Breaking the Creative Machine
Exploring a living systems methodology for creative community infrastructures
(Week 2— This blog post documents the development journey of my Final Major Project for the MA Service Design course at LCC, UAL.)
As someone that constantly thinks about the future, I love control.
I like predictability, and exact, unchanging results. I like things outlined and measured. That way I know what and how to fix things if ever something goes wrong.
This is how I approached team management and running a design studio. Even if we didn’t structure ourselves as the typical hierarchy, I made sure there was a process for everything: Linear systems that told everyone exactly what to do from the start to the end of a client project. Structured positions that specified scope and responsibilities.
I thought this would bring comfort and security, but after 10 years of operation, I feel like it has built in a sense of stagnancy instead. Because rules are so hardcoded into our culture, I struggled to be flexible and to approach projects in a more experimental, and playful way.
You would think that this would be fine for a business. “What’s wrong with doing things as they’ve always been done?” But this thinking erodes not only businesses but organizations (and culture) over time. It is in this state of predictable stagnancy that creativity is lost.
Creativity — the generation of new forms — is a key property of all living systems. (Fritjof Capra)
For the longest time, I looked at organizations as machines.
Setting every small part in place, and letting it run as I monitored and measured outcomes, and created new solution pathways. In hindsight, this top-down approach bogged down everyone in the team, including myself.
Researching on Living Systems has completely changed my perspective. Why should we look at ourselves as machines when we are in fact alive? We are shaped by relationships, we are constantly adapting, healing, and learning (even within our own bodies), and we live interconnected to our environments, not isolated. We are meant to live outside of patterns and defined scopes.
Each person — each piece of a network — should be given the freedom to develop, shape, and enrich the structures they are a part of.
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Fritjof Capra’s The Systems View of Life (2014) advocates for a shift in thinking, away from the mechanistic and reductionist schools of thought celebrated during the Scientific Revolution. Instead Systems Thinking tells us to embrace the “whole as greater than the sum of its parts” — seeing society as an interconnected web of relationships that is chaotic, non-linear, and with its own set of hidden dependencies and relationships.
Here are some points and reflections that I took with me from the book (and its implications on organization design):
- With Living Systems, organizations are seen beyond what they produce — they are also goal-oriented and meaning-oriented simply because they are made up of living beings. Fulfillment and purpose therefore have to seriously be considered in the operation and culture of a creative business.
- Autopoiesis (coined by Chilean biologists and systems theorists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varel) distinguishes living beings from non-living matter. It is the ability to self-create or self-produce: to adapt, learn, and develop without top-down command. This ability can be applied structurally to form empowered, self-directed teams that autonomously inform and iterate new processes and policies.
- Aliveness, creativity, flexibility, and the capacity to learn reside in informal communities of practice. Skills and knowledge are exchanged and sharpened often non-verbally through joint tasks. How then can we encourage interdisciplinary exchange among peers in informal and organic ways to promote growth?
- To approach things with a systems point-of-view is to guide impulse instead of suppress it. This means leaning into open processes and holding space for people’s individual curiosities. It is through this impulse that spontaneous emergence can happen, triggering new structural changes.
- Influence is strengthened through partnership rather than domination. Living Systems see new conditions of power as persuasion, education, and instruction, rather than enforcement. How then does this affect hierarchical structures and the responsibilities/roles of managers?
[…] all living beings are members of ecological communities, bound together in networks of interdependencies. When this deep ecological perception becomes part of our daily awareness, a radically new system of ethics emerges. (Fritjof Capra)
Beyond the realm of organization development, Living Systems and Systems Thinking call for a new system of ethics. The awareness of our interconnectedness calls us to see the connection between ourselves and our environment. We are not separate from nature, or from our neighbor. When we grow, the other grows too.
For so long, the economic model of the service industry (especially for creatives) has been built on competition. It fixates on the separation of oneself as the better option. A lone machine trying to do things faster and faster. But does growth always come from competing? Or can growth come from a symbiotic, interconnected relationship between people working towards the shared flourishing of their industry?
References
Fritjof Capra and Luisi, P.L. (2014). The systems view of life : a unifying vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
