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Strategic Thinking – the need for a philosophical approach to finding creative alternatives.

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A colleague just returning from teaching creativity in a Corporate setting expressed the need for logic and philosophy in education as a prerequisite. He seemed somewhat frustrated by the experience. I have had similar experiences working with not just design students, but people in positions that need to make strategic decisions, and need to grapple with and navigate complexity.

One advocates stepping out of the box, taking a broader, deeper and temporally expansive perspective, but almost universally, people in practical professions (managers, engineers, designers) seem to find it difficult.

There is a general cultural anathema to being strategic – what with thought leaders advocating ‘failing fast’ and experimentation as antidotes. Well we have a litany of failures in the world to show that the latter process only works occasionally (statistically low probabilities of success) though it is massively celebrated in popular culture.

In my opinion, t is not a pattern that one should really practice, particularly by those who need to think about bigger issues. This is not an argument against experimentation or probing, practices integral to innovation, and creativity is an important driver.

Questioning and critical practice that go hand-in-hand with being strategic (by strategic, I mean those issues that have broader and deeper impact on the world and demand creative impact making), are not practiced enough in the face of urgent action. Being strategic takes time, and there are no easy solutions often except what gets resolved through conversations.

Somewhere in our broader education system we have lost this foundational ability to abstract in our pursuit of the concrete and immediate. By the broader system, I include more than just formal educational institutions – we find a general societal loss of an appetite for deeper thought and conversations. We were supposed to be an ‘Argumentative Society’ (In India at least). You can only be creative in a culture of creativity in which creative acts happen – creativity is not a private pastime or something you practice in fishbowls.

A recent experience witnessed a design studio with floor-to-ceiling glass and you could see people practicing design – design as spectacle.

Creativity flourishes in cultures of positive dissent and pushback. Clarity of purpose and meaning are the logic that shapes – it can be constraining or creative. I tried teaching people to be creative where they had to return to authoritarian cultures where questioning was the first step to career hara-kiri. And anyway wisdom was expected to trickle-down, or rooted in some antiquity. Of course there were enough marketing tropes about ‘navigating the future’ or some equally insipid marketing blah.

There might be an easier approach than having people study philosophy though – one can arrive at a philosophical attitude through the process of learning to think in abstract terms. 

I found most young designers have difficulties with abstractions and with identifying patterns and meta patterns – being able to get to the essence of something. Architectural thinking is perhaps a good way to begin.

Getting to the essence of something is like getting to the genetic code of that object – locating a generative core. Complex situations need us to find these deeper patterns – conceptual, ideological, even spiritual – for they hold much power to shape or constrain.

Complex humanity (ahh human-centered design!!) – is multi-dimensional, and one seems to want to approach it with little knowledge of sociology, or history, or politics, or civics, or even a deeper why of ones own cultural practices – where blind faith comes from I guess. Such is the deplorable state of our education systems – the depths of siloed expertise being such an obstacle to understanding let alone synthesis – the ability to find connections and relationships and coherence and meaning – to create practical holistic spaces for action.

Only when we loosen those deep structures will creative alternatives emerge. In order to do that we have to get past the literal. We will need language and grammar, and a comfort with uncertainty that is the wellspring of all that is creative. It is where our hope lies – just advocating for creativity – and that is a trope that I do not think popular discourse really understands. Making cute drawings you forgot to make after childhood will not get you there.

Once we learn to see and appreciate patterns, we begin to understand similarities and differences and what is universal and what common, and what deeper causes that are generally hidden from our perspectives are operational in our lives. The ‘logic’ of living human patterns is what we need.

And, from that practice comes the practice of meta-patterning, and that is where hope lies. That practice of meta-patterning is the foundation of philosophy or at least being philosophical and not necessarily being a philosopher in some academic sense.

Strategic design touches all branches of philosophy, except not as it is practiced. One must think about phenomenology, epistemology, ontology, ethics, axiology and so on, in order to be a good strategic designer. If you truly are a good strategic designer, you must be a philosopher too – chicken and egg of causality here.

Grappling with complexity as practice in search of patterns and reflecting on patterns back in the studio in search of meta patterns, that is philosophical and that can lead to strategic creativity. Those that can deal with MetaPatterns can begin to become Strategic MetaDesigners.

 

Note: – (MetaDesign is a framework I have been developing – a practice that lead complex Human Evolutionary Social Systems to better futures – a mouthful alright – CHESS, Living Enterprises, Better Futures ).

MetaDesign – Transdisciplinary Practices beyond disciplinary simplicities

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There is an urgent need to address complex societal challenges, and while each discipline makes valiant efforts to rise up to the task, they are bound to find themselves inadequate.

The Complexities of Social Challenges cannot be understood at the level at which they were created, nor can they therefore also be solved by the disciplinary thinking that created them. It is necessary to follow Einstein’s admonition and find a vantage point that goes beyond any particular disciplinary boundaries.

There is a tendency to appropriate this vantage point as a redefinition or renaming of one’s own favorite discipline – Design aspires to become strategic, as does Foresight, or Innovation, or Systems Thinking, or Technology. Who does not wish that the impact they make on the world to be anything less than strategic – disruptive, Game-changing?

However, it is also natural, that while they appropriate some of the Methods, Tools and Techniques from the other disciplines to address the gaps, these efforts eventually turn out to be simplifications – the same broader challenge of narrow disciplinary focus that contributed to the situations in the first place.

Richard Normann in a business context and in his book ‘Reframing Business’, called for the use of a Crane – a metaphoric device that lifts you out of the debris of the current landscape to find that other vantage point.

I personally have no preference for one or the other discipline.

In my professional career I have tried to sincerely change the world through Technology, Innovation, Systems, Foresight and Design among other things and I have always found them individually wanting in some way of the other.

So, when I term this new vantage point, MetaDesign, I am using the term Design in a much broader sense – as the act of Intentional Change-Making, as a verb rather than a Noun.

It is the act of and the Practice of Making Better Worlds and Realizing Better Futures, a continually evolving effort, just like the Complex Evolutionary System that Living Enterprises are. And if Systems Thinking is the art of synthesis, then MetaDesign is the causality that makes better futures, and the trans-disciplinary synthesis that puts you on that trajectory.