READING TIME

5 min

AUTHOR

Annemi Olivier

From chaos, to order, to creativity

3 years ago

My dad was a professor that dedicated his career to researching creativity and giftedness. Although I would like to think that I was the inspiration for his literature on ‘creativity and the highly gifted child’, his interest started before

My dad was a professor that dedicated his career to researching creativity and giftedness. Although I would like to think that I was the inspiration for his literature on ‘creativity and the highly gifted child’, his interest started before they had me and his early works date back to the 1970s. But what do we really know today and how is it relevant to organisations?

From chaos to order to creativity 

‘Equilibrium’, ‘balance’, and ‘stability’. These are all words we associate with health, calmness and order. We want things to be ‘equal’ and return to ‘homeostasis’. On the other hand, ‘disequilibrium, ‘lack of control’ and ‘instability’ all convey associations of disease and disorder. In fact, for a very long time, it was a popular belief among scientists that, in any system closed off from its environment and left to its own devices, the disorder and chaos in the system will always increase. Things have a tendency for disorder because there are more ways in which things can be in a state of disorder than in a state of order.

Enter Henri Bénard. Bénard heated a thin layer of liquid evenly on a metal plate. By heating the molecules in the liquid slowly, one would expect the disorder in the liquid to increase, because the jiggling molecules are moving around more and more in random patterns. Alas, this is not what he observed. At a specific, unexpected instant, suddenly the most magical, hexagonal structure emerges (see image). Paradoxically, this liquid system is neither in a chaotic state, nor is it in an ordered state; it is said to be at the edge of chaos. The edge of chaos is the ‘goldilocks relationship’ between not too much order and not too much disorder (chaos).

In the brain, the edge of chaos is where novel insights happen – that a-ha! moment that feels so familiar to us. We call these insights creativity.

Creativity in practice

For decades organisations were seen as machines, with people as the gears churning away at repetitive tasks day after day. Over the more recent few decades, the most prominent metaphor for organisations are those of a living system. Living systems are able to stay alive precisely because they are not in equilibrium; they function at the thin slither of space at the edge of chaos.

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When organisations stop innovating by opting to follow the status quo, thus entering a state of homeostasis and equilibrium, they go belly up. But with structure to provide order, interdepartmental collaboration and informal conversations, the organisation can start living again. Mingling with colleagues that deal with different tasks than you, allows you to connect different ideas together to end up with brand new creative ideas. When children receive limited input from their environment, little social interaction and a lack of variety in their interactions, creativity can be stifled. I’m reminded by Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rule for Life where he writes:

…Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering.

Sometimes breaking the rules just a little pays for itself in the form of spikes of creativity.

The neuroscience of creativity

The spikes in creativity have manifested itself physically in recent years with neuroscience tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). Not long ago, scientists found the brain waves responsible for creativity. Alpha waves (especially in the right hemisphere) are such a good predictor of creativity that the brain wave can be detected a full 8 seconds before a person becomes aware of the insight! Scientists also found that people can develop skills when they have lesions to their left hemisphere, because these lesions ‘release the hand brake’ in the right hemisphere inhibiting these skills from developing, providing further evidence that creativity is associated with the right hemisphere.

My Dad sadly passed away four years ago but I remember how my brother and I invented our own games on rainy days, with a couple of household items and a set of rules that always changed along the way. Now I know why we could never play by the rules! I acknowledge his extraordinary role in sparking my interest in so many things, with creativity and human sciences being part of my everyday life as a marketer today.

REFERENCES

  • Erickson, M. 2017. The neuroscience of creativity and Insight https://bigthink.com/think-tank/eureka-the-neuroscience-of-creativity-insight
  • Capra, F., 1996. The web of life (pp. 153-171). Audio Renaissance Tapes.
  • Lehrer, J., 2012. Imagine: How creativity works. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  • Peterson, J.B., 2018. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Random House Canada.