Creative Duos

(see bisociation | Creative Ensembles | Creative Quartets)

 

Basic meaning

1. A collaborative partnership consisting of a learner and a mentor.
2. A collaboration designed to find new values, ideas and opportunities.

Our proposition

1. We hold that difference (rather than quantity) is our primary resource. 
2. Ten thousand years of industrialisation has encouraged us to identify resources with quantity 
   • (e.g. cash crops, money, oil etc.) 
3. This led to the myth that abundance is synonymous with monogeneity and plenty. 
4. However, abundance can only be created by combining different things appropriately. 
   • (i.e. single assets, materials or entities rarely have practical value in isolation.) 
5. Current industrial/economic mindset founded on several moot assumptions: 
   • e.g. that mechanical economies of scale can be applied, more or less, in any context (e.g. biological/creative/wellbeing) 
     • Scaling up to increase profits is often counterproductive or costly to adjacent organizations/organisms. 
     • See concept of Long tail business. 
   • This is an unfamiliar way to see the world. 

A combinatorial model

1. According to Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) all creative thinking is a combinatorial process. 
   • This idea underpins his term bisociation (Koestler, 1967).
   • in effect, this combinatorial theory of creativity acts as a superset of creativity tools. 
2. In his method, two, or more, apparently incompatible frames of thought are forced together. 
   • By ‘frames’ he means "any ability, habit, or skill, any pattern of ordered behaviour governed by a 'code' of fixed rules". 
3. When this happens, the mind is believed to struggle to make rational connections. 
   • Eventually, it makes a creative leap that, if successful, may surprise all of the collaborators. 

Recombination

1. Bisociation is a combinatorial model, whether it combines things, ideas, viewpoints, or people. 
2. There is, therefore, an interesting parallel between ‘creative innovation’ and sexual reproduction. 
   • In both cases, two ‘parent’ factors combine to create a new (i.e. third) outcome that differs from each. 
   • Whether in sexual reproduction, or in ‘creative innovation’, successful innovation is difficult to achieve. 
   • This is because their success depends on the appropriate alignment of a huge number of complex, usually hidden, or unknown, factors.