Creativity in Organisations: An Emergent Perspective

Richard Seel, April 2005

More and more organisations are realising that creativity is essential. Whether it is new product development, provision of innovative services or fundamental creative change resulting in a new, more adaptive, culture, harnessing creativity is the key to organisational performance and success in an ever-changing environment. In this article I will explore creativity as an emergent phenomenon, asking what an organisation might do to help foster and facilitate the creative process. I will illustrate my thesis both by looking at my experience in a creative organisation par excellence: the British Broadcasting Corporation.

After I left college I joined the BBC as a trainee assistant film editor. For the next six years I spent every working day watching a variety of talented film editors and directors creating films for the BBC. For the next fourteen years I watched myself doing the same thing. I will argue that the creative process has something to tell us about emergence and also that the culture in the BBC—certainly in the sixties to eighties—operated in a way which was very supportive of emergent creativity.

Complexity

Over the last thirty years there has been an increasing awareness that nature is rarely simple—at least in the sense of being predictable and linear. We have come to realise that small causes may have large effects (and vice versa) and that simple actions may have unpredictable and surprising consequences. Both Lewin (1993) and Waldrop (1993) offer accessible introductions to the development of complexity studies, especially as practiced at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Since then there has been a mushrooming of studies and yet our understanding is still very far from complete.

The systems studied at Santa Fe and other centres usually consist of large assemblies of simple ‘agents’. These agents interact with one another according to small sets of simple rules. Yet, despite this double dose of simplicity, the results of the interactions are both surprising and unpredictable.

Human systems have several more levels of complexity than the basic complex adaptive systems about which we have now learned so much. The ‘agents’—people—are actually very complex systems in their own right and their interactions are not governed by simple rules (though we can sometimes make useful models by assuming that there might be such rules).

Human beings have intentionality; they can decide to ignore the rules or to make up new ones. Individuals behave unpredictably and getting consensus can be almost impossible in some circumstances. Yet human systems display many of the properties of complex systems. In particular, coherent patterns of behaviour can arise from the apparently idiosyncratic interactions of random individuals. This property of complex systems is perhaps the most significant of all: the seeming inevitability of the appearance of new and unpredictable patterns—a phenomenon known as emergence.

Emergence

[Emergence is] the process by which patterns or global-level structures arise from interactive local-level processes. This “structure” or “pattern” cannot be understood or predicted from the behavior or properties of the component units alone. (Mihata 1997:31)

Jeffrey Goldstein (1999) offers a helpful introduction to the notion of emergence and shows that the term was first used as long ago as 1885 by the English philosopher G. H. Lewes. Emergence is the key property of complex systems, yet still remains mysterious in many ways. Emergence cannot be planned or predicted, controlled or coerced; like the slippery eel, as soon as we try to grasp or master it, it will slip out of our reach. Yet emergence does not seem to be a completely random thing; there are times when it seems more likely than others and many people have struggled to cone up with some sense of the conditions which must be present before emergence can occur.

Drawing on much of this work, I have come up with a tentative list of pre-conditions for emergence in human systems. My work is particularly focused on organisational life: those patterns of meaning and commitment which swirl and dissipate minute-by-minute without ceasing. The effectiveness of these conversations is, in large part, a measure of the effectiveness of the organisation. If the conversations are rich, diverse and unconstrained there is the possibility of creative and adaptive change. If not, the organisation will be doomed to repeat itself until it is so far out of alignment with its environment that it will die. So, in brief, here is a list of some of the things which seem to me to be important in facilitating emergence in organisations (see also Seel 2002):

Creativity and emergence

In 1903 Edward Elgar was on holiday in Northern Italy, staying in Alassio. He had hoped to be able to write a new symphony but his mood (Elgar was subject to severe mood swings) was dark and he felt no inspiration. He wrote:

This visit has been, is, artistically, a complete failure & I can do nothing: we have been perished with cold, rain & gales—five fine days have we had & three of those were perforce spent in the train. The Symphony will not be written in this sunny(?) land.

But the holiday was not a complete write-off for he did manage to compose the overture In the South. One day, while walking near Alassio, Elgar found himself “among streams, flowers, hills” with snow mountains on one side and the blue Mediterranean on the other. He came upon an old Roman road and a peasant shepherd standing by an old ruin:

“And in a flash,” he wrote, “it all came to me—the conflict of armies in that very spot, long ago where now I stood... And then all of a sudden I came back to reality.

The experience was seminal:

In that moment, I had composed the overture. The rest was merely writing it down. (quoted by Mark Elder on Radio 3, 21/11/04)

Mozart and Tchaikovsky had similar experiences:

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer—say travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. (Mozart, quoted in Vernon 1970:55)

Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soil is ready—that is to say, if the disposition for work is there—it takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches, leaves and finally blossoms. I cannot define the creative process in any other way than by this simile. The great difficulty is that the germ must appear at a favourable moment, the rest goes of itself. (Tchaikovsky, quoted in Vernon 1970:57)

We find here the many of the same qualities which are associated with emergence: unpredictability, new forms coming out of apparently disconnected, even irrelevant, thoughts and sensations, an inability to force or control the outcome.

Sculptors sometimes speak of chipping away the stone to reveal the figure within; when I was editing I came to think of the process of creating a documentary film as one of revealing the story which was hidden in the rushes. This story was rarely obvious on first viewing, nor did it often have much to do with the director’s shooting or cutting script. If we were to use the language of complex systems we could describe the work of the film editor as facilitating the emergence of the story latent in the rushes.

Composing and sculpting are apparently solitary arts (though most composers and sculptors operate within some kind of community of practice) but film making is essentially collaborative. The emergent model is even more readily applicable here and so for the rest of this article I will explore whether the conditions for emergence detailed above can shed any useful light on the creative process—the very process which seems incomprehensible to Elgar, Mozart & Tchaikovsky.

Film making as a complex responsive process

Ralph Stacey has argued that organisations are best described as patterns of complex responsive processes. He draws on the work done in the natural sciences in complex adaptive systems but developed to take account of psychological and social factors. According to Stacey (2001:6),”…human futures are under perpetual construction through the detail of interactions between human bodies in the living present, namely, complex responsive processes.” This sort of perspective offers a useful way of reflecting on what actually happens in a collaborative creative endeavour. In order to illustrate my thesis I will first give a brief description of the way documentary films were made at the BBC during the time I was working there.

In the period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s there was a general acknowledgement that BBC documentaries were the best in the world. Other broadcasters might produce occasional works of great merit but for consistent high quality the BBC was hard to beat. No doubt this was in large measure due to the talent of the individuals employed by the BBC but I believe that the organisational approach to programme making also played a large part.

Finding the subject

The method of documentary film making during that period was not constrained or stereotyped but there was a general process which seemed to lead to the desired results. The first step was for a director (they were called producers in the BBC) to find a topic and sell it to his or her head of department. Actually, although most directors worked within a departmental structure—Music & Arts, Science, Further Education, Religion and so on—there was always scope for an idea to be offered to another department and, if accepted, for the director to be given time to make the film.

Directors got ideas from all sorts of places. In fact there was a kind of informal market in ideas—some people would suggest ideas freely, others would guard theirs jealously. There was a dynamic mixture of competition and co-operation which meant that programme suggestions were constantly being offered, rejected, re-worked and refined. It wasn’t perfect—but that was one of its strengths. In fact it acted as a complex system with lots of ‘experiments’. Failure was tolerated, though not celebrated—I remember working on one full-length documentary which just did not work. In the end it was simply shelved and never saw the light of transmission. This was not encouraged but there was a tacit recognition that without the possibility of failure it was impossible to make innovative and successful programmes.

Shooting the film

After a period of research and preparation the director would choose a cameraman (they were all men in those days) and crew and go on location to shoot the film. The best directors would have a clear idea of what they wanted but would expect things to work out differently. The cameraman, in particular, had a great deal of latitude in choosing the shots and what was actually captured on film. They had a significant influence on the final shape of the film as well as how it looked on screen.

Towards the end of my time at the BBC video technology enabled the director to see exactly what the camera was looking at. Many of the younger directors seemed to relish the extra control this gave them but it seemed to me that the rushes that came back were less spontaneous and more predictable than when the cameraman had a greater amount of freedom. It also meant that the director did not have to brief the cameraman so thoroughly.

Editing

This is the part of the process which I know best. The first step was that the director and I would view the rushes together. Although we may have spoken about the film beforehand this was effectively my introduction to the project. Typically there would be about twelve to fourteen hours material for a fifty minute documentary (the BBC’s equivalent of an hour, since we had no commercials). Viewing would take two or even three days, during which time we would talk and start to explore possibilities.

Then, while we in the cutting room prepared the film for cutting, the director would go away and put together a cutting script. This could be quite detailed but the important thing was the structure: the actual story line of the documentary. I would then assemble the rushes into the shape suggested in the script. My own style, as I became more experienced, was to put only as much work into each sequence as was necessary for me to be confident that it would work in the final film. (For the purposes of this article, I am assuming that the ‘grammar’ of documentary film has three components—the shot, the sequence and the film as a whole. Shots are built up into sequences and sequences into the completed film.)

Cutting the sequences

There is a basic set of skills which an editor will employ to ensure that a sequence is smooth, with its own internal rhythms and logic. Perhaps the shot goes out of focus at a vital point—use a cutaway. Perhaps the contributor won’t stop talking—edit what they say, keeping the essence of their point, and have some to camera and the rest as ‘voice-over’ other shots. Perhaps they are not very articulate; after all what sounds quite natural in a real-life conversation can sound very stilted on screen. I once worked on a film with a man who was very nervous on camera and said, “y’ know” after almost every word. I cut out most of them and just left a few to give a flavour of what was probably his normal speech pattern.

But it can be more difficult than this. I remember one sequence which simply did not want to go together. The shots wouldn’t cut properly, the sound was poor, there was no sense of flow. I wrestled with this for a couple of days and eventually I made it work. It was a triumph of technique and the director was appropriately appreciative when he came to see it. I became very proud of what I had done—but it did not find its way into the finished film. The director confessed that it had never really worked for him and the film was all the better for its omission.

At other times I adopted the opposite approach. On a Children’s documentary the director had provided lots of footage of a particular event. I just couldn’t get it to make sense but I had a deep conviction that it would go together even though I didn’t know how. So I left early that afternoon, spent the whole of the next day at home and woke up the following morning with the shape of the whole sequence clear and fresh in my head. It was then a relatively simple matter to assemble it—in a very real sense the sequence cut itself.

Indeed I came to distinguish between sequences which I cut and sequences which cut themselves. Obviously this wasn’t literally true but there was a very different feel to the two cases. In the first, it was like working against the grain, in the second, working with the grain. And it became increasingly clear that it was the sequences which cut themselves which were more satisfying, more compelling and more complete somehow. I came to think of myself as a midwife—the birth might not even happen without my skills but I was not responsible for the birth itself; that was outside my sphere of operation.

The structure

Once all the sequences had been assembled the director would return and we would view the film together. Almost without exception we would agree that it simply did not work. What seems to make structural sense on paper rarely works as a piece of film making. In fact, for me and for many directors, it was at this point that the film making really started.

We would now brainstorm ideas about the best structure, maybe moving sequences around to see whether they would work but often just making some notes on paper which I would subsequently try out on the film itself. Out of this process a new running order would be agreed. If we were lucky this would be ‘it’ but more commonly there would still be a great deal of work to do.

During this period the collaboration became intense. When a film went out, people would often ask who’d had the idea for a particular sequence or approach. The answer was nearly always, “don’t know”. The very ideas themselves seemed to emerge out of the interactions between the people in the cutting room (usually just director, editor and assistant editor) and belonged to no one individual. This kind of creative conversation was encouraged and rehearsed at the BBC in many ways. Conversations were always rich, and often discursive; there was rarely a sense that it was important to ‘stick to the point’. Tea breaks were often long and relaxed and no-one worried about too much about time keeping. There were times when this freedom was abused but on the would we were treated as people who had the skills and the integrity to deliver a finished product on time and to a high standard.

The role of the director

Film making is a collaborative enterprise. It is about as far removed from the stereotypical struggling artist in garret as it is possible to get. At each stage different people participate and make their own creative contributions. The constant thread is the director, whose role is crucial.

In my experience, the best directors were those who came to the cutting room with a clear sense of the way they wanted the film to be. They would often prepare quite a detailed cutting script but were then be prepared to let go of this completely and, in a sense, start all over again. This mixture of clear vision and ability to change their perspective as the film emerged was, in my view, a winning one.

By way of contrast, one of the worst films I ever worked on was with a very dogmatic (but not very competent) director who came to the cutting room with a 200 page script and 100 minutes of commentary which he had pre-recorded himself. I was required to cut the pictures to fit his commentary—the phrase “illustrated radio” came to mind and not with approval! After weeks of work we had a series of little sequences strung together with no sense of form or purpose; the film was a complete dog’s dinner. Eventually after six months’ work it was transmitted at half the original length and still, to my mind, an artistic mess.

Nor would it work if the director came with no clear ideas and just handed the rushes over to me to see what I could make of them. This did happen from time to time with inexperienced or less competent directors and the results were never satisfactory—the film could be perfectly adequate but always somewhat insipid.

Boundaries

In any creative endeavour there seems to be some kind of struggle with boundaries. Sometimes these boundaries emerge from the material itself; usually they are imposed from outside. One of our perennial adversaries was the length of the transmission slot. On film after film we would arrive at a good and satisfying structure only to find that it was over the allowed time, probably between 55 and 60 minutes rather than the 50 allotted. We would look at it again and agree that it could not possibly be shorter without doing serious artistic damage.

The procedure then was to appeal to Presentation for an overrun—a longer transmission slot. Only once in my career did they agree to this, every other request was turned down; the film could be no more than originally agreed. What followed was always surprising: we would look again at the film, disappointed and irritated, and suddenly we were seeing it with new eyes.

“We could drop this sequence without too much harm…” “If we do that then we could move that sequence earlier and trim this other one as well…” And so it would go on. The net result was almost always a tighter and better structured film.

We hated the bland bureaucracy which led to a films being cut down yet we often had to recognise that the externally imposed discipline had helped us to end up with a better result.

Reflections

I believe that the process of making documentary films, as I experienced it in the BBC, has a lot to teach us about creativity in organisations. In particular I suggest that it shows us many of the conditions necessary for emergence. In terms of those I tentatively outlined above we can identify some of them in action in the creative process:

Connectivity

Early studies of emergence showed the importance of the right amount of connectivity (Kauffman 1996). It is not essential that everyone is connected to everyone else—indeed, that is likely to inhibit emergence. But modern network studies (e.g. Barabási 2002, Watts 2003) suggest that emergence is more likely when you have well connected groups with a few key connections between the groups.

The BBC matched this model quite well. Each occupational group was quite tight-knit: you could usually tell who was an editor, cameraman, or manager just by where they sat in the canteen at Ealing Film Studios. But there were also people who connected the different groups. Directors would sit in a different place depending on whether they were shooting or editing; some craftspeople had friendships which went across the boundaries; some cameramen were interested in the editing process and vice versa (though most were not).

In many organisations the links between groups or departments are missing (in my work I often hear the term ‘silos’ used by people). It then becomes very difficult for fresh ideas to spread and for the cross-fertilisation, so essential to emergence, to occur.

Diversity

If there is not enough diversity in the system if will be hard for different patterns to emerge. The Sunday Times (05-12-04) carried a story about Descartes award winning geneticist Howard Jacobs who is reported as saying, “We are at our most productive when we share our thinking. One night of crazy brain-storming over a few beers is likely to produce more exciting results than 20 years’ solitary study in the laboratory.”

The BBC of the 1970s and 1980s was not, on the face of it, a very diverse place. Its employees were mainly white, male, university educated. But it was more diverse than many organisations with a better mix of ethnicity and gender. Organisational culture can have a powerful effect on the amount of actual diversity displayed, no matter how great the potential diversity might be, and the BBC’s culture was very tolerant to diversity.

Dress code is often a good indicator of organisational culture. In the BBC of that time there were no dress codes amongst creative staff (managers wore lounge suits). One of the finest editors would come to work wearing sandals held together with tape while another would arrive in a three piece suit and bow tie, taking a drag from his elegant cigarette holder. Smart or casual—it didn’t matter.

This diversity of dress spilled over into conversation. Few topics were undiscussable (I can think of only one—there was a cultural norm that one could not evaluate or rank the work of different editors) and this undoubtedly contributed to the creative climate.

Ideas were freely shared in the BBC yet this was not some sort of utopian hippy community. Instead there was a productive mix of competition and collaboration. Ideas for possible programmes were freely offered by almost anybody who had a desire to get into a production department. Their hope was that if the idea was successful, they would be offered an attachment as a production assistant. This did not always happen and there were sometimes mutterings that ideas had been stolen. Yet, there was enough trust and integrity to ensure that this was the exception, not the norm, and there were enough examples of people who did have their good ideas rewarded to keep the system in constant creative flux.

Rate of information flow

Ralph Stacey (1996:179) has suggested that rate of information flow is important in organisational creativity. Others see information flow as equivalent to energy flow in what Prigogine (Prigogine & Stengers 1984) call a dissipative system. In such a system emergent order can form even though the system is far from equilibrium, provided that the rate of energy flow through the system is high enough. A simple example might be the little whirlpool formed as water drains from a bath. As long as the water flow is great enough we can see a fairly stable vortex at the plug hole. As the flow diminishes, the pattern collapses.

Formal information flow was not always brilliant in the BBC. There was a standing joke that, as professional communicators, we were poor at communicating with each other. Nevertheless, there was always enough flow to keep the creative process going, especially since many of the other factors were well-tuned.

Lack of inhibitors

There are many factors which can inhibit emergence. Three which seems especially significant to me are related to power, identity and anxiety. As far as power was concerned, the BBC had an ideology of equality—everybody was called by their first name, for instance. Power differentials did exist and were sometimes nakedly obvious but on the whole the egalitarian ethos worked well; people were happy to offer suggestions and expected that they would be taken seriously. An assistant editor, for instance, could make a major contribution to the shape of a film.

The sense of identity was very strong, often to the point of arrogance. We ‘knew’ that we were the best in the world. Canteen conversation often turned to the lure of ITV, with its much higher salaries, but we all knew that we wouldn’t move on because we would not have the scope or the status if we did. Only a move to feature films (for drama editors) or to set up your own independent company (for documentary editors) could really offer any temptation. This created a huge sense of security which made the whole creative process much easier.

Anxiety enhances creativity and emergence if it is not overwhelming. Actors can use ‘first-night nerves’ to fuel a great performance. Stage fright, though, can disempower and cripple an actor. What seems to be important is that anxiety can be expressed and then harnessed but that it never gets so strong that it is necessary to erect personal or organisational defences. I was always nervous before starting a film, sometimes worrying that I’d forgotten how to edit and that it wouldn’t come back to me. I learned to accept this and conversation with others assured me that this was a common experience.

Good constraints to action

Emergence is much more likely if there are some clear constraints to possible action. It is generally more fruitful to specify what may not be done and then give explicit permission for anything else to be attempted. This was certainly what happened in the case of our frequent appeals for more time. The existence of the boundary facilitated the emergence of a better programme.

Other boundaries were imposed by those executive producers who had overall control of a documentary series (such as Omnibus, Everyman or Horizon). A key part of their role was to maintain boundaries so that individual documentaries would conform to the general style of the series. Individual directors and editors sometimes felt that the decisions were arbitrary and unhelpful but in general they had a very positive role in creating good programmes.

Positive Intention

Because people have free will and intentionality their desires can influence the shape of any emergent outcome. I remarked above that the best films all had strongly articulated but lightly held scripts. A clear sense of shared vision can be very fruitful—as long as it doesn’t stifle creativity.

I was talking with the director at the end of show party after we’d finished a series of seven documentaries. “I don’t think you did your best on the show jumping programme,” he said, “it ended up pretty much as the way I’d scripted it.” In vain did I protest that his original conception had seemed fine to me. We had developed a way of working where he would come with a strong sense of vision and purpose but would then empower me to develop it in ways which seemed to express it better.

Quality of Interaction

Emergence is more likely when relations between people are positive. At the BBC there was a sense of energy and fun. Occasionally it became a bit silly and the management had to impose the boundaries. At other times everyone got fed up and we even went on strike a couple of times. But on the whole there was a very positive atmosphere thought the whole film-making community.

Watchful anticipation

Let chaos storm!

Let cloud shapes swarm!

I wait for form. (Robert Frost, Pertinax (1949) in Frost 2002)

Because emergence is unpredictable, it may be necessary to wait. This is a skill which is not common among working people, especially in the West. At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, I believe that there are far fewer top-class documentaries on television today than there were in the ‘golden age’ I have been describing. If this is the case, I believe that the pursuit of efficiency has played a powerful part.

Schedules are shorter today than they were in my day, and in one sense that is fine. It is perfectly possible to get fifty minutes of cut film on the screen in four weeks but when I was working we had six to eight weeks to do so. The extra time was often spent waiting—not a passive waiting but filled with an expectancy and openness to potentiality. We wouldn’t accept the first solution if we had a sense that there was something better waiting to come. Like Robert Frost we accepted the chaos but sensed that form would come—and it usually did.

Conclusions

The study of emergence in complex systems offers us a useful perspective from which to consider creativity and the conditions which can foster creativity. Both theory and the BBC practice suggest that creativity may be best fostered by creating fairly tightly connected communities of practice (Wenger 1998), connected by a number of distant ties between communities. Ensure that your culture encourages diversity of opinion, approach and attitude; enable a good mix of competition and collaboration in the dissemination of ideas. Encourage an egalitarian empowered approach but make sure that the boundaries are clear and explicit. Have clearly stated goals, ideally expressed in the form of stories, but hold these lightly so that they can stimulate rather than inhibit emergence. Work towards a positive and energetic set of interpersonal relationships; encourage space and time for play. And do not strive for too much efficiency—by removing the possibility of unproductive downtime you also remove waiting time and lose the opportunity to wait for form.