For those who are intentional about stewardship in their life, every item of “what” that we learn leads to “So what?” interpretations and responsibilities, and “Now what?” applications and purposes. This post follows up on Retrospective on Providence and a “DNA of Destiny” with details on a sort of final countdown to launching my curriculum project – which is my own big-time-stewardship so-what and now-what response to decades of learning about the intersection of cultures, organizations, and change. Besides overviewing the status of the project, this post delves into the creativity theory of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and the polymath philosophy of Thomas Jefferson.
Prodigies and Paradigm Shifters
For years, I’ve studied creativity theory. I’ve been interested in two things especially. Both of them have to do with the “DNA of destiny” that I mentioned in my last post.
- How do “gifted prodigies” emerge – how does their profile of extreme giftedness tend to manifest itself, especially at an early age? For instance, I spent a few hours recently looking at YouTube videos for X Factor and “Got Talent” type series from America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. It was amazing to see the many 10- to 15-year olds worldwide that qualify as singing prodigies, and to know that many seasoned professionals started their careers as teens.
- How do the profiles of abilities and the formative experiences we see in adults who are “paradigm shifters” and “paradigm pioneers” compare with the gifted child prodigy? (According to Csikszentmihalyi’s creativity theory on people who become “game-changers” in their field of endeavor, a paradigm shifter has strengths on both sides of various polarities. See the section below on his theory.)
It seems that in both cases, there has to be a certain level of preparation and practice of the gift(s), enough time for maturation so there is enough precision in the use of the gift(s), and enough frustration to transform the experiences into problem-solving situations that bring transformation. This may not take a long time for prodigies. But the likely arc for growth into a paradigm shifter/pioneer takes significantly longer, as they must not only master themselves and their general gifts and intellectual abilities, but also must master the concepts and contours of the specific academic domain(s) in which they seek to make a game-changing contribution.
Stewardship and the Status of My Curriculum Project
I don’t know that God designed me to be a paradigm shifter exactly. But I do know that in creating my forthcoming curriculum series on paradigm shifts, cultural contextualization for ministry, and sustainable organizing for social transformation, I’m aiming to maximize my creativity to make something sublime. I’m hoping and working toward something that represents the best and most elegant use of the resources and research I’ve brought together.
This whole concept is something I tried to flesh out in my four-part series on Creating an “Elegant” Social Transformation Strategy. Some of the details may be of interest in showing the process involved. Who knows, maybe some future reader interested in creativity will find clues that will help them unravel the mystery of what they’re attempting to achieve.
Anyway, for the past six months especially, I’ve been plugging away toward the actual and final writing process. I’ve gotten a huge amount of to-do details done. Working outlines are ready for four book/workbook sets. The last miscellaneous “notes on napkin” are typed. Full-page notes are sorted into file folders. A tentative overall format is set. Materials for the media studies are gathered into three boxes and four shelves. My probable print-on-demand publisher is selected.
And I think I’ve pretty much hit the saturation point with the concepts involved, after 20 years of studying the concepts, and 40 years of organizational set-up experiences. I need to “download my brain,” but to help make sure the materials are as useful as possible, I needed to become more aware of probable users so I keep them in mind during this writing/editing process.
After all, about 10 years ago I stopped reading books about the kinds of issues my curriculum deals with – church planting, generational dynamics, church methodological models and transitioning, etc. That may seem silly, because now I have to play catch-up with those various fields. But I just didn’t have the energy back then, plus I sensed the spirit was leading me to focus on developing an original perspective, not just deriving newly synthesized concepts from the old ones others were presenting. Then again, part of the creativity stewardship question is whether our calling is to create a primary/original source, and riff off other people’s work to create a secondary/derivative source. Both require creative synthesis, but they rely on different kinds of learning style profiles. (That’s an advanced topic that the curriculum will deal with.)
It isn’t like I was completely isolated from developments in Kingdom and culture for 10 years, but I was avoiding reading everyone’s theories about them. And then, surprisingly, the past few months I find myself drawn in to reading or projects or discussions on big issues that are all about shifting paradigms. Like revising the role of seminaries and other training programs. Various reconfigurations and collaborations in the “post-Christendom” world after the fragmentation of denominations and movements. City-reaching strategies and new momentum in church planting. This has all been timely, as it expanded my perception of who might benefit from what I’m producing.
So, content mostly ready to roll for a final editing. Group activity exercises and media resources underway. At last, seems like time to launch the final stage – and that’s sort of kick-started me out of perfunctory perseverance and into an excited stewardship mode. Hip-hip-hooray and hallelujah!
It won’t all be a tedious series of editing details. There is fun built in. Namely games. I’m a big fan of “immersion learning” exercises and simulation games. (The first thing I recall asking Santa for – before I could even write, so I had to dictate this to one of his “elves” – was for all kinds of puzzles and games.) So, to keep things a bit more fresh and fun, some days I’ll work on four such so-what/now-what games for applying the curriculum concepts. They all deal with how to organize for sustainable social transformation, but use different situations for their plotlines. The games involve: (1) a fair-trade organic vineyard, (2) a cultural archaeology team, (3) conflict and collaboration among post-apocalyptic tribes, and (4) a design-oriented reality TV show – a sort of reverse Project Runway, where you have to figure out how to keep participants in the game, instead of eliminating them.
Maybe some will think that games are irrelevant – just write about the concepts. But I see gaming in learning as a significant part of future-oriented training programs. To overlook the importance of this integrative kind of learning experiencing will mean an epic fail in terms of customizing for both providential learning styles and for cultural realities. For instance, did you know that recent American research shows that 91% of children age 2 to 17 are digital gamers via smartphones, computers, tablets, videogame systems; and that the average videogamer is age 37? (Hat tip on these sources goes to my friend and learning styles trainer, Dr. Kathy Koch from Celebrate Kids, Inc.) Doesn’t it make sense that some kinds of reality simulation and roleplaying games would be appropriate for training programs then?
So, I don’t foresee white-knuckling work ahead. I’ll be working in areas of passion that represent what I’ve been designed to do. And I expect there will be exhilarating periods, just as anyone experiences when immersed in a deeply creative process.
However, I don’t have a timeline or deadline for releasing portfolio parts of the curriculum. It really does depend on time, energy, and funds available. Especially – unless some miracle occurs – it’s about stamina. My energy level is so utterly unpredictable that the best I can strive for is to do something constructive on the project most days, take Sabbath rests on a regular basis, and see what unfolds. Kicking into relatively high gear on the curriculum may mean I’ll be taking a break from blogging … just have to wait and see. But I do plan to post on futuristguy to announce when the first curriculum units are available, so stay tuned …
And now, the promised sections on creativity theory. Both are edited versions of material I have published elsewhere.
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and “The Creative Personality Profile”
In his book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced roughly equivalent to chick-SENT-me-high) presents the results of his extensive research with about 100 highly creative people from the arts, business, sciences, technology, and other domains. He used three criteria for determining which men and women to interview:
- They must have made significant contributions to their fields, usually at the level of a paradigm-shift (new direction or much higher level of complexity for the domain) or vastly superior work.
- They must still be working in that field or a directly related domain.
- They must be at least 60 years old.
From this interview set, Csikszentmihalyi organized sort of a lifespan flow-of-development for highly creative people, as well a “creative personality profile.” Read the book to find out about the lifespan perspective; here I’ll deal with the profile.
The creative personality profile has particular interest for holistic methods for education, leadership, and team building. That is because Csikszentmihalyi focuses on 10 sets of polar opposite characteristics, such as introvert-extravert. These are what make “creative” people so very paradoxically complex; where most people tend to have only one or the other pole developed or maybe both poles somewhat developed, paradigm shifting people have both poles highly developed. They can shift between the poles as needed. To reach all types of students and team participants – whether they have this kind of creativity or not – we must teach and reach to the realities of these polar opposite characteristics.
In Csikszentmihalyi’s system, creative people can experience these diametrically opposed conditions “with equal intensity and without inner conflict” (page 57). These complementary characteristic sets are:
- Vitality and high levels of physical energy, yet need quiet and rest.
- Smart yet naive.
- Playfulness/irresponsibility, yet discipline/responsibility.
- Imagination and fantasy, yet a rooted sense of reality.
- Introversion and solitary work, yet extraversion and engagement with people.
- Humility, modesty, and selflessness (knowing their work rests on the prior accomplishments of others), yet self-assurance, pride, and ambition.
- Incorporate what are typical considered by the culture to be “masculine” characteristics, yet also embrace what are culturally defined as “feminine” characteristics.
- Rebellious, independent, risk-taking, and iconoclastic, yet traditional and safe in first learning the rules of the domain.
- Passionate about one’s work, yet objective about it as well.
- Sensitivity, suffering, and a low threshold of pain, yet bold enjoyment, fun, and “peak experiences.”
From his lifespan and creative personality profiles, Csikszentmihalyi generalizes some ways that everyone could improve the creativity in his or her life, even if one isn’t a highly creative person or a paradigm shifter. I suspect that general creativity tools missing in the curriculum of seminaries and other leadership-training programs. For instance, I had one graduating Master of Divinity student express his frustration that, “They taught me how to preach, but not how to preach creatively for 30 years so I don’t drive my wife and my congregation crazy!” They need to be included. Proficiency and freshness in too many fields depends on them to think otherwise. For instance: preaching, teaching, strategizing, cultural analysis and interpretation, contextualization, organizational possibilities, futures and foresight.
Csikszentmihalyi’s findings also fit with the concept of a creative person having both left and right hemispheres of the brain well connected, which links it to the research of Tony Buzan and Richard Israel. For instance, “mind mapping” is an outlining technique developed by Buzan, where you write a topic in the middle of a large sheet of paper or whiteboard, then brainstorm various additional topics directly related to that initial topic. You branch each topic off from the center like a wheel spoke, then see what other topics may come off of that spoke. Eventually, you may find some places where these farther-out topics on different branches connect with one another.
This holistic approach keeps the logical interconnections intact instead of compartmentalized, as in traditional outlining. (This is part of what makes mind mapping more postmodern-friendly.) It is also a variation of the “non-linear extrapolation” skill used in futures learning scenario construction, where you do not simply project the present via a straight line trajectory into the future. Instead, you assume that the way things are function in a fluid system where your course is constantly pulled and pushed, tugged and tweaked, acted and reacted.
Buzan collaborated with Richard Israel, an instructional design expert who also pioneered the use of behavior modeling to improve sales techniques. Together, they wrote Brain Sell, a mid-1990s book that combines work along the lines of both left-right brain research and Multiple Intelligences. Their “Sales Mind Matrix” relies on 10 essential mental skills. These are clustered into left-brain skills (numbers, words, logic, lists, and details) and right-brain skills (pictures, imagination, color, rhythm, and space). This system purports to lead to higher sales when sellers intentionally consider all 10 mental skills when making a sales pitch. Thus, it sounds like this is the same as cultural “contextualizing.” I also find it interesting how much overlap their list of 10 mental skills has with the eight Multiple Intelligences approach – words, logic, pictures, music, body (small and large motor skills), nature (pattern recognition), people, and self.
Creativity and Polymaths
The following section is the “bonus pre-amble” to the article I posted on Dune, Density, and Polymathology. A shorter version of the article appeared in the Wikiklesia 1 volume, Voices of the Virtual World: Participative Technology and the Ecclesial Revolution (2007).
In July 2001, I had a most intriguing conversation with my church planting strategist friend Linda Bergquist. She identified me and two other people we know in the San Francisco Bay Area as “Christian philosophers.” Linda felt the Church doesn’t particularly like philosophers, but she believed it still needs them. Specifically, she sensed these three people were being raised up to help the Church transition into what we then were calling the post-postmodern era. Ahh, how terms change over time!
Anyway, Linda told me how she’d recently read that Thomas Jefferson was offered all kinds of military commissions and other strategic jobs during the Revolutionary War. Instead of taking any of those opportunities, he went back home and worked diligently on the background for creating the American Constitution. He had confidence the Revolution would succeed, and so he was free to do the philosophizing that was necessary for the establishment of long-term goals and sustainability of this new union. As a “renaissance man” and philosopher, Jefferson trusted that his abilities matched this historic opportunity, and he knew where he should invest his time in order for a larger payoff in the long run.
Similarly, Linda was convinced that these three church planting philosophers in the Bay Area need to NOT feel pressured to be “The Theologian” or “The Practitioner,” but to invest in the most important roles we could play right now for the future of the Kingdom – research and development, and interdisciplinary philosophy.
This encouraged me then, and it remains comforting now, while I am still working on the same massive set of trainings in paradigm and cultural systems for growing Kingdom Culture. I am a polymath; I am called to be a philosopher; I am stewarding something important for the long run of the Kingdom. It requires complex thinking and dense communicating. So, regardless of what may be published during my lifetime, I know at a deep level that pouring myself out in these tasks will have paid off in the long run for what God is doing in His world. It is a privilege, within God’s providence, even when at times I feel wearied from and worried for this project …
