Origins of Creative Genius

My modest proposal took me largely by surprise. I was trying to write about ‘general creativity,’ but didn’t like any of the results. My failed efforts eventually degenerated into introspective, ironic, circular little jokes; the essay turned into a story about itself – an ‘auto-bibliography’ as I sometimes call it – that had nowhere to go.

Then I accidentally stumbled upon Seth Godin’s post, which became both encouragement and subject matter for the self-deprecating attitude I worked myself into. And a few hours later, I had produced something totally unexpected.

Such accidents are not unusual; they seem to be the source of creativity. A lot of research has focussed on this ‘chance’ element of creative success in art and science. UC Davis psychologist Dean Keith Simonton specializes in this aspect of creativity, most notably in his 1999 book, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives On Creativity. Building on the work of psychologist Donald Campbell, Simonton compares the creative process to the chance variations and natural selection of Darwinian evolution.

Simonton’s most radical claim is that the quality of creative output is directly correlated with quantity: the creators with the most successes are simply those with the highest productivity, or who make the most attempts (so they often produce far more failures as well).

Another characteristic of creative individuals is a peculiar kind of egotism. As Simonton says, characteristics like "ego-strength" and self-discipline "enable creators to exploit the strange ideas that fill their heads without allowing those ideas to take over the organization of their personality." Creative geniuses aren’t afraid of risky and untested ideas, nor are they afraid of the social embarrassment and isolation that might follow their (virtually inevitable) failure.

A perfect example of this is Frank Gehry, the great architect who designed the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, and the Experience Music Project in Seattle. I just watched the 2006 documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, made by his friend and Academy Award winning director, Sidney Pollack. (I highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in creativity.) One clip has the Guggenheim Foundation's Director, Thomas Krens, talking about Gehry’s ego, or rather, "the biggest ego in the business": "Instead of reacting negatively to criticism, he’ll basically say the reverse of what you might expect someone with a big ego to say – ‘Let’s just rip it apart and start again’ – because he knows that when he does it for the second time, he does it from a higher plane of knowledge, it’s a second opportunity to do that. Now that’s real ego."

It is perhaps because of that confidence that creative people are willing to make risky long-term investments in their original projects and ideas. In their 1995 book, Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity, psychologists Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart described creative people as "investors" who know how to "buy low and sell high": "Creators generate ideas that are like undervalued stocks (stocks with a low price-to-earnings ratio), and both the stocks and the ideas are generally rejected by the public."

To put it very succinctly, we can describe creative people as being "open to experience," and having "a disposition that includes a diversity of interests and hobbies, a preference for complexity and novelty, and a tolerance of ambiguity."

What distinguishes Simonton’s work is that he focusses on the importance of chance variations that occur in creative thought processes – those unforseen moments of ‘inspiration’ – which emerge from changing, multiform associations of ideas. One of the book’s strengths is the number of examples of this tendency Simonton provides, mainly in the form of autobiographical reports accounts by scientists like Einstein, Poincare, Helmholtz, and Darwin himself.

Another example of this characteristic is given in the one of the best moments in Sketches of Frank Gehry. Pollack was fortunate to have access to Gehry’s psychoanalyst (!), who suggested that "there's something in there, in that right brain, that allows him to take those free associations, and then make them into practical realities."

Of course, it isn't enough just to generate wild and random ideas. Creative geniuses spend years (usually about ten) gaining enough "domain-relevant knowledge and skills," to be able to recognize and capitalize on their novel ideas. To make this point in another article, Simonton quoted Louis Pasteur, who said, "chance favours the prepared mind." Another expert on creativity, Howard Gruber, has referred to this as generating a "network of enterprise."

I think it’s important (in case you’re inclined to make further reflection of this notion) not to overestimate the novelty of these ideas about "associations"; they’re among the oldest in psychology – arguably older than the field itself. (In case you see this as obvious, and you’re wondering who could be so stupid... me. And I’m a bit miffed that this stuff never came up in the three university psych courses I took.) Philosophers promoted "associationist" doctrines of mind before psychology was even a profession, and William James devoted an entire fifty-five page chapter to association in his monumental Principles of Psychology, published in 1890.

James included a brief history of the doctrine, tracing it from Thomas Hobbes through David Hume, up to James’s friend and sometime intellectual sparring partner, Shadworth Hodgson, who was the first to outline a non-atomistic theory of association (or "redintigration") in 1865 – which I’m tempted to think of as a prototype for "quantum" theories of mind.

And the Darwinian approach to association is nothing new either; the notion of natural selection was almost immediately taken up by philosophers like Herbert Spencer (who, incidentally, also coined the term "survival of the fittest") to enlighten or explain cognitive processes. James did the same; in fact he pointed out that Spencer's theory wasn't Darwinian enough. In Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, Chicago historian Robert J. Richards summarizes James’s correction of Spencer, telling us James believed that "the novel ideas produced by men of genius – and ourselves on occasion – were not due to direct adaptations," but rather "sprang up in the mind as spontaneous mental variations..."

Simonton also cites Sarnoff Mednick’s "remote association theory." Simonton says that creative geniuses use "flat associative hierarchies," which he has explained elsewhere as meaning "that for any given stimulus, the creative person has many associations available, all with roughly the equal possibilities of retrieval." This is opposed to the "steep associative hierarchies" of less creative people, in which ideas are more likely to associate with a smaller selection of similar and familiar ideas.

We can find something much like this concept in Hodgson’s work as well. Although from Hodgson we get perhaps a better account of uncreative thought processes: "people who have few or weak interests are decided predominantly in their redintigrations [or associations] by habit; those who have many or powerful interests have redintigrations of more variety and more apparent originality. Interest is the source of what is called character... interests, if at once few and powerful, have a tendency to coincide with habit, for then they both run in the same groove; it becomes a habit to feel certain interests; and the same series of redintigrations revolves day after day, unless the objects of presentation are usually new and various, as for instance in travelling."

Of course, Hodgson and James weren’t talking about "creativity" as we know it today, because the concept was still being formed in their time. Through most of history, creation has been viewed as an act of God. Our notion of the "creative person" is a product of five hundred years of humanizing and democratizing progress (which, I believe, is still in the making): inspired by great artists, writers, and designers; enabled by new technologies, from the printing press to the web; validated by scientific discoveries, notably those in the young field of psychology, not to mention Charles Darwin; facilitated by changes in politics and the emergence of global commerce; and articulated by philosophers from Descartes, Locke, Smith, Kant, and whoever has the courage to tackle these complex and ambiguous notions today.

The world I see now is one in which all of these factors – art, science, technology, commerce, and civics – have become closely integrated, almost unified in some aspects, like communications. The one that seems the most absent now is philosophy. Perhaps this is because philosophy is par excellence the domain which progresses on the backs and in the minds of creative geniuses – autonomous iconoclasts, multi-disciplinary adventurers, and unconventional risk-takers – while our age is structured to promote safe, conventional, normal, and methodical productivity, even when it’s framed and sold as "creativity."

The web, obviously, is a major cause of this; that’s the focus, or "head," where the different faces of creativity are increasingly fused together. The web is a civic domain because it has very quickly become part of the infrastructure of our everyday lives; the web is a scientific domain because it is still in a process of discovery, it’s still evolving through experimental trial and error; the web is an artistic domain because it is created and designed by people; and the web is a commercial domain because corporate organizations seem to be the most effective means of managing these diverse elements.

Despite all of the criticism thrown at large corporations for being slow and stodgy, commercial enterprise in general has an astonishing ability to adapt and grow. Every year, thousands of entrepreneurial startups – think of them as "chance variations" – come into the world, becoming either "selected" to thrive or reabsorbed back into the raw material from which new associations may emerge.

Some of the most successful companies, such as Google (itself a chance variation not too long ago), "recreate" this evolutionary process on a smaller scale within themselves, encouraging employees to suggest original ideas, which are then either selected (or more often, not) by objective tests and trials. (Stanford’s Robert Sutton is one of the best researchers and writers on this kind of organizational creativity. See his recent blog post on 'rewarding failure,' which cites Simonton’s Origins of Genius.)

And with professional schools in business, design, and engineering adapting to this new general-creative attitude, even in just the past decade, our appreciation for how to motivate, manage, and reward creative work has improved greatly. Business people are learning to "think like designers" and more creative-minded people are pursuing careers that were formerly in the traditional domain of business.

But is all of this draining the creativeness out of "creativity"? What are the implications for genuinely unconventional and autonomous creators? How might deeply creative people distinguish themselves, when so many others claim and aspire to be creative, aping the rhetoric and manner of creativity as a way to conform with the current attitude of business, making such notions quite conventional and unoriginal?

Art, science, commerce, and civics have become so regulated and methodical that there is little space for genuine creativity to stretch out and thrive in original ways. The one domain that remains open is, oddly, philosophy: the one that's also the most "absent" (remember what Sternberg said about creative people "buying low and selling high"). I’m not talking about professional philosophy, but philosophy in the sense of living through an open-ended love of learning. I usually call this "creative generalism," "general creativity," "radical creativity," "radical generalism," or whatever I feel like at the time. The name doesn't really matter, as long as I don't fall in love with it and lose sight of the important thing, which is to keep learning, creating, developing, growing... It may not bring any immediate material or social rewards, but who’s asking for them?

Combined progress in other domains has generated a breathtaking supply of material for organizing original "networks of enterprise," through which to generate radically new associations and insights. Meanwhile, the emerging technologies – like the web – that are largely responsible for proliferating the supply of information (and increasing its overall complexity), also provide the tools for reorganizing it more creatively and effectively.

I think that very soon someone will figure out how to put it all together, creating a whole new way of looking at life, to understand it intuitively, and to develop a "new common sense." All this will require is a love of adventure, and a willingness to work hard and invest over the long term. I can’t prove it yet; it’s just a feeling I have...

The Practice of Theory: Prefacing the Draft Enterprise Model

[This post is a preface to the Draft Enterprise Model post.]

As with my Résumé/Manifesto, the Draft Enterprise Model is an older piece of work (from June 2007) that I’d be just as happy never to see again; but I think it at least helps to give a more comprehensive impression of my background and intentions.

This one is especially useful because I managed to include more references and sources than I normally tend to. The way I like to work is to blaze ahead forming original ideas (I always learn something new when I write); then I go out looking for things other people have said that might support or contradict them.

But I usually don’t return to my old ideas: I consider them results that show me how I’m performing, what’s working well for me, what I might need to improve, etc. – the way athletes assess their performance. When I occasionally do return to old ideas, it’s usually with the same attitude that athletes review old game tapes. Reviewing past results helps reveal performance weaknesses (which might affect future work, not just a given piece); it helps me adjust my mental habits, composing rules and theories that I can master intuitively, applying them to different situations, going over them in my mind until I don’t have to think about them any more. Then the next time I find inspiration, I can blaze ahead again – generating new results – restarting the whole process.

At first glance this practice might seem too narrow-minded or disregarding – paying little attention to other people’s prior work – but that isn’t the case at all. I don’t just study my own past results, I study other people’s results just as carefully. The process oscillates between freedom and discipline, and even within the free mode it oscillates between freedom to create and freedom to discover. While I’m composing, I’m not encumbered by other people’s ideas; while I’m researching, I’m not encumbered by my own ideas. It’s all about seeing clearly what is actually in front of me.

I’ve done this for a long time now, deliberately trying to master the practice since 2002, and having used the method naively for as long as I can remember. Along the way it has introduced me to (and forced me to respect) a greater range of ideas than most people even realize exist. I don’t find any ideas that radically change my perspective or worldview: I’ve already seen life from all the angles. (I know I’m exaggerating, and I now that – like my statements the other day – this may seem like an immodest or arrogant thing to say. But I don’t think it’s bragging to call attention to an actual effort I’ve made. Other people have degrees and awards to speak for their labours; I’m compelled to be a little more vocal on my own behalf.) I became familiar with so many ideas because I spent the better part of a decade deliberately trying to prove myself wrong – every single day – and I was wholly devoted to that task, almost exclusively.

This approach isn’t pure skepticism; it is rather like what Carol Dweck describes as a "growth mindset," or what Jacques Barzun calls (from a broader social and historical perspective), "spirited pessimism." As historian Daniel Boorstin explains his own, similar attitude:

I am, then, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist. If our mission is
an endless search, how can we fail? In the short run, institutions and professions and even language keep us in the discouraging ruts. But in the long run the ruts wear away and adventuring amateurs reward us by a wonderful vagrancy into the unexpected.

That perfectly illustrates my intentions for Open Conceptual: it’s a kind of fluid enterprise that keeps streaming freely over all of the ruts, eroding, levelling, softening, redefining our conceptual landscape. Of course, it can’t just wash everything away; it remixes everything, rearranging and resolving, or as the kids say, "mashing-up" the structures and contours underlying the many diverse disciplines.

Now, it might seem that I’ve gone from ideas that were becoming clear in June to ideas that are even more ambiguous and vague; it might seem like the past two months have been counterproductive. But this is just another cycle of oscillation; this is another period of rearranging and resolving. Each time around, my reach grows broader, my appreciation grows deeper, my descriptions become more precise, my references become more suitable, and the overall organization becomes more intuitive – my creativity and discovery become more free.

But the way to cultivate freedom is not freedom itself, it is discipline. Over time, as familiarity and proficiency increase, generating capital in the form of knowledge and competence, it becomes prudent to invest that liquidity into something more solid: theory.

At some point (like the point I’ve reached within the past few months) it may become apparent that your basic attitudes and ideas aren’t going to change very much – you’ve already done enough work and research that it’s safe to settle into some kind of pattern or system. Or to put it more urgently, it’s inevitable that you will eventually settle – whether or not you do it explicitly and intentionally – so it’s a good idea to do it deliberately. This way you at least have something articulate to work with, which allows you to more effectively monitor and evaluate the results of your ideas.

More importantly, as work and ideas become more complex, there must be some way to organize and manage them – some kind of map or architecture to help you navigate it. And it’s objectiveness facilitates communication and conciliation with other people’s ideas. When two people with explicit theories find themselves disagreeing, they have more options than to merely "agree to disagree": they can move levers, test variables, observe differences, and reformulate assumptions. (I’m not saying they will be able to reconcile their ideas – or that they’ll even try – but that a degree of articulation is a precondition for conciliation.)

Beyond this, having an articulate theory gives you a real commodity to market. And if they’re organized well enough – into coherent conceptual networks, or systems – they may acquire a kind of life of their own, sustaining themselves apart from your own intentions and efforts. We might consider this to be the ‘aim’ of any theory – to go from being, say, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to "Darwinism," from Karl Marx’s economic theories to "Marxism," etc.

That’s sort of what I’m trying to do here – but I’m not trying to create an ‘ism.’ Those have tended to be too closely identified with the creator’s personality (even though creators often try to disown the ism that bears their name). I only want to put together enough of a theory so it acquires a life of its own, so that it can become other people’s theory as well, so we can work collaboratively on it, building an investment that generates financial, educational, and social capital in self-sustaining and original ways.

I’m trying to approach theorizing as a business-like enterprise. The most important thing I can say about it is that the theory isn’t an end in itself, it isn’t a totally genuine attempt to compose a "true" theory of creativity. It is a way to study the creative, strategic, organizational, and administrative processes involved in a theorizing enterprise. It’s about mastering the practice of theory.

[Go to Draft Enterprise Model]

Draft Enterprise Model

[Originally written in June 2007, unless otherwise noted. See the The Practice of Theory: Prefacing the Draft Enterprise Model.]

Introduction:

This is a germinal outline for a very open business model, for a very open and adaptive type of enterprise.

Open Conceptual was founded for the purpose of developing intellectual resources, and one such resource is the business model itself: "innovating the company’s business model… itself is a part of the company’s innovation task."[1]

To even call it a "business model" is misleading. This is more correctly an "enterprise model," because the enterprise involves scientific, artistic, commercial and civic aims equally.

The Scientific Side:

This is an experiment, an attempt to make a conceptual leap towards a new model of human enterprise, leaving behind as much conceptual baggage from the old models as possible. What is meant here by "conceptual" is any idea, image, word, metaphor, principle, etc. that ‘frames’ the way we learn, think, work, live, and create.

It is common to talk about ‘new ways’ of working and living, but we tend to do so using the old vocabularies and frames[2]; so the "leap" never gets off the ground[3]. Most attempts either are pulled apart by conflicting sets of inertia or eventually settle back into old models and methods.

The focus of Open Conceptual’s work is at the threshold where the "leap" may either fail or succeed. This requires employing the enterprise itself as an experiment — keeping it dynamic and continually reworking it in order to observe the results.

But the fact that Open Conceptual is an experiment doesn’t mean that it must conform to established scientific methods. In fact, it is precisely those methods — and their underlying attitude and assumptions — that are under investigation.[4]

This is not a perfectly controlled, closed experiment; it is open – both outwardly and inwardly. In the first place this means opening out into new perspectives, generating insight. Secondly it means being open to a fairly high degree of chaos – playing – and hoping to observe something previously unimaginable.

More simply, this means attempting to generate hypotheses, not prove them — that’s what traditional institutions are for. (And Open Conceptual is not an attempt to undermine those institutions; it is an attempt to build beyond them.)

Technology and culture are changing rapidly; conventional, ’safe’ methods of inquiry may not be able to keep pace. Something new may be needed.

Open Conceptual may not be that "something new" which could possibly deal with the full scope of emergent complexity; but it can at least contribute, helping to generate insight, cultivating the necessary conditions for broader and deeper appreciation — towards a general theory of creativity.

The Commercial Side:

A new ‘theory of creativity’ seems to be both necessary and attainable in light of new realities. Necessary because of increasing complexity: we need an articulated general concept of motivation, learning, progress, and growth. Attainable because of the tools and resources that are now available — like the web.

Open Conceptual’s core resource is not so much the theory itself — which may never be complete, given the nature of such ideas — but the activity involved in developing it. This works to generate ‘incidental resources’: knowledge and competencies. These can hardly be anticipated or planned for; the most useful ones are often the least expected: they occur as insights.

Open Conceptual’s evolving business model is based on utilizing these incidental resources – the growing body of insights – to generate capital in order to finance ongoing development – a process which in turn produces more more effective knowledge and competencies.[5]

(The long-term goal represents the scientific and civic elements of the Open Conceptual attitude; the short-term practices represent the commercial and artistic elements.)

‘

Incidental resources’ might take the form of book and business proposals, consulting services (creative-conceptual development, ideation, training, communications, etc.), publishing, public speaking, media production, conference promotion, art shows, or some medium that doesn’t even exist yet. (Actually, "preparing for emerging forms of media," expresses Open Conceptual’s mission quite well.)

The Artistic Side:

When we think of different modes of creativity we think of painting, literature, music, poetry, architecture, etc. But creativity enters into every aspect of human life — especially during stages of learning and development.[6]

Psychologists who examine creative individuals often include scientists, civic leaders, business people and politicians in their work[7]. Recognizing opportunities and solving problems in any field involves the same general processes as more ‘artistic’ modes of creativity.

Furthermore, the changing nature of work through the past century has generated entirely new creative specializations. The type of person who might have became an ‘artist’ in 1850 might have instead became an ‘art director’ in 1950 — think of Andy Warhol, who first established himself illustrating shoe ads.

The design-attitude is now spreading from products and advertisements to the development of whole companies — new industries even. This is most clearly demonstrated by recent innovations in professional education, especially at business schools. (See, for example, U of T’s Rotman School of Business; also see Stanford’s d-school.) And let’s not neglect to note that such programs are also designed.

Open Conceptual is about penetrating more broadly and deeply in this vein – using depth of understanding to generate greater breadth of relevance, and vice versa — to design the philosophical frameworks of any mode of creativity and enterprise.

Civic:

Above all, Open Conceptual is based on the notion that a better world begins with education — in the most general sense of the word. Not just in formal or institutional settings, but in the sense that each individual has a personal responsibility for their own competencies and knowledge.

Cultivating knowledge and competencies — broadening and deepening our understanding of the world and our effectiveness in it — is intrinsically rewarding. These are ‘generative goods’ that we can seek as individuals which actually enable others to do the same, promoting greater opportunities in a "good society."[8]

Open Conceptual intends to become an advocate for education outside of its traditional settings, to encourage people to responsibly cultivate knowledge and competencies, and to facilitate some of the ‘conversations’ which thus emerge.[9]

By doing so, intrinsic or subjective creativity may develop into objective accomplishments — scientific discoveries, works of art, commercial enterprises, civic institutions. These objects then form the structure through which even greater creative opportunities may be found and pursued.[10]

Creativity is meaningless unless it results in something objective, but results are meaningless unless they facilitate subjective well being — happiness — by making us more effective and appreciative in life.

The Creative Discipline:

Mastering ‘creativity’ involves gaining insight into a wealth of disciplines and domains. For example, insights gained in ‘general creativity’ promote a realignment of understanding in other disciplines — like psychology and philosophy of science. This is more about realignment — upgrading and downgrading the importance of specific concepts in relation to each other – rather than refutations or (dis)proofs.

‘Creativity’ doesn’t really exist as a distinct discipline or domain. There isn’t really a core theoretical foundation to refute or disprove; there are merely some ideas that have been suggested from other fields.

[Work in progress; much more to come soon…]

Notes:

[1] Henry Chesbrough, Open Business Models, 2006.

[2] Much philosophical energy of the past century has been devoted to the ‘philosophy of language,’ which involves analysis of how language relates to, or corresponds with, the world, things, ideas, ‘truth,’ etc. In the latter half of the century ‘cognitive science’ has emerged to study the same types of problems from a more empirical, neurological, computational approach. I only mention these fields in order to point out that I know enough about them to know what I don’t know; or rather, I know enough to know that I don’t care to know more – for now. Anyways, I associate "vocabularies" with Richard Rorty and "frames" with George Lakoff. If you want a good introduction to the broader field of ideas, start with Steven Pinker.

[3] [This note added 12 Sept 07] Since writing this I’ve discovered that another "creative generalist," Steve Hardy, who blogs at http://www.creativegeneralist.com,/ frequently mentions this notion of a creative "leap" in the same sense.

[4] Consider Karl Popper's influential theory that science proceeds by positing falsifiable hypotheses rather than ‘proving’ them. See Thomas Kuhn's distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science. Also see Paul Feyerabend's more radical position of ‘anarchic science’; as well as Micheal Polanyi's concepts of ‘personal knowledge,’ ‘tacit knowing,’ and ‘heuristic passion,’ and their effects on science.

[5] Using what Chris Argyris calls "double-loop learning," which means changing or developing our "boundary conditions" — such as goals – whereas "single-loop learning" would be to simply change the way we maintain stability or performance within those boundary conditions.

[6] Now more than ever. See Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind (2005).

[7] Specifically Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1997), and Howard Gardner’s Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinski, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi (1993).

[8] The importance of ‘competence’ and effectiveness (or "effectance") covered in Robert White’s 1959 paper, "Motivation Reconsidered: The Concept of Competence", and competence has become a focal point of psychology since then. "Intrinsic motivation" is commonly associated with psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. See Deci’s 1996 popularization (with Richard Flaste), Why We Do What We Do. The concept of ’generativity’ found its way onto this page via psychologist Dan McAdams’s Stories We Live By (1993). And the "good society" is a reference to sociologist Robert Bellah et al’s Good Society (1991), which provided much of the direction the theme of this work. For a different perspective on the same theme see Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000).

[9] For an explanation of the full sense of the term ’conversation’ as used here, see Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). And to observe the value of this conversation in action, read the many comments made by some of the world’s most eminent philosophers, about Rorty’s recent passing.

[10] For a more comprehensive idea of the direction I’m going here, consider Anthony Giddens's concept of "structuration."

[Originally written in June 2007, unless otherwise noted. See the The Practice of Theory: Prefacing the Draft Enterprise Model.]

Generalism 1: "generalist or specialist"

A recent discussion on David Armano’s blog, Logic + Emotion, has motivated me to clarify what I mean by "generalism." The conversation was started by Dave Gray’s illustration of the "Generalist or Specialist" dichotomy, the key difference being that generalists "are best when defining the problem or goal" [I wouldn't change a word of that.] while "specialists are best at solving the problem or executing the plan."

The sum of Armano’s initial comment was that maybe the diagram should be labelled "Generalist and Specialist," because generalists "can excel at both defining and solving problems," and "specialists can also excel at defining the problem." Subsequent commenters elaborated on the same essential points, reiterating the need to alternate between both attitudes, or "voices," as Christine Martell put it.

I wanted to contribute my own comments but it seemed that everything had already been said as well as it could be – at least everything that could be said without ctrl-alt-deleting the whole discussion. So I decided to reconceive it in my own terms – terms that I’ve been carefully developing for over a year now. A few things need to be clarified.

The first question to consider is whether we’re describing personality traits or prescribing job descriptions. Eventually we’ll try to do both, but it muddles things if we don’t distinguish between intrinsic tendencies and designed intentions; we must be carefully aware of which aspect we’re talking (or even just thinking) about.

The distinction is important, because if we’re talking about professions, disciplines or job descriptions – things we have the ability to design and change – then maybe we shouldn’t be abstractly discussing "generalists or specialists" at all. We’re supposed to change perspectives; only the most rigidly mechanized forms of labour don’t involve some alternation between specific details and a more general patterns and processes. And professions have become so dynamic that any attempt to classify or conceive them statically will crumble in our hands: nothing can be said about them without adding conditions like "sometimes..." and "it depends...."

Conversely, this growing professional dynamism makes it even more necessary to discuss the inherent differences between ‘generalist-types’ and ‘specialist-types,’ so we can more effectively design projects and jobs to suit (and capitalize on) diverse personal strengths.

I normally try to avoid talking about ‘personality types’; I believe it tends to become too reductive – for example, giving too much importance to the "introvert-extrovert" dichotomy, forgetting that it is an artificial (and hypothetical, or provisional) concept – but I suspect that maybe the more ‘personality dimensions’ we have to work with, the less danger there is of reductivism, or attributing too much importance (or concreteness) to any one.

It seems to me that there certainly are some people who are ‘born generalists’ and others who are ‘born specialists’ – that some people are inherently better at defining problems and others are better (or at least more comfortable) executing plans. [And I feel quite strongly about this. I spent most of my life trying to learn how to follow directions and plans; a few years ago I finally realized that I was wasting my time: I’m much better at finding directions and designing plans – thriving in ambiguity and complexity – and those are the skills I decided to focus on and nurture.]

But are "generalist" and "specialist" the best names to use for these two types? If we’re looking at personality differences, much of the existing literature uses the term "creative," and includes generalist tendencies as being a part of creativeness. I don’t know of any studies of creativity that wouldn’t include Gray’s definition of the generalist approach as one of the core attitudes (or traits or styles or whatever you want to call it) of creativity. I’m thinking of work by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Howard Gardner, and Dean Keith Simonton. Dan Pink’s 2006 book, A Whole New Mind is a good introduction to the same general notions. For a more business-minded approach to creativity, look at Roger Martin’s recent articles on topics like "business design," and "integrative thinking."

In my own work I tend to juxtapose the "creative" mindset with the "productive" mindset. I take creativity to mean introducing something really new to the world – not just new versions but completely new classes, types, and species of things. Creativity involves working through ambiguity and complexity to define new roles, rules, boundaries, frameworks, etc.; whereas productivity means working within existing rules and boundaries – producing new copies and versions of things that already exist – perhaps with slight refinements or variations.

Another related distinction I should mention is the one Chris Argyris has often made between "single-loop" and "double-loop learning." Single-loop learning aims to achieve specific results, or maintain certain conditions – Argyris uses the metaphor of a thermostat that is set to a specific temperature. Double-loop learning aims to develop more effective or efficient results to aim for – like changing the temperature that the thermostat is set to maintain.

We might say that creative people are double-loop learners: they are open to new results and conditions – not just aiming to become more effective within a given framework, but designing more effective frameworks and aims. [In my August 19th essay, I began to illustrate this notion of ‘investing’ in concepts – developing better vehicles for effectiveness and growth – making our ideas work for us, rather than merely working for them.]

To be able to change these "boundary conditions" effectively, we need to see from a broad enough perspective: we need to actually recognize the existing boundaries and identify what’s beyond them: we need to see over disciplinary (cubicle?) walls.

Sometimes specialists are unable to do so: some only appreciate their task from the inside; they tacitly take boundaries and roles for granted, and perhaps can’t even explicitly define them. They know when something "isn’t their business" because it doesn’t fit into any of their existing patterns or frames, so they let somebody else take care of it. This kind of focussed, ‘inside’ appreciation is required for effective execution; otherwise everybody would be too distracted by emerging novelties to finish projects they’ve already started [Some exceptionally creative people – eg. Leonardo and Goethe – have been notoriously bad at concentrating on and completing projects.] and everybody would continually meddle and interfere in other people’s tasks, which they’re not equipped to deal with.

But what happens when new challenges emerge that nobody is equipped to deal with? What about new opportunities that don’t fit into anybody’s existing patterns or frames? Such challenges and opportunities are daily realities in some industries – especially disciplines that involve both human and technological factors.

I needn’t remind anyone that technology is changing rapidly. But what many people perhaps don’t appreciate is that technological changes are relatively small and easy to recognize compared to the powerful but subtle changes in the ways people think, work, and live with technology – the way people appropriate novelties and find original and unexpected ways to use them, which in turn generate newer technologies, which in turn...

People must be increasingly aware of the boundaries of their work – being especially careful not to make them too static. Boundaries should be plastic, networks and teams should be fluid, integrated, coherent, and adaptive to new challenges and opportunities. It is no longer acceptable to ignore problems that don’t fit into your job description: chances are that it doesn’t fit into anyone else’s either.

So everybody may have to think or work like a generalist at some point – as several people noted in the Logic + Emotion discussion.

But while being generally open to other roles and new information, it is still necessary to specialize, or cultivate deep professional competencies and expertise. This is what the people at IDEO (among others I’m sure) have been talking about for years, illustrated by their concept of "T-shaped" individuals – people with broad general knowledge, covering many fields, and deep competence in one (or maybe more) specialized discipline. (See Tom Kelley’s Art of Innovation and Ten Faces of Innovation; there are also numerous articles by/about other IDEOers on this concept. Coincidentally, Armano has added his own refinements to the ‘T-shaped’ concept.)

This dynamism is the reason for my earlier claim that perhaps we shouldn’t abstractly discuss "generalist or specialist" job descriptions at all. To ask whether someone is a generalist or a specialist presupposes some kind of permanent arrangement, within which jobs fit as static fixtures – like old tools hung on the wall of grandpa’s garage. But in terms of the moving constellation of marketing, communications, education, and management oriented fields, it just doesn’t seem reasonable to begin with such overtly static assumptions.

However, is it possible to become a purely general generalist? We know there are 'HR generalists,' 'general practitioners' in medicine, and 'general contractors'; but as far as any outsider is concerned, they specialize in HR, medicine, and construction respectively. What might ‘pure generalists’ do – and what effect could they possibly have?

[Originally posted at thecreativegeneralist.blogspot.com, August 26, 2007]