Author: Daniel Mackisack
There’s a proverb – “Necessity is the mother of invention”.
I don’t think anyone is exactly sure where it’s from. Some say it originates in Aesop’s fables. Plato’s Republic says, “Need will be the real creator.” A 16th-century manual on how to use a longbow includes the phrase “Necessitie, the inuentour of all goodnesse.”
Variations pop up all over the place. In any case, it’s been around a while. As has the truth behind it.
Need, compulsion, difficulty, challenge…constraint. They force us to think differently and ultimately to try and do things differently. They always have.
Yet in the collective consciousness, ‘politics’ – the domain touching all others, where all these terms apply in abundance – is seen as dry and plain; boring and bureaucratic; practical and pragmatic. Not only devoid of creativity but almost antithetical to it.
Why is that?
Perhaps it’s because some part of us feels like a solution isn’t creative unless it strikes the right aesthetic and seems almost a little bit wild. Somehow, a policy proposal doesn’t really seem quite as out there as a power ballad.
Maybe it’s because we’re all too cautious and reluctant to step outside the norms for risk of political consequences. And maybe, in many cases, the consequences of failure are so significant that creativity and risk are just irresponsible.
In other words, maybe perceptions are correct, and politics really isn’t creative.
But I don’t think so.
Creativity is more than just a splash of colour. And the creative process, while occasionally flashy, is more often subtle. It expresses the things that are hard to express. Complicated things. Nuanced things.
And more to the point for the political realm, it addresses the problems that are hard to solve.
People in politics solve complex problems every day. They do it as individuals and in teams, and occasionally, we all do it in large collectives.
That’s the other misconception. Creativity is seen as an individual act.
But it doesn’t have to be so.
Democracy is an act of collective decision-making that is inherently creative. Albeit sometimes less so than it could or should be. There is ideation and divergence as options are explored followed by decision-making and convergence as they are narrowed.
It’s a process we undertake at all levels in some form or fashion. Whether it’s the election of leadership or the development of campaign and policy solutions.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t be better at it. And the first step is embracing not only the label but the value of constraint.
Every difficulty, every challenge, every technical hurdle that needs to be overcome, every budget line that needs to be balanced and every interest group that needs to be accounted for forms the scaffolding within which the solution needs to be built.
Finding that solution becomes more complicated with every constraint and therefore requires a more creative process.
The collective, often seen as complicating things further when it comes to straight decision-making, is not a burden in these situations. It’s a resource.
And it’s one that makes the end result just plain better.
Collective creativity, as described (and espoused) by Stephen Boucher in our latest Briefing, is a tool for political problem solving that brings both new ideas and greater legitimacy.
Stephen brings a wealth of experience as CEO of Dreamocracy, founder of Smarter Together and coordinator of the “The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance”.
He describes how the creative process, given the right approach and methodology, is anything but stymied by the collective.
The trick lies in recognising the parameters or constraints of the particular problem a group seeks to solve, fully expanding on the possibilities within those conditions, and then being willing to crunch down to that specific solution that ticks all the boxes.
As it turns out, there is a huge range of approaches to take. An array of tools and specific methodologies that draw on the wisdom and intelligence of the collective to solve complex problems.
And rather than creating conflict as we’re prone to expect, that sort of expansion and contraction in thinking is something the collective excels at – benefitting from different perspectives to truly explore a space, and different expertise to truly understand what works (and what doesn’t).
In a world where the complexity of problems, political or otherwise, seems to be accelerating beyond the scope of individuals to address or even comprehend, that collective ‘creative’ approach to problem solving would seem more necessary than ever.
So, the question, then, is no longer about the risk and consequences of practising creativity in politics.
The real risk is if we don’t.
