quite different reasons. Not only do such systems quickly achieve good compromise solutions under conflicting constraints, but they should also track the moving peaks on a changing fitness landscape very well if the existing environment changes. If external conditions alter, a rigidly ordered system will tend to cling stubbornly to its peaks. Poised systems, by contrast, should cope better with shifts in the landscape.These insights hint at the reasons why flatter, decentralized organizations may function well. Counterintuitively, breaking an organization into patches, where each patch attempts to optimize solely for its own selfish benefit, can lead, as if by an invisible hand, to the greater welfare of the whole organization. The trick, as we have seen, lies in how the patches are chosen.

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