Collaboration

Zoë Westhof has me thinking again, this time about what it specifically means to change the world. (I encourage you to go to her site and join the conversation, or add a comment below.)

What does change have to do with creativity?

Changing the world is a particular form of creativity in which our chosen medium is life itself. Tactics for creativity and tactics for change largely overlap.

This connection between change and creativity is a segue-way into a new series I have in the works on the topic of why creativity matters. Consider this a preview.

Attempts at change benefit from a creative approach, both to imagine the kind of transformation you want to accomplish and determine the scope of your ambitions.

And creativity generates change — if not directly, at least as a side-effect. What we create may be radically different or only a slight variation, but if it is exactly the same as what already exists, we wouldn’t call it creativity, we’d call it re-enactment or repetition.

Creativity is the driving force behind everything we do that’s different from what we’ve already done.

The Tactics

Read history: Learning more about the past will constantly remind you how dynamic the world really is, and how lucky we are — in so many ways — to be living in this moment.

For example: Did you know that the life expectancy for the working poor in mid-19th century Bethnal Green, London was sixteen?! (via Stephen Johnson’s Ghost Map.)

Study past change agents: Those who did it well and those who botched it. What went right and what went wrong?

Look for unlikely allies: Find people who seem very different from you, but, in your chosen arena of change, want essentially the same thing.

Develop empathy with opponents: Why do they want to hold on to the very things you are trying to change? How can you ease their valid fears, undermine their irrational fears, and at least partially co-opt them?

Draw clear lines: Determine those whose minds can’t be changed. Ignore them if you can, marginalize them and mitigate their effects if you can’t.

Don’t wait for someone else: Maybe they are waiting for you?

Get yourself stabilized first: Change is a marathon, not a sprint, and you need to train and stay fit for the long haul. (See Bobby’s comment on Zoë’s post for a great example.)

Everyone has a role to play: All across the spectrum, from the radical marching in the street, to the contemplative researcher assembling the data to make the arguments that get people into the street, and everyone in between. Find your role, excel, and don’t waste time and energy fretting that you can’t do everything.

Don’t get discouraged by what’s beyond your reach: In today’s information environment, our sphere of awareness is vastly larger than our sphere of possible action. That’s a situation that sets us all up for disillusionment and despair.

We can’t individually fix every tragedy we know about. The challenge is to stay connected at the global level, to the good and bad, while maintaining our momentum in making change on an achievable scale.

Challenge broad patterns and viewpoints, not just specific instances: Switching to low-power light bulbs is great, but if a public figure declares conservation a “personal virtue” you have an advocacy problem, not a light bulb problem.

Be open-minded: Change happens in unexpected and unplanned ways.

Beware of revolutions: Change that begins with a stated goal of shattering existing structures often spills a lot of blood, and what is shattered is rarely reassembled into something positive. Most revolutions are disasters for just about everyone involved. (See the point above about studying history.)

Think of the world as malleable: something that can be hammered and shaped into new forms without breaking completely.

Beware of incrementalism: Tentatively proposing small change, and submitting it to a process of bureaucracy, negotiation and consensus-building is like running through the surf: you’ll expend a lot of energy, but you might not get very far.

Incrementalism is often a tool used by incumbents to shut change down.

Instead, make subtle and barely perceptible changes so far out of the range of expectations that they befuddle the establishment. Change the underlying reality before the status quo backers understand what you are up to, and put them in the position of defending a return to what has become an unpopular and undesirable past.

And don’t ask first.

Leave a trace: Leave No Trace is great for backcountry trails and Burning Man, not so great as a life philosophy. Your every action adds to your legacy. It is impossible not to have an impact. In every decision, try to make sure you bend the world towards your values, however slightly.

Slow and steady wins the race: Is it bad form to end a list of change tactics with a cliché?

Spread your ideas, and sow the seeds of the changes you want to see.

Just like art and culture, profound and lasting change is bigger than you and unfolds on a time scale longer than your lifetime.

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I’ve been mulling over Zoë Westhof’s recent post Midnight Blogging from the Bathroom: Do We Have to Choose?

Here is her framing of her key question:

“The dilemma it leads me to is this: I cannot decide if I want to devote myself to supporting creative endeavors or to supporting deep-rooted social issues. When it comes down to it, I adore giving my attention to both. So my question is this: Do we have to choose?“

Should we be creative, or should we save the world?

What if the only way to save the world is to be more creative?

The Big Problems

The most profound problems we face as a global society are complex, hard-to-understand, and require ‘non-linear’ solutions. Small solutions fail as we scale them up to the size of the need.

For example, how do I reduce my carbon footprint? I know how to do that. How do we get nation-states to do the same in a coordinated and effective way? That’s hard.

How do we prevent one pregnant HIV-positive mother from passing the virus on to her child? We know the answer to that. How do we prevent 20 million mothers in the next five years from passing the virus on to their children? We don’t know the answers to that yet — financially, socially or logistically. It’s still too big for us.

We can make big problems little through cooperation, attrition and persistence, but sustaining those efforts requires creative and non-linear approaches.

Personal Choices

In a sense, this question of choosing is a personal version of a classic political question: how can a society spend a cent on space exploration or some other long-term investment when there is a single person hungry?

It is a moral riddle with many unsatisfactory answers. The most satisfactory answer for me: we invest in basic research in the hope that it will help us learn something that will dramatically reduce hunger in the future, and we balance that with what we can do to help our fellow citizens today, in this moment.

When we make this societal dilemma personal, when we place the goal of long-term progress on one shoulder, and instant relief on the other, we may wilt under the pressure, and not achieve either one. While a sense of duty and obligation can be motivating, and keep us from inertia and apathy, too much can tear us apart.

Choosing is excruciating for the curious mind. There is so much to know, so much to learn, so much that needs to be done.

Do we personally have to choose? In a given moment, for a specific period of time, I think the answer is yes. There is no reason you can’t lean from one side to the other over your lifetime, as your skills and opportunities allow. But in terms of effectiveness, if you constantly feel the tug of all the other undone things, will you be able to do your best work in a particular moment?

Do we want a scientist, on the verge of a breakthrough in discovering an HIV vaccine, to feel an obligation to stop researching, leave the lab and spend a month working in a soup kitchen? And do we want someone who genuinely enjoys running a soup kitchen to leave that critical job to study biology so that they might know enough to do vaccine research in five or ten years, even if they don’t feel they have an aptitude for it?

This dilemma is a variation of the ‘too many ideas’ theme I started exploring in my last post. In this case, the problem is too many worthwhile projects and needs. I’ll be returning to the exploration of ‘too many ideas’ in the next few posts. I wanted to respond to Zoë’s post first, while it was fresh in my mind.

Your Role

We each have a role to play. Creative exploration can help us find it.

What if your role in solving a particular problem is not navigating the complexities of international law, but helping a legal expert think more creatively?

If you are writing about the creative process, maybe there is a lawyer somewhere reading your work, and it gives her a new insight into how to approach a tricky human rights advocacy issue? Would that make your writing human rights-focused, or still ‘just’ creative? Maybe it is both?

You can’t know the effect of the ideas you share. You can do your best to craft your ideas, and share them widely.

Sowing Seeds

For the past few years, Mercy Corps has used a quote by Gandhi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

I’d like to suggest a slightly altered version: Seed the change you want to see in the world.

To me, the verb ‘be’ implies an immediate and localized effect: by embodying our values, we change those around us, who, in turn, change those around them.

The word ‘seed’ reminds us that results take time. Different seeds take root in different seasons. We don’t have to limit ourselves to one kind of seed. When we fling the seeds of our ideas far and wide, they can spread beyond our reach, out of our sight.

We cultivate those seeds, whatever they may be, because that’s what we do best.

And we sow the seeds of our beliefs, with no assurances we’ll be there for the reaping.

Related: This article is part of a series on creative surplus.

Update: A hat-tip to Sunday Oliver for pointing out the difficulty of ‘sewing’ seeds, and reminding me the correct spelling is ‘sowing’ seeds. I tend to think aurally, and the homophones always trip me up. (And yes, I did mean aurally, and not its homophone orally!)

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