One way for a change agent to cultivate creativity, or thinking outside the box, is to simply grow one’s box. This is something you may already be doing all the time, perhaps without being aware, if you have an interest in the world you are living in, but especially if you like your job and are keen on keeping it and getting better at it over time.
If you are working from a broader perspective you are going to be thinking from a larger frame, with more tools to draw from. You might start with just one application, something with a limited purpose. But that application will need data from other sources, and will need to provide information to some other system or systems. You end up with a bit of a cobweb of flows in and out, the conventional flow chart. Perhaps the application has a user interface, with various views and ways for people to enter or modify data. You’ve already moved outside of the conventional mapping of a system implementation, since people have interactions outside the processing of information directly between themselves and the machine; they may be getting information from other sources, or they communicate via email, phone, among themselves in their office space. They may be focused primarily on the function at hand, or using it while telling stories about their weekend, goofing around, or while they shop on Amazon. The application may be used by people in various offices globally, in different office spaces, each having their own conversations about the weekend or a dinner party where they met so-and-so or played golf with the CEO, or the author of some oblique book about Basque culinary arts. The application may be part of an online service that reaches hundreds, or even millions of people outside the company. It may be linked to supply chains of goods, distribution services. The periphery continues to grow. It’s the reverse of the pealing of an onion, as what is called the Whole System surges out into the fuzzy extents of the absurd.
You may begin to think that the application, or system of systems, as a bit of a prosthetic tool that extends people’s reach, their power, allows us to do things we could not easily do with pen and paper, stone tools, wax carvings, papyrus. It immediately replicates the information you put into it many times, in many flavors, for variety of purposes, all over the web or network you are working in, not unlike DNA, or the processing of digestion, the chemical and nervous systems of the body. Yes, every system we devise is in a way a model of ourselves, or parts of ourselves, distributed over silicon chips, wires and fiber optics, encoded in a simple binary, similar to our yes and no, pleasure and pain, the basic structure of all our gut and rational decision-making.
Granted, it’s not always going to be useful, or even entertaining, to consider all the possible connections or ramifications of the implementation project you are working on. It is indeed impossible. But there are times some simple steps outward may save your life (or at least a bit your time).
Some years ago I was dealing with a difficult design problem, and I just happen to be reading Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature, a book about Darwinian Evolution, and its relation to the mind, i.e. brain processes, but also looking at the whole history of natural processes as a sort of mind process. Bateson was trained as a biologist, but also worked in the field of anthropology, among other things, like cybernetic war craft, psychology, the language of dolphins, you name it. The brain and its mind processes, he argued, worked in a way that was parallel to the way evolution proceeded (and is still proceeding), as an interaction of two main random processes: nature randomly generated changes (mutations) over time, and the environment those changes were born into randomly selected whether those changes work, whereas the brain randomly produces thoughts, and the world randomly selects which thoughts are a valid use value, or not. For instance, the thought that one cannot simply walk across the air when one gets to the edge of a cliff, was a successful thought early on and survived to this day. Over millions of years, both processes – mind and nature – working in parallel, have produced all the wiring and the patterns that make up our world.
Now, you can accept that model, or not, as a truth about how we and our world came into being. Either way, it does give us is a set of algorithms that can be adapted to our own needs by shrink-wrapping and modifying some of the variables. The two random processes can become two not-so random processes, that make the types of selections you require and design into a kind of feedback loop, possibly for creating validations, or reconciliation, whatever it is you need to do. At the time, Bateson’s book was challenging and engaging enough to consume a great deal of my thinking, turn my thoughts about everything on their head, and in the end helped me get unstuck and produce a fairly elegant application design, as well as a way to move forward in the future.
But you needn’t take such a huge shift in the size of the frame in order to grow your box, you need only look outward from the edge of the box you’re currently working from. I find I need to remind myself that the flows of an implementation project are not merely those I see on the flow chart, but also all of the human interactions that occur around them. They form something like an emergent web around the system flows, a hyper or meta system, that when tweaked at one point, will send vibrations through the entire system. Think of a guitar. You pluck one string and the entire wooden box begins to resonate, giving off sound into the room, perhaps into other rooms, out through the windows, where the tone may blend and clash or harmonize with other sounds – birds chirping, the noise of traffic.
Your job at times is to find those guitar strings and pluck them. It may be an easy-to-alleviate inefficiency somewhere, or the resourcefulness of a particular person who is under-utilized, and who, once unleashed, will add amazing value to the organization you are serving.