There is a thing called creativity we generally associate with artistic work, as well as with the generation of solutions and surplus innovations. That said, there is no really good way to define creativity with any kind of specific demarcation from things that are not “creative.” We are told the stories where flashes of brilliance, in which breakthroughs emerge seemingly out of nothing, as in Kerkule’s dream, in which he supposedly discovered the molecular structure of the benzene ring in an image of a snake swallowing its own tail. Or there are the cliches of poetical flight, where a painter or poet is transfixed by their work, and in some state of transport, receive transmissions from divine sources.
Those are fairy tales, for the most part, and if you talk to anyone who is consistently and productively creative, you’ll hear a different story. New ideas rarely come in a single flash, but accrete incrementally, through various extensions of other ideas, and lesser radical leaps. Very often there are blends of preexisting ideas, as in the iPhone, which combined the idea of the personal computer and the cellular phone.
There are people who tend to be more successful than others in generating new and original ideas and products, and do so repeatedly. They tend to be strange and curious folks. Some of them even read poetry, for goodness sakes! And some business leaders even promote things like poetry reading writing as a form of business training.
So it may very well be that excessive creative output tends to arise in people who develop particular habits or interests, and have ways of thinking that are untypical among their less creative peers. It has been the point of my past couple of posts to ascertain various thinking strategies from the work of Henri Bergson and Rudolf Steiner, who were not only exemplary creative thinkers, themselves, but influenced other overtly creative practitioners in multiple fields of endeavor. While the mystery of how this all works may remain unsolved, there are experiments we can attempt in order to increase our own creative productivity, and the next few posts will be about how we may apply Bergson’s and Steiner’s conceptual schema into practical exercises.
How does one actually make use of something like Duration, or Monism, in one’s everyday world, apart from occasional happy accidents? One way is to begin, as I said, with experiments, and that is exactly what I am suggesting we try doing over the next several weeks.
We will begin with Steiner’s concept of Moral Imagination. In my previous post I explained that ordinarily concepts arise from percepts, which are perceptual events received from external sources, such as a sound heard or an image seen, or those created inwardly when remembering or envisioning. Concepts arise when sensory information is reprocessed into generalizations. For instance, when a stone in a field emerges from the background, becomes a thing unto itself in our minds apart from the field, and then becomes categorically one with many stones. Moral Imagination is the ability to take concepts – for Steiner, those concepts that are categorically complex more principles – and reverse the process to imagine new percepts, and therefore map the concepts back into actionable behaviors in the world.
Leaving aside the gravitas of moral principles we can begin to generate percepts from concepts, and make it a regular practice, in order to help engender something like a talent for outside-the-box, or creative, thinking. Accomplishing this is really more straightforward and less mysterious than one might think.
Without going into a lengthy explanation of what NLP or Neuro-linguistic Programming is – in short, a practical approach to studying and working with subjective experience – I am going to suggest we use the NLP Outcome Frame, or Well Formed Outcome Conditions, as a place to begin experimenting. I have chosen the Outcome Frame because it is a useful guideline when trying to map such an abstract concept such as Moral Imagination. I promise you, these tools can be very useful with the right attitude. In brief the conditions for well-formed outcomes are:
- The outcome must be stated in positive terms
- It must be defined in sensory terms
- It must be something that is under one’s own control
- It must be ecological
- It must be properly contextualized
Positive Terms
One can state an objective in the negative without clearly defining where one wants to go. One can say, “I’ve got to get out of New York,” and end up anywhere else in the world, possibly somewhere less accommodating, if one doesn’t choose a specific destination. What is meant by stating things in the positive is just that, choosing the actual destination, so one has a specific direction to move in.
Sensory Terms
If we simply state some abstraction such as “I want to go to Miami” we begin to have a specific target, but we haven’t defined how we accomplish that. What is meant here is imagining all of the sensory details involved in going to Miami, that can be used as as verification. For instance, I may require a taxi to the airport, so I will imagine myself calling a cab service, the ride to the airport, the smell of the jet fuel, the sounds of the engines as you approach. These are the details you typically utilize unconsciously when taking feedback from your sensory experience to assure that you are on your way. To consciously break these down into their component features is a great way to gain awareness and control of the process and generate different, nuanced results, as well as to radically change the outcome approach altogether.
Under One’s Control
Perhaps you don’t have the financial resources to buy the plane tickets and pay the cab fare to get to Miami. Your outcome may then perhaps change to involve the various ways you can begin saving money, by imagining yourself putting more money in your savings account, telling yourself no, when you want to buy some unnecessary luxury item. Or perhaps your objective is based on someone else’s decision, as in getting a new job, a promotion, or having one’s blog post read by a larger audience. These are things one cannot control. Instead you begin to imagine setting outcomes that could make those things more likely. I may not be able to make a particular person choose me over another candidate, but I can find out in more detail what sort of values that employer or others like her have regarding candidates, and begin working towards satisfying those values. For instance, if an employer tends to hire people with particular certifications, your outcome becomes working toward those certifications. In other words, the outcome is something you can do.
Ecological
Simply said, the Ecology Test is a check that the outcome is appropriate. This is perhaps where we can return to the moral part of Steiner’s dictum. Not only do we want our outcome to be a good fit for ourselves, but also for those around us, otherwise it would cause conflict, and may fail or ruin one’s credibility and integrity. Miami may not be the best place for me to vacation, or a particular job may not be a good fit for me. It would also not be a good idea to cheat in some way, in either case, since that would strain relationships with those around me, as well as possibly damage my own principles, and the overall value, and again the credibility, of the thing I am trying to achieve.
Properly Contextualized
Lastly, context is very important. Behaviors can be useful in one context and not useful in others. It may be useful for me to travel to Miami, or wherever I decide to go on vacation, in order to enjoy myself, get the rest I need, and revive, but I need to set proper contextual markers around it. I can go on vacation for the time I have scheduled with my employers, but it may not be a good thing for me to stay on vacation indefinitely, unless it is also desirable to leave my job and home behind. In the same way, it may be useful for me to work on certifications on my free time, but not when I have deliveries at my current job, which may need to take priority.
In Conclusion
The NLP Well-formed Outcome Conditions can be a useful guideline for practicing the generation of focused and detailed plans based on high-level ideas. The above examples were meant to demonstrate its use in the simplest terms, although it is up to the user how complex and how detailed the process is. The key is to begin with the overall concept and build the sensory imaginings, and actions one can take to produce the intended results. For software development, this may involve visualizing the actions that may take place on the screen as you move your cursor and click on particular images. In the case of organization change, one might imagine the new types of interactions that might occur among staff members, as well as the content of their conversations.
These are only tools for thinking, ways of guiding what steps to include in an overall process, but the thinking has to be done by us. By adapting the well-formed conditions into our own thinking and planning, we can begin to plan and generate ideas with greater clarity and leverage. The only way to find out how well this will work for you is to try.