Creative Duos
(see bisociation | sympoiesis | Creative Quartets and other useful definitions)
Basic meaning
- A collaborative partnership with the potential to make new meanings, opportunities or products
- A collaboration designed to find new values, ideas and opportunities.
- e.g. it may comprise a learner and a mentor.
Our proposition
- We hold that difference (rather than quantity) is our primary resource.
- Ten thousand years of industrialisation has encouraged us to identify resources with quantity
- (e.g. cash crops, money, oil etc.)
- This led to the myth that abundance is synonymous with monogeneity and plenty.
- However, abundance can only be created by combining different things appropriately.
- (i.e. single assets, materials or entities rarely have practical value in isolation.)
A combinatorial model
- 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.
- 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".
- 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
- Bisociation is a combinatorial model, whether it combines things, ideas, viewpoints, or people.
- 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.