About Creative Differences
Welcome to Creative Differences. I want to write here, differently, about the subjects of my daily work: data analysis, innovation and strategy. Most importantly, I want to break apart the weary conversations of my trade - the easily parodied business language - and piece it together again more tellingly, kintsuge-like, to make of the worn out terms a more engaging discourse.
For the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, It isn’t simply that rules are made to be broken: the rules tell you that there is something to break. What then is the something that lies behind the tired business talk I want to reconstruct? The clue for me is the important word practice.
A practice is more than just a job, don’t you think? A doctor, a lawyer, an architect, a designer: they have practices which are not just jobs to be done as a means towards an end, but an end in themselves, a vocation perhaps. The implication is that the practitioner commands, ready to hand, a breadth and depth of knowledge and experience which they bring to bear, only ever in part, to each new case or project.
You may also have a yoga practice or a meditation practice or a practice of prayer. This practice means more to you than just a habit. As the meditation teacher Bodhipaksa says: It’s part of who I am.
My work, delivered as workshops, writing, analysis and review, at its core involves mentoring people into their practice: analytics as a practice, innovation as a practice, strategy as a practice.
One way I do this is to break apart terms and use the resulting contrasts - the creative differences - to see more clearly what is going on. Strategy or tactics? Project or product? User experience or user interface? Complex or complicated?
To be clear, I don’t want to define terms. This newsletter is not a glossary, but a rough scaffolding which works well for me while I construct new ideas.
Using differences
Business writing can feel monotonous. Individual words - innovation, disruption, pivot, synergy - which may have been fresh and purposeful at one time, lose their energy from constant use.
It is also true that the meaning of these terms becomes ever more diffuse as speakers or writers drop them into almost any context to sound professional and informed.
That may be a little unfair. Speakers and writers generally don’t try to appear falsely noteworthy, but they do often use buzz words that they think are still meaningful. We can rescue some of these terms. We can also explore some new ones.
I want to do three things here, if possible.
First, mapping the between
Most importantly, I want to help people be more incisive in their thinking and thereafter in their action. To do so, it’s not enough to give someone a pre-canned definition of innovation and point them on their way. I have found it far more helpful to use a contrast between different terms to tease out an understanding of what, to use my example, innovation is and what it is not. I often contrast innovation and invention. In the between we can find practical applications.
The aim - I will repeat this often - is not to write a glossary. I am not so interested in defining innovation in some authoritative sense (which will be forever changing regardless of authority) but I do want to help people innovate. It doesn’t matter much to me if someone disagrees with my version of the term. But if, by contrasting innovation and invention, I can gently prod an executive into being more radical here, or a designer into revisiting an idea there, then I am happy enough.
Scaffolding
I have described this approach as a form of scaffolding which enables us to build up some practical ideas. Perhaps a better term is bricolage - which you may know as the French equivalent of Do-It-Yourself. But really a better translation would be tinkering, piecing some construction together from whatever we have to hand.
I don’t like to go to into a business situation with a handbook of new vocabulary that my clients should diligently learn. I am much happier listening, finding out what they talk about today: the terms they use loosely (visualization, strategy) ; their formalities (code review, release) ; and the words absorbed from their community (data lake, governance) which may be more or less formally defined within or outwith the organization.
Often people feel constrained by formal terms; we can undermine the walls thrown up and think more freely. Other terms are so vague as to be nearly useless, used more for comfort than for practice. Save us from thinking outside the box!
This is the material we can work with. I want to help develop the skills of bricolage, the scaffolding of genuinely practical thinking.
That word Practice again
I’ll write about practice more in a future article. You can see already that it is an important term to me.
Work for many has become less rewarding financially, personally and socially than for several generations. Even for the well-rewarded, modern workplaces can feel predatory and modern work compromised, fraught and dispiriting.
Fixing that is more than I can do. Nevertheless, I have mentored a lot of people through promotions, career changes and sometimes radical breaks. In those conversations we often fall back on the cliché that there is more to life than work. Of course this is true and equally, if you are employed, there is no need to commit more to your employer than they do to you. If finance or HR demanded it, you would be gone tomorrow. Respect, commitment, contribution are either reciprocal or they are just cosy exploitation. Nevertheless, I think I can say something more positive …
There is more to work than work.
Even in the most tedious of jobs, there can be comradeship, community and care, often in the face of difficulty. But beyond tiresome work (and I have plenty to say about that too) many careers, from the field to the office, enable you to build a practice: a distinctive personal mindset, skillset and range of knowledge which you can uniquely bring to each challenge. It need not be as powerful as a vocation or a calling, but as you develop this practice, it can become a valued, validating component of your identity.
Where to start?
In my next newsletter, I’ll start with what is for me an easy topic, simply because it comes up so often in my work: innovation. It’s a good starting point for other reasons: you can use the scaffolding in all sorts of situations; it’s an area which has been over-worked by others, so it’s fun to poke at it; and I happen to have a lot of the material written already which makes it easy, not just valuable.
Stay tuned, as they say!
Postscript: intellectual property
I have none. All my ideas - in the spirit of bricolage, perhaps - I have found in the work of others. You may find traces of philosophy. A hint of Heidegger? A dash of Derrida? A great deal of Adam Smith. But you’re just as likely to find me inspired by knitwear designers such as Kate Davies or Alice Starmore. (Susbcribers will get used to my knitting!) Of course, there are plenty of influences from technology and design whether from earlier researchers like Claudio Ciborra or Marcia Bates or insightful contemporary practitioners such as Albert Cairo or Indi Young.
I don’t always call out these influences, because some ideas, no doubt, I have misunderstood, misused or at least repurposed to my own ends. I have meant no disrespect to their originators. Other concepts I have taken on more formally, but then found in practice that I broke them apart carelessly or deliberately. Some I use as metaphors. Some I set myself against. All are yours to reuse yourself as you see fit if you find them here.