Creativity in the LO LO17000

dinapoli (dinapoli@nh.ultranet.com)
Fri, 13 Feb 1998 10:33:06 -0500

Replying to LO16968 --

Am deLange writes:

>Rich, I was very pleased with your contribution. I am willing to accept
>that "creativity is the fundamental life force". But then we will not be
>able to understand creativity further than life. Therefore I have gone
>one step further by defining creativity itself as the result of entropy
>production (irreversibility). It seems to be a very small step, but it
>ellicits a grand paradigm shift.
>
>Your interest in the relationship between creativity and networking stems
>from the "fact" (sic, according to my framework) that constructive
>creativity requires seven essentialities (see my post to Lee Bloomquist on
>Competition). One of them is the essentiality "associativity-monadicity"
>(wholeness) which is the very heartbeat of networking. Two other
>essentialities are also unusually important to networking, namely
>"connect-beget" (effectiveness) and "open-paradigm" (openness). In other
>words, networking is the combination of these three essentialities into
>one compound essential.
>
>Networking in a LO is very much what Senge wished to capture by making
>system's thinking one of the five, in fact, the fifth discipline for
>understanding learning organisations. Should Senge have tried to explain a
>LO in terms of creativity, it would have been a formidable task because he
>would first had to explain creativity itself without invoking learning!

Am, thanks for the stimulus to clarify for my self and try to state my
definition of creativity. On an individual basis, I have been defining
creativity as intuition guiding action in a spontaneous manner. I must
credit Margaret Crossan for this definition, although, for her, this is
the definition for improvisation. On a group level, I think you can use
the same definition, just adding collaborative to spontaneous.Spontaneity
is a key concept that had three meaning parts: 1) as an ability to
experience and express fully, without inhibition 2) as the timeless
present, i.e., outside of time and 3) responding to a familiar situation
with novelty ot to a new situation adequately(Moreno's definition).

When you add the structural(network) criteria for creativity to the
equation, then you can bring the insights of complexity theory to the
dance.I should admit (as it will soon become obvious) that my
understanding of complexity theory is pretty basic.

For example, the self-organizing evolution of an improvisational story can
be seen as creating order out of chaos via the strange attractor of
co-evolving meaning generation.A good improv story will operate within a
sustainable structure, while allowing all kinds of iterations/variations
on the theme. This process is related (equivalent?) to knowledge creation
and, of course, learning.Is this way of languaging adding something of
value to the understanding of creativity? I wonder.

Could you please give reference citation for the seven essentialities.

Appreciatively,
Rich DiNapoli
dinapoli@nh.ultranet.com

-- 

dinapoli <dinapoli@nh.ultranet.com>

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