Innovation needs collaborative creativity

| January 13, 2016

In his last blog for our Innovation forum, Graham Thorburn offers ten brief thoughts about collaborative creativity he’s gleaned in 35 years as an artist and teacher of artists. 

In this final blog from me I want to write in praise of courage, curiosity and shamelessness. And I am determined to be positive, in face of the overwhelming temptation to be critical (again).

I once spent a week at a chimpanzee research station in Tanzania, and while that doesn’t make me an expert, it doesn’t take one to quickly see two things: how central the dynamic of power and status is to chimpanzee society, and how similar we are to them.

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but there is more and more evidence that the majority of our decisions are made at a pre-conscious instinctive level, and what we think of as logical decision-making is actually post-event justification – creating logical rationalisations for decisions already made. And the smarter we are, the better we are at doing it. You have to be very comfortable in your own skin to be genuinely curious about the world, because one of the most powerful forces working under the hood of our conscious mind is the determination to maintain our existing power and status against all threats, and expand it if we can.

And criticism of those who threaten our power is one of the most powerful weapons we have in this struggle.

Of course, while Donald Trump can say these things aloud, we egalitarian Australians shake our heads in wonder and say ‘Only in America.’  But let’s not kid ourselves. While I like our largely successful attempts to create an egalitarian society, you only have to venture onto the roads at tradie knock-off time to experience rampant assertive egalitarianism. Like any human society, power and status matter in Australia – except we’re inclined to pretend it doesn’t, which arguably makes us less able to deal with it.

What’s this got to do with innovation? Everything. 

Criticism kills creativity. There’s a place in collaborative creativity for rigour and challenge, but though criticism may dress itself as rigorous questioning, it’s almost the opposite of it. The objective of rigour is to challenge participants and colleagues to go further, to extend themselves. The objective of criticism is almost always to shame people back into their boxes so they won’t challenge the existing order. Shame can be a force for progress, but it’s much more likely to stifle it.

Fear of shame kept Darwin from publishing Origin of the Species until he was on the verge of being gazumped. More recently Huw Price, who is Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, argues that fear of reputational damage (i.e. shame) is blocking research into cold fusion – a potential key contributor to solving the climate change versus energy conundrum.

As I hope has become clear, while I applaud the Government’s efforts to put innovation at the forefront of Australia’s working culture, I’m sceptical about whether that’s sufficient. On the whole, governments can only shift the environment – they can’t determine what people will make of those changed circumstances. To me there are two deeper, slower-changing cultural currents that are much more powerful than any Government policy can ever be – the timid consensus-seeking Australian culture, and basic human nature.

Nor am I immune to these forces. Despite my determination to make this last blog positive, I’ve slipped right back into criticism.

So, in recompense, allow me to offer ten brief thoughts about collaborative creativity I’ve gleaned from 35 years as an artist working in a collaborative medium, a teacher of such artists, and a writer of curriculum for teaching such artists.

  1. People talk about the meeting of like minds. Much more productive, if you can manage it, is the meeting of unlike minds. Difference is much more useful than similarity if you want to be truly innovative. You want a group with as wide a cross-section of skills, talents, points of view and mindsets as you can manage.
  1. You need a process that minimises and deflates the struggle for power and territory. No pissing on lampposts.
  1. Use ‘What if…?’ as a tool for keeping the discussion in the realm of the speculative possible. Don’t let it become concrete until the group assigns a specific investigative task, to be completed and reported back to the group. This has two positive outcomes: it gives a focus to a meeting without pre-emptively locking in a shallow solution; and it gives the meeting a natural duration.
  1. Accept that the process is iterative. You may cycle through information, imagination, investigation, information and so on many times before you get to implementation.
  1. Even then, implementation will almost certainly throw up new problems. ‘If you got it right the first time, you almost certainly overlooked something.’
  1. Focus on the questions, and let the answers come. Some may actually come in the meeting, most will come outside the meeting – to unexpected people at unexpected times. Tend the garden, and let a thousand flowers bloom.
  1. Deflect any attempts to use power to shut down discussion. The most common form this takes is the appeal to higher authority, though these days the deities called upon are much more likely to be ‘common sense’ (often presented as ‘the ludicrous logical extension of your proposition would be…’), ‘human nature’, ‘the laws of physics’ and so on. See item 3 above.
  1. Allow – nay, deliberately encourage – questioning the questions. As I said in one of my blogs, ‘What if the real question isn’t traffic, but office hours?’
  1. Use distraction to create space for the unconscious. In most of us the inner critic is much more powerful than any external critic, and we have to do something to keep it occupied while the subconscious works on the problem . Sherlock Holmes had ‘three pipe problems’. Why a pipe? Because a pipe needs constant tending to clean it, fill it, light it and keep it alight – which keeps the controlling critical conscious mind distracted with a small but varying physical task. If you can manage it in the meetings without people feeling patronised, or that you’re ‘wasting their time’ (i.e., diminishing their importance), include communal tasks as an occasional deliberate distraction.
  1. Use deliberate obstacles as a strategy to avoid unseen assumptions. Besides the use of power, the greatest obstacle to creative thought is unrecognised assumptions. As the Greek philosopher put it, ‘Whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish.’ Set the group the task of coming up with a deliberate obstacle that would make it difficult to achieve the objective. This forces the discussion off the beaten path – but takes the curse off doing it by presenting it as a speculative game. ‘What if we had to reduce greenhouse gases by 25%, but could ONLY use coal?’

 

Read Graham’s previous blogs for our Innovation forum here:

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