Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
AND
G ABRIELLE D ONNELLY
INTRODUCTION
The world is in the throes of a great transformation (Macy and Johnstone,
2012; Morin and Kern, 1999; Ogilvy, 1989; Slater, 2008). The complexity,
pluralism, and uncertainty of life appear overwhelming. From Beijing to Rio,
from Cairo to Los Angeles, the rate of change is not letting up. Indeed, it
seems like the rate at which we take radical change and radical changes for
granted is also accelerating. A recent cartoon showing the evolutionary
development of humans has our latest installment losing the erect posture
in favor of the now familiar hunched over position of individuals checking
their smart phones. We should keep in mind that smart phone technology is
less than 10 years old: the first iPhone came out in 2007, but in 2014 it seems
almost inconceivable for a considerable majority of people to live without one.
Nevertheless, the changes brought about by the new technology and the
relatively seamlessness with which it has been accepted hide the fact that we
are talking about very, very new phenomena, and are potentially blind to the
implications of our new hunchbacked posture.
Ziauddin Sardar argues that we are in postnormal times, an inbetween
period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have not yet emerged, and
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Historical Roots
In the West, the concept of creativity as we know it today emerged in the 15th
century during the Renaissance, (Tonelli, 1973). It coincided with the birth of
humanism and individualism (Wittkower, 1973), and a reaction against
theocracy. It blossomed with the Genius myth of Romanticism in the late
18th century (Goehr, 1992). Until the 1980s, research on creativity in the West
was situated mostly in the discipline of Psychology. It focused primarily on
what were known as the three Ps: Person, Process, and Product (Runco,
2007). In the romantic mythology underlying this atomistic, individualistic
view, the creative person was mostly a lone, often eccentric, genius (Montuori
and Purser, 1995). The unit of analysis was almost exclusively the exceptional
or eminent individual (Glaveanu, 2010).
The how of creativity occurred exclusively inside this individual, the
creative person. The classic image of the creative process was of a light bulb
going on over the creators head during the Eureka moment. The creative
process was viewed as a solitary one, at first with mystical or divine sources,
and then increasingly associated with unusual mental states and
psychopathology (Andreasen, 2006). The what or creative product was
associated with big bang, earthshaking insights and products (A. Montuori
and R. Purser, 1999; Runco, 2004, 2007). The where of creativity was
confined to specific domains, almost entirely in the arts and sciences. We can
see this in the great traditional exemplars of creativity, almost entirely male
and almost entirely made up of artists and scientists such as Van Gogh,
Einstein, Mozart, and Feynman (Barron et al., 1997).
The Changing Face of Creativity and Leadership
At the beginning of the 21st century the way we understand, practice, and
express our creativity is changing. These new developments are in turn
influencing how society is changing (Montuori and Donnelly, 2013). Creativity
leads to change, and change leads to creativity. Three main trends involve (a)
viewing creativity as a more networked, collaborative process, (b) as an
everyday, everywhere, everyone process, rather than something confined to
exceptional geniuses (Montuori, 2011a, 2013), and the articulation of creativity
as a form of leadership and leadership as a form of creativity (Burns, 2004;
Csikszentmihalyi, 2004; Gardner, 1995; Hooker and Csikszentmihalyi, 2003;
Montuori, 2010; Simonton, 1984; Sternberg, 2007).
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Not very much has changed in the last 25 years (Western, 2008). In the same
year, a critique of leadership emerged that questioned the romance of the
heroic leader (Bligh, Kohles, and Pillai, 2011):
It appears that as observers of and participants in organizations, we may have
developed highly romanticized, heroic views of leadershipwhat leaders do,
what they are able to accomplish, and the general effects they have on our lives.
One of the principal elements in this romanticized conception is the view that
leadership is a central organizational process and the premier force in the
scheme of organizational events and activities. It amounts to what might be
considered a faith in the potential if not actual efficacy of those individuals
who occupy elite positions of formal organizational authority (p79).
This critique of the heroic Great Man coincided with a shift out of one era
and into a new era (Montuori, 1989; Montuori and Conti, 1993; Morin and
Kern, 1999; Sardar, 2010; Slater, 2008). In this transitional, postnormal
period, we see the demise of one guiding model of leadership and the birth
of new forms of leadership (Wren, 2007).
For our purposes, we begin our discussion of leadership very simply, by
asking, who can be a leader? A brief review of the history of the worlds great
leaders shows that widely recognized, celebrated, as well as despised leaders,
have been overwhelmingly male representatives of the dominant culture,
embodying characteristics that can be summarized (but are of course not
limited to) the heroic model. It is becoming increasingly apparent that
leaders are now emerging from traditionally underrepresented groups, such
as women and minorities. US President Obama is perhaps the most dramatic
case in point. In the global social imaginary, there is now an AfricanAmerican President of the United States. This does not mean that leadership
opportunities have opened up for one and all, but it does signal the beginning
of a shift toward greater openness toward traditionally under-represented
groups in leadership roles.
The shift in the who of leadership extends in other areas: it is not confined
to the position of arguably the most powerful man in the world. As an
example, the Goldman Environmental Prize is handed out every year in San
Francisco to individuals described as grassroots environmentalists from all
over the world who have made a considerable and often courageous
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Seth Godins popular Tribes provides us with two useful images that can orient
us to the emerging understanding of leadership (Godin, 2009). His argument
is that we are moving out of the age of the Factory and are now in an age of
Tribes. A tribe, he writes, is a group of people connected to one another,
connected to a leader, and connected to an idea (p1). The term tribe might
strike one as amorphous, as pre-modern as the word factory seems
quintessentially modern. The crucial difference now is in the word
connected. The new social media have connected individuals all across the
globe. Whereas in pre-modern times a tribe was a local phenomenon strongly
defined by physical proximity, it is now possible to be part of a planetary
tribewhether fans of some obscure indie band, coming together to support
earthquake victims in Abruzzo, or, in the shadow side of this phenomenon,
organizations like Al-Qaida and the Aryan Brotherhood. Tribes can emerge
and disappear: the search for Malaysian MH370 has involved a tribe of
individuals scanning regularly updated images of the Pacific Ocean on their
computers for traces of wreckage. The operations of Wikipedia can be said
to be performed by a tribe devoted to writing, assessing, and correcting
entries. And tribes are not only the most important new form of social
organization and social change, they also drastically change the who, what,
where, and how of leadership. For our purposes, we might think of Tribes as
a pointer toward Ogilvys pluralist philosophy of Some.
Factories are large, hierarchical, unwieldy, inflexible, and generally not prone
to innovation. In a factory, leadership is confined to a few. Command and
control are the central features of leadership in factories. Factories are like
armies. The US army defeated the Iraqi army in a matter of days, but that was
hardly Mission Accomplished. The awkward fact, of course, was that Iraq had
nothing to do with 9/11. It is far from clear what exactly the accomplished
mission was, and there was much mission creep in attempts to reframe,
justify, and rationalize an invasion that reflected a mindset rooted in a different
age. The assumption was that a nation is attacked, which is an act of war, and
this can only be done by another nation. This requires retaliation against that
nation. There is a logic and a clarity and a simplicity here. In postnormal times,
a distributed network of terrorists living all over the world cannot be defeated
by an army in a head-on battlefield confrontation. It is not a hostile nation in
the traditional sense. The 7/7 bombers in London lived in England, and the
9/11 bombers lived in the US. They were a group of people connected to one
another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.
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these problems were themselves once solutions, but the solutions have
become the problem.
The new creativity and leadership are different from the old in a number of
ways, as we have suggested. But these changes, while in and of themselves
interesting and suggestive, are not enough. If we are to move through these
postnormal times toward a new world, we need to be aware of the roots,
branches and fruits of the old world and present alternatives to them.
We conclude with a brief sketch of some of the larger issues. A postnormal
era is the result of the exhaustion of the old paradigm or of the worldview
of Modernity. This exhaustion is visible in a number of areas. As we pointed
out earlier, we can see that many of the solutions offered by Modernity, mostly
having to do with controlling the natural environment, have now themselves
become the problem. As Ogilvy suggested, the alien environment we must
now confront is not, as it once was, the natural environment, but rather
technology and politics (Ogilvy, 1977). What we need to confront is not out
there so much as our own creations and our own ways of thinking, feeling,
and being, institutionalized and made real.
The shift to this emerging worldview will very much depend, as Sardar
stresses, on creativity and imagination, and specifically how what were
perceived to be zero-sum relations in the old worldview can be turned into
win-win relations. How conflict and difference can, in other words, be
mediated, leveraged, and perhaps even transcended by creativity. Fostering
and drawing on creativity everywhere, everyday, from everyone, will not be
an easy or fast process, but this kind of networked, open source creativity
seems essential to go beyond the limitations of Hobbes and the Machine.
Given the urgency of global problems, the task seems daunting, at best. But
we are suggesting that the new, global networked creativity, channeled into
collective problem-solving and the generation of alternatives, can also provide
us with remarkable potentials and opportunities that were unimaginable a
mere 20 years ago (Montuori, 2013; Montuori and Purser, 1996). Life may
never be normal again, but if that is a result of losing the shackles of Hobbes
and the Machine, we may actually have something to look forward to.
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