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Creativity

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Creativity is a generative principle. Sometimes associated with the generation of ideas, but better associated with the generation of completed works.


“Die ewig rege, die heilsam schaffende Gewalt” [Goethe]

“The fact that order and creativity are complementary has been basic to man's cultural development; for he has to internalize order to be able to give external form to his creativity.” [Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (Secker & Warburg, 1967) p 39]

Creativity and Awareness

Creativity and Integrity

Creativity and Improvisation

 

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veryard projects - innovation for demanding change

Creativity and Awareness

veryard projects > change > creativity > awareness

There is a common (romantic) myth that creativity comes from unconcious genius and inspiration, rather than deliberate awareness.

The novellist Alain Robbe-Grillet is particularly scornful of this myth. "The nineteenth-century myths have lost none of their force: the great novellist, the 'genius', is a sort of irresponsible and fatal monster, oblivious of what he is doing, if not slightly half-witted, from whom 'messages' emanate that only the reader may decipher. Everything that may possibly obscure the writer's judgement is more or less permitted as being favourable to the birth of his work. Alcoholism, unhappiness, drugs, passionate mysticism, madness - the more or less fictional biographies of artists have been so cluttered with all these that it now seems quite natural to see them as necessary essentials of their melancholy condition, or in any case to see an antimony between creativity and awareness.

[Towards a New Novel, 1962, trans 1965]

veryard projects - innovation for demanding change

Creativity and Integrity

veryard projects > change > creativity > integrity

In resolving the dialectic conflicts between value and fact, meaning and relevance, integrity is the master value … wisdom the protector of fact and meaning, justice the protector of fact and relevance, courage the protector of relevance and value, and love the protector of value and meaning.

These … virtues … instruct us to create, not adjust.

D. Kolb, Experiential Learning (Englewood Cliffs NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1984) pp 227-8

Wisdom dictates that we do not blindly follow the implications of knowledge but that we be … responsible in the use of knowledge. 
Courage tells us to push forward when circumstance signals danger and retreat.
Love requires that we hold our selfish acts in check until we have viewed the situation from the perspective of the other - the Golden Rule.
And justice demands fair and equitable treatment for all against the expedience of the special situation.
more Reframing
Zone Theory

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Creativity and Improvisation

veryard projects > change > creativity > improvisation

Like many women, and an increasing number of men, Mary Catherine Bateson's life was disrupted by forces outside her control.  Her book Composing a Life puts a positive spin on this, and describes how rich her life has been in consequence.

This book started as “a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings. At times, I pictured myself frantically rummaging through the refrigerator and the kitchen cabinets, convinced that somewhere I would find the odds and ends that could be combined at the last minute to make a meal for unexpected guests, hoping to rescued by serendipity. A good meal, like a poem or a life, has a certain balance and diversity, a certain coherence and fit. As one learns to cope in the kitchen, one no longer duplicates whole meals but rather manipulates components and the way they are put together. The improvised meal will be different from the planned meal, and certainly riskier, but rich with the possibility of delicious surprise. Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity. Sometimes a path chosen by default can become a path of preference. … I believe that our æsthetic sense, whether in works of art or in lives, has overfocussed on the stubborn struggle toward a single goal rather than on the fluid, the protean, the improvisatory. We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist’s vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies.”
[Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life (New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989) pp 3-4]

“Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live. Women have always lived discontinuous and contingent lives, but men today are newly vulnerable, which turns women’s traditional adaptions into a resource. Historically, even women who devoted themselves to homemaking and childcare have had to put together a mosaic of activities and resolve conflicting demands on their time and attention. The physical rhythms of reproduction and maturation create sharper discontinuities in women’s lives then in men’s, the shifts of puberty and menopause, of pregnancy, birth, and lactation, the mirroring adaptations to the unfolding lives of children, their departures and returns, the ebb and flow of dependency, the birth of grandchildren, the probability of widowhood. As a result, the ability to shift from one preoccupation to another, to divide one’s attention, to improvise in new circumstances, has always been important to women.”
[Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life (New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989) p 13]
Mary Catherine Bateson is the daughter of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.
 
more Karl Weick on Bricolage

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