Part of the Creative Emergence Process is being informed first by our inner wisdom and inner authority - thinking from within. It is becoming aware of our thoughts, images and information unfolding from within our psyche first, and then finding the people, books, art, music, philosophies, stories, websites, conferences, studies, creative methods, etc. that help further draw out, distill, and better understand what is calling to emerge into our awareness.
One of these books which had most intuitive resonance for me was A Simpler Way
I revisited the book this morning and feel even more resonance and a more coherent and integrated perspective. This book has so much more richness than I am able to share here, but I have included a few excerpts from the book...still very much true today, if not more so...
Excerpts from A Simpler Way
a book by Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers
There is a simpler way to organize human endeavor.
It requires a new way of being in the world.
It requires being in the world without fear.
Being in the world with play and creativity.
Seeking after what's possible.
Being willing to learn and be surprised.
This simpler way to organize human endeavor
requires a belief that the world is inherently orderly.
The world seeks organization.
It does not need us humans to organize it.
This simpler way summons forth what is best about us.
It asks us to understand human nature differently,
more optimistically. It identifies us as creative.
It acknowledges that we seek after meaning.
It does not separate play from the nature of being.
The world of a simpler way is a world we already know.
We may not have seen it clearly,
but we have been living in it all our lives.
It is a world that is more welcoming,
more hospitable to our humanness.
Who we are and what is best about us
can more easily flourish.
The world of a simpler way has a natural
and spontaneous tendency toward organization.
It seeks order. Whatever chaos is present at the start,
when elements combine, systems of organization appear.
Life is attracted to order--
order gained through wandering explorations
into new relationships and new possibilities.
Life is creative. As it tinkers with discovery,
it creates more and more possibilities.
With so much freedom for discovery,
how can life be anything but playful?
Life is about invention, not survival.
We are here to create, not to defend.
Out beyond the shadows of darwinistic thought,
a wholly different world appears.
A world that delights in explorations.
A world that makes it up as it goes along.
A world that welcomes us into the exploration
as good partners.
Everything is in a constant process
of discovery and creating.
Everything is changing all the time:
individuals, systems, the environment,
the rules, the processes of evolution.
Even change changes.
Tinkering opens us up to what’s possible in the moment.
Analytic plans drive us only toward what we already know.
We believe that answers already exist
out there, independent of us.
We don’t need to experiment to find out what
works; we just need to find out the answer.
So we look to other organizations,
or to experts, or to reports.
We are dedicated detectives, tracking down solutions,
attempting to pin them on ourselves and our organizations.
What if we invested more time and
attention in our own experimentation?
We could focus our efforts on discovering
solutions that worked uniquely for us.
We could focus on what’s viable, rather than what’s right.
Playful and creative enterprises are messy and redundant.
Parallel systems are dedicated to finding what works,
not by careful stepwise analysis in the hands
of a few experts, but by large numbers of a population
messing about in the task of solution-creation.
Fuzzy, messy, continuously exploring systems
bent on discovering what works are far more
practical than our attempts at efficiency.
The system succeeds because it involves
many tinkerers focusing on figuring out what’s possible.
The solution is discovered through the doing,
by noticing “the shape things will take to come forth in.”
The more present we are as individuals and
organizations, the more choices we create.
As awareness increases, we can
engage with more possibilities.
We are no longer held prisoner by habits, unexamined
thoughts, or information we refuse to look at.
Yet we often tend to limit our expectations
of what’s possible by surrounding ourselves
with large amounts of information that tell us nothing new.
They don’t ask us to question
why we’re doing what we’re doing.
They don’t ask us to notice what learning is
available from all those things we decided not to measure.
In a creative organization, everyone in the
organization feels compelled to be alert,
seeking out new measures, new events to observe.
Our consciousness expands as we become willing
to question even our processes of observation.
Consciousness and creativity are inextricably
linked in this always discovering world.
Our first task is to see the world differently.
We need to observe processes that
we either ignored or cannot see.
To support natural processes of organization,
we must first change our beliefs.
We give up believing that we design the world into existence
and instead take up roles in support of its flourishing.
We work with what is available and
encourage forms to come forth.
We foster tinkering and discovery.
We help create connections.
We nourish with information.
We stay clear about what we want to accomplish.
We remember that people self-organize
and trust them to do so.
We work with organizing-as-process
rather than organizations-as-object.
We reframe our thinking about responsibilities.
In self-organizing systems structure emerges,
it’s not imposed.
They spring from the process of doing the work.
The structures will be useful but temporary.
They can be expected to emerge and recede as needed.
It’s not the design that requires our attention
but rather the conditions that support
the emergence of necessary structures.
Organizations keep searching for ties that bind them
--new incentives, rewards, punishments.
But organizations could accomplish
so much more if they relied on the passion
evoked when we connect to others, purpose to purpose.
Until the system forms, we have very limited
knowledge of what might emerge.
The only way to know a system is to play with it.
Instead of defining what’s right for a system
and then struggling to impose it,
we learn to say, “Let’s see.”
