Just to add to Ken's post on creativity research and its applicability.
Here is an article by Liisa Valikangas (available at:
http://www.sric-bi.com/BIP/briefs/B0046.shtml, follow the link to read with
original format). I'm not necessarily subscribing to this viewpoint but
think that it is pertinent to clarify the relationship between creativity
research and its applicability in design practice. This refers to
creativity but I suspect it applies to other areas. It is only natural that
some (including me) mistrust any applicable result from creativity
research, since a large part have been in the form of recipes or (often
visual) riddles that supposedly 'make' people more creative. I think we can
safely say that such viewpoint is misleading at best. This article points
to one interpretation of creativity as a complex system. The point for our
discussion is that there are clear contributions to practice (design
management in this example) that largely depend on basic research on
complex adaptive systems, emergence, social networks, situated interaction,
and a host of other relevant concepts. The premise is that the more we know
about these fundamental processes and their role in shaping phenomena in
these areas the better equipped we are to improve our design practice by
better understanding and drawing parallels to everyday experience.
I would agree with David that there ARE research programs of creativity
that are a cul-de-sac. But the leap from this to disregard ALL inquiry of a
field just seems to much. Perhaps by applying some creativity to the
research of creativity we can find additional approaches and methodologies
that lead somewhere. The existing knowledge bodies could then be
interpreted in a new way. And our expectations as to the kind of results
that creativity research should provide would need to adjust as the focus
of attention does.
From Complexity to Creativity: What Can Managers Learn?
by Liisa Valikangas
I just finished reading Complexity and Creativity in Organizations
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 1996) by Ralph Stacey, a
management professor. For people looking for simple solutions to make
organizations creative, this book is not the answer. Stacey writes in the
introduction, "Let me make it clear right at the start that I am not about
to present you with a new recipe for organizational success, that is, the
latest successor to Culture Change Programs, Total Quality Management,
Business Process Reengineering, Future Visioning, Competitive Competencies,
Investors in People, or the like." He then goes on to say that he is
interested in understanding why we so "desperately" jump from one of these
"savior" recipes to another. It is almost as if we have given up the hope
of trying to understand the complexities of organizational behavior and are
willing to try just about anything. According to Stacey, partly to blame is
our ill-conceived question that we take as a starting point: "How can we
design our organizations so that they will yield successful outcomes?" This
question creates a vicious circle that stems from our efforts to try to
foresee and control organizational adaptation to change, leads to
increasing frustration and anxiety as such efforts do not produce
predictable outcomes, and thus only increases our desperate search for yet
another success recipe as we are unable to make sense of our experiences.
Change programs often produce change, but not the kind that the changers
intended.
Stacey claims that today's fast technology development and information
flows produce a kind of competitive environment in which everything depends
on everything else. Such high interconnectedness is combined with much
greater diversity than before: In the global environment, many more
decision variables bear on the outcomes than ever before. This
interconnectedness results in a degree of complexity that is practically
unmanageble. Managing a company is not a controlled experiment in which one
variable can change at a time when everything else remains constant.
However, the point that the book makes is deeper. It is not only that the
causal links between managerial actions and organizational outcomes are
obscure and unknowable. The point is, more, that these links are
necessarily obscure and unknowable if the the organization is to be
creative. The management can get the organization to do what it wants only
if what the management wants "is an endless repetition of what [the
company] has already done. If we are at all interested in novelty, [the
company] will have to be designed to operate in the space for novelty,
where its long-term future is unpredictable and emergent and hence cannot
be intended in any comprehensive way."
So what is this "space for novelty" like in which companies are creative?
Here Stacey draws on complexity theory. What are complex adaptive systems
like? They operate at the "edge of chaos," at the edge of system
disintegration--in other words, at their limit. This idea is familiar to
people who have heard Lew Platt from Hewlett-Packard say, "If my people are
not failing most of the time, they are not trying hard enough." This
practice defines "pushing the envelope," creating new knowledge. Complexity
theory tells us that such a space is paradoxical in that it is both stable
and unstable at the same time, full of contradiction, tensions--a
dialectic. Balanced properly between creative destruction and
reconstruction, the company evolves in radically unpredictable but creative
ways. The key point for a manager is that its outcomes cannot be predicted.
If managers want creativity, they should stop trying to control the
outcome. Creativity happens in a company that is pushing its limits (but
only if the company is indeed stretching its knowledge frontier and thus is
not in the space for complacency).
The second key point to the manager is the containment of anxiety. For some
people, highly leveraged organizational tensions are too much to bear. For
instance, typically people need to feel secure about their jobs (the kind
of security that exists in a formal or informal contract between employer
and employee) before they dare to explore new ways of improving
productivity. Stacey talks about two systems operating in organizations:
the formal network and the informal network (see D96-1986, Corporate
Innovation and Informal Networks)--in his book, the legitimate and the
shadow system. It is the tension between the two that management should be
concerned about--not about eliminating it. Stacey's book tells a story of a
chemical company that had avoided any tension between the two. The
legitimate system had rational plans about how to cope with corporate
challenges such as addressing environmental concerns, boosting stagnating
sales, enhancing creativity. The shadow system ensured that the company was
a safe haven against a somewhat hostile world, putting pressure on the
company to cut down waste, lay off employees as sales were lackluster, and
adopt safer production methods. The company was like a family for its
employees, its main function the provision of security. Writes Stacey:
At all levels, therefore, those who were interviewed were using imagery
that seemed to be saying: "We want to be treated like children and told
exactly what to do and exactly where we are going and we want to be
punished when we are bad, but in fact this does not happen. So although we
are well looked after and `held' in this organization, that security is not
as satisfactory as it could be. We want even more security. Furthermore, we
demand that we be treated fairly and that means that evenhanded choices
between people should be seen to be carried out. Fear that we might not be
treated fairly leads to sibling rivalry. And if this rivalry gets out of
hand, it will attract the attention of, and leave us exposed to, a hostile
environment."
No creative tension existed in that organization. Employees would have
perceived any creativity as a threat because of the unpredictability of its
outcome, and thus would have rejected it. But how can management adjust the
tension between the legitimate and the shadow system so that good things
happen? Stacey talks about tuning the control parameters at critical
levels: "As with nonlinear feedback systems, the general dynamic
progression of an organization is determined by the state of the control
parameters, and at certain critical points those control parameters cause
the space for creativity to materialize." What are the control parameters?
Four of them exist:
* People are affected by emotions. The most important dynamic for
creativity is that of inspiration and anxiety.
* People continuously choose between their individual goals and those of
the company they work for. The two can never fully align, and the
motivation for an individual to comply with the organizational, shared
goals is the need to belong. This motivation reflects the dynamic of
conformity and individualism.
* Power differentials are part of corporate life. A leadership-followership
dynamic is at play.
* People think systemically. That is, they are able to reflect upon
themselves and upon the system they are part of. This systemic thinking is
the interplay of consciousness and self-awareness.
According to Stacey, the most important control variables of the four above
are the level of anxiety and power differentials. "The more an organization
is assigned to assist members in containing rather than avoiding high
levels of anxiety, the more power differences will be exercised to assist
members in engaging in rather than avoiding self-reflection and the more it
will be possible to work creatively despite high rates of information flow,
large differences between schemas, and rich connectivity between people."
In essence, the very elements that are necessary for
creativity--self-reflection; information flows; diversity in goals,
approaches, values; interaction between people--also cause anxiety.
Formulating a future vision and letting people off the hook of having to be
creative about the future by giving them a specific task to perform with
specific performance criteria will cause the organization to stagnate. The
system is strictly defined and thus unable to adapt creatively to emerging
futures. For instance, managers should pay attention to creative efforts
that indirectly contribute to an increased knowledge base and explorative
learning in a company.
Writes Stacey: "The emphasis on managing long-term specific outcomes is
completely misplaced. They cannot be managed, but it is possible to
influence the control parameters, namely, the containment of anxiety, the
use of power, the flow of information, the degrees of difference that are
tolerable, and the extent of the connections across organizational
networks...from this perspective, managers still need strategic plans;
however, they relate not to outcomes and actions to achieve them, but to
methods of affecting anxiety, power, difference, and connectivity."
What does such advice mean concretely? First of all, managers should make
sure that a lot of pressure exists for a company to grow (and thus to
stretch its limits continuously). For instance, Konosuke Matsushita,
founder of Matsushita Electric Industrial, reportedly said occasionally
when things were going very well and the company was highly profitable:
"And in the next five years, we should double our revenue." Talk about
challenge! But at the same time, mechanisms should exist to ensure that the
anxiety caused by such requirements can be handled by the corporate
employees. Matsushita talked about people as the most important part of his
management philosophy (for instance, one of his many books is People before
Products). Second, power differences should be minimized in an organization
aspiring to be creative: They only maintain the established order rather
than challenge it. It is hard to be creative in a very authoritarian
environment. Third, make sure that different viewpoints in the company are
represented by people who participate in core activities such as product
development. Studies on informal networks of companies often show that even
though R&D, marketing, and production are supposed to cooperate, their
actual communication is either minimal or nonexistent. A challenge for the
management here is to get people to talk to each other who have little in
common. Perhaps incentive systems such as measuring actual electronic-mail
traffic could apply here (counting the number of electronic-mail messages
exchanged, say--independent of their content--between the departments).
Last, research in many areas (such as on brains) has confirmed that
intelligence comes from high degrees of connectivity. For a company to be
intelligent, the key issue is multiple contacts between its people,
departments, managerial levels, and ideas. Electronic mail and corporate
intranets have provided one avenue to enrich connectivity. Whether we are
about to enter an era of high creativity facilitated by global networks of
communication remains to be seen.
At 04:46 PM 3/21/2003, you wrote:
>Dear Ken and all
>
>Many thanks for the bibliography. I will check the references out shortly.
>
>One question I shall certainly ask is do these research studies 'contribute
>directly to the improved practice of design'? You say they definitely do.
>
> > This is a specific demonstration that some streams of
> > creativity research absolutely meet this standard.
>
>Good. I hope they also shed light on the more difficult philosophical issues
>that I raised. I will respond in due course.
>
>BTW, I have not forgotten about my promise to continue to spell out in more
>detail the kinds of criteria that I find useful in deciding between research
>that is useful for improving my practice, and research which does not. I've
>been temporarily distracted by other matters.
>
>Thank you to everyone who has commented so far.
>
>David
>
>--
>Professor David Sless
>BA MSc FRSA
>Co-Chair Information Design Association
>Senior Research Fellow Coventry University
>Director
>Communication Research Institute of Australia
>** helping people communicate with people **
>
>PO Box 398 Hawker
>ACT 2614 Australia
>
>Mobile: +61 (0)412 356 795
>
>phone: +61 (0)2 6259 8671
>fax: +61 (0)2 6259 8672
>web: http://www.communication.org.au
-- Ricardo Sosa
PhD candidate, 3rd year
Key Centre of design Computing and Cognition
Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney
http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~rsos7705
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