Chaordic Columns | Blog
| Rhythm, Resistance & Randomness - maandag 3 oktober 2011 |
Rhythm, Resistance & Randomness
Creativity in Process Design
An essential part of my work is to design processes that help release the creative potential of a group of people - usually a team in an organisational context - in order to address and resolve the issues and questions that really matter to them. These issues can range from organisational and strategic questions around vision, purpose, strategy, products and services, concepts and structures, to relational challenges in working together as a team. By consciously including process elements that support the release of that creative potential, these processes usually become more effective, and efficient, because people are woken up to looking at the same issue from a different, previously unknown, perspective.
Over the past years I’ve come across interesting responses from clients and sponsors when I talked to them about the importance of that release of creativity. Quite frequently they became fearful of having to engage in funny games, ridiculous experiential exercises or spending time on stuff that was not really immediately at the core of their concern. Yes, it’s true: light-hearted, experiential exercises can most certainly contribute to a release of creative energy. These exercises tend to do so in a divergent manner, i.e. the creative energy is all over the place after participation and requires serious efforts to be framed, and therefore converged towards real problem-solving or co-creative and collaborative conversations. Is it fun, yes. Does it help, usually. Is it strictly necessary, no.
In my experience there exists another approach to designing for creativity that is more integrated and consolidated. It’s an approach that I only discovered by already doing it. I call it the 3R – approach, which stands for a conscious and integrated use of less known process design elements: Rhythm, Resistance & Randomness. I’d like to introduce them to you by using three different examples.
Rhythm
Years ago I was working with two trainers from an international youth NGO, preparing for a process that needed to deliver the organisation’s strategy for the next five years. Together they were very accustomed to a certain way of process design, and I was the odd external duck stepping in from outside. They shared with me how their participants, the organisation’s management team, not only expected this particular approach but also how they were sort of dependent on it because they didn’t know any better. The approach comprised of fixed time slots: 2 x 1,5 hour in the morning, lunch and 2 x 1,5 hour in the afternoon, dinner. Plenary presentations or instructions, then small group work, and finally followed up by reports back in plenary. 2 days, 8 time slots, every slot the same rhythm.
I asked them if they would be willing to play with a different rhythm to explore what new perspectives and energies could be woken up. And fortunately they were curious enough. The whole prep and design meeting we juggled around with different timings, different lengths of the sessions, different atmospheres we wanted to create, different rooms and spaces to use, different materials to engage, and in the end decided to go for what we started to refer to as a "allegro” design, in analogy with music: lively and joyful. With short plenary intervals, lots of outdoor conversations and walks, free mornings until lunch but active and productive evenings instead. The outcomes were overwhelming. The trainers and management team all agreed they had never enjoyed their strategic process so much, that it was better aligned with their organisational culture and that the outcome was refreshingly new, to-the-point and almost ready to go.
Resistance
Last year I was supporting a team to organise a conference on "the future of education” for all the employees of their organisation. When I joined their preparatory process, they had already picked their keynote speakers, and all three of them were what I refer to as ‘the usual suspects’, i.e. they were very known to all the people and would tell a story they had already heard (and read) over and over. When I inquired about the motivation for this selection of speakers, I was told that that was what people were expecting and also that their stories and perspectives were aligned with the organisation’s vision.
I shared with the prep team the most essential lesson that I learnt in the theatre world: "the antagonist shapes the protagonist’s identity”, i.e. the anti-hero or the opposite force is what actually makes visible and accentuates that what we really stand for and believe in.
They went for it, and we decided to substitute one of the speakers for someone else with a radically different story, and a commonly not-so-appreciated perspective. The conference was a thrill; the speaker (who we briefed properly by the way) was interrupted frequently, challenging questions were asked,...he was even booed at one point in his speech.
Afterwards we took a significant amount of time to debrief this experience with the audience and asked them reflective questions why this speech had triggered such strong resistance in them. We asked them to take note of what positive or affirmative beliefs this had woken up in them, and to take these into the remains of the conference. It helped, a significant amount of the participants put on their evaluation forms that they had learnt to look at their points-of-view and arguments with fresh eyes and curious minds and discovered new opportunities.
Randomness
Only a few weeks ago I was having coffee and a conversation with a good friend and colleague who has done some amazing work in the field of community development. She and her colleagues had been asked to come up with a training programme, a new service, to acquaint others with their success story and approach. Throughout the conversation it became evident that she was completely stuck in a fixed paradigm or understanding of what such a training service would entail and what that would require from her. What had been proposed to her as an invitation to come up with something creative to share her ‘good practice’, had become a painstaking item on her ‘to do’ list.
I remembered a quote from the book PopCo that I read this summer (and wrote my previous Chaordic Column about), it says: "If I keep fiddling around, I will have my own moment of serendipity […] Is it then a ‘happy accident’, no because it springs from the most important lessons that I have learnt”.
We decided to practise this on the spot and went back to her most important lessons learnt over the past year as ‘community entrepreneur’. We named them explicitly and then put it aside, parked it in our consciousness so to say. Next, we went back to the actual design conversation, designing her training service. And I invited her to propose as many different crazy ideas to me as possible for what this training service could become. To let one crazy idea be the spark for the next one. And all of a sudden, there it was. Her eyes started to sparkle, she relaxed in her chair, and within five minutes she designed the foundation of her training programme from a deep knowing of what it is that she has to offer the world.
Please note, this is a very different process than brainstorming. That is a linear activity of the mind. This is a non-linear practice of evolving creativity, and the source that it springs from is a profound energetic memory of something that works.
This experience of serendipity proved truly to be an activity of the soul, of a sense of deeper meaning. As Ikujiro Nonaka, a Japanese business scientist, also points out: The serendipitous quality of innovation is […] the ability to create knowledge not by processing information but rather by tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches […]”.
Responses:
| Nobody has responded to this message yet. |
Respond:
