Mary Panttaja

I started reading “Nonzero” by Robert Wright last night. I had picked it up as interesting in my research at one point—but last evening it was finally begun.

Right off I was struck that his analysis is very meaningful to my theories of creative engagement and innovation. (Of course, this is always a potential trap!) His basic thesis is that life with all its creative evolution is a non-zero-sum game. A zero-sum-game is one in which everything of value goes to one player or the other—there is a winner or loser and the stuff of value is split between them. What one gets the other does not.

But Wright contends that life in the big picture is not a zero-sum game but non-zero-sum game. That is, in its ability to create, evolve, and innovate, life creates situations where every participant can win, where each “game” can improve the life situation of all the players. Not that it always works this way—there is not a guaranteed outcome—but if it did not work this way in general, how do we find ourselves in a world with such vast creative results, high complexity and diversity, and successful innovation?

Then this morning I used a visual search engine recommended by Michael Arrington in Techcrunch (Quintura Visual Search Engine Relaunches) to seach the term “creativity” for work related to “Catching the Updraft!.” I was immediately stuck by the usefulness of the Quintura approach, using a tag cloud to present and help you navigate the data. I have a strong bent towards visual representations. It was immediately intriguing and productive.

In the tag cloud, I found an interesting site from David Weeks, a creativity expert in the UK, Creativity and Innovation in Business. He has a cartoon series called “D and his thinking heads”. It in he discusses the difference between the “logical” brain and the “creative” brain.

I immediate saw a connection that may help me evolve my explanations about what is working when “creativity” is flourishing and when it doesn’t. Perhaps the “logical” brain is always (or often) playing a zero-sum game, where the “creative” brain is based, like the evolutionary process itself, in a non-zero-sum game. Both potentially useful for their own purposes—-but exactly that—not general purpose or all-purpose brains.

In our methodology we use something we call modes—which are different styles of operation or engagement with the process—embodying different relationships to the creative process. With this new metaphor I can see that some of them are more intentionally non-zero-sum based, working to make non-zero-sum assumptions about the world.

So, as usual, things are flowing that make more things flow—definitely a non-zero-sum morning.

Catching the Updraft—what is this about?

(Note that I’m trying to catch up each of the threads of my weft as I get started.)

One of the major threads that has been compelling me in the last few years, is the desire to come to some understanding of how and why the world? How and why humans? How and why companies? Through a great deal of study, research, meditation, and collective thinking, a group of us has evolve an understanding that satisfies us.

One of our realizations is that for people who are driven to ask such questions, a general answer won’t do. Such people have to find their own answer, even if it evolves from the study of others. (Which, for most us, it must.) In any case, it becomes necessary to delve into all the dark corners until one finds an understanding that works for your sensibilities. I and a few cohorts have spent some time driving that dark terrain and have a model that we use to explain, illuminate, and practice how to participate most effectively in the world.

What’s a model? It’s a way of thinking about things which we acknowledge is not the thing itself, but allows us to work with and predict the thing. For example, we (most of us anyway) don’t know what gravity is, but we have practical and mathematical models of how it works that we can use to predict how things will go. So it is with our model, which we call “The Arising World.”

Today I will not go into the details of the model, though you can get a sense of it on my older site which is called E-4. It describes a practical model of creativity and innovation that can be leveraged in all our activities. I will be rewriting, in this or another blog, the story of this practical philosophy of action and creativity. I am calling it “Catching the Updraft”, and it will be arriving at a website and blog shortly—or perhaps at a theatre near you!

The key, as always, is the entrance. What is the first thing people want to hear? What are the most important points? As in marketing, where you need to lead with the customer’s interests and not the product designer’s proud creations, it is critical to identify the real value propositions.

I think the real value for most people is guidance on how to act, what to do. But without a deeper understanding of where the guidance comes from, what it means, it becomes hollow and simplistic. So a balance is required: this is what is true and this is what you do about it.

The first principles are:
1) Everyone is the potential for something unique and important to arise into the world. Actually, this is true for everything. The world is the sum of all its distinct parts living their unique lives. (Later we can get into the fact that they “are” the potential, they don’t “have” the potential.)
2) If we can align ourselves with our own potential, we can have the most extraordinary and meaningful life that we can imagine. We can fulfill the purpose of our potential in the world. And if we are aligned, we will find it gloriously satisfying.
3) There are ways to find and align ourselves with our potential—the practical part.

So this is true for everything: people, families, organizations, corporations, communities. We need to answer the key question of “who am I” with a statement, not of static identity, but of a dynamic potential waiting in the wings to be realized. Mozart was his music coming into the world—he was the vehicle through which it became reality. That brilliant teacher that inspired you so, was there just to be that inspiration. Everyone has a potential to be realized.

So, in the model, your potential is arising into being along with the rest of the world—the arising world model. And, as we tell the story, it creates an updraft. You can catch the updraft and go along for the ride, freely participating in the creation, or you can miss/resist/impede the updraft and get bumped along. “Catching the updraft” is the practice of getting into the middle of your potential and riding it for all it’s worth.

And this can work for an individual’s life, an artist’s work, a company’s evolution, a project’s life cycle. All the same arising into being—just more complex alignment challenges, more challenging and intricate potentials coming into being, more difficulties identifying what the potential really is. But we are evolving a documented process that we can use to embed this thinking into our everyday actions—with diagrams and everything. So it’s a practical approach.

The beginnings of the Catching the Updraft site and blog are in the works and should be available next week some time. (I mistyped it as “Catching the Updaft!”—isn’t that interesting?)

What is your biggest question about your life or work: “How do I figure out what I should be doing?” or “How to I make what I’m doing more effective?”