Re-Situating Ideation

What is an idea?

This week I have been thinking about Jason Frasca's provocative post: What is an Idea? And it led to a number of great discussions Jason and I had (as well as it inspired our newsletter this week).

He describes two types of ideas: Big Ideas and Small Ideas.

Big ones are the ones that we understand to be springing into reality fully formed. You know the type -- how many times have you been asked "whats your big idea?" or "whats the big idea?" -- angles are singing as these ideas are deliver on silver platters...

Small ones emerge in doing (humble and unnoticed...)

The contrast is compelling and gets at a major problem in discussions about innovation: we obsesses about having the big ideas before we engage in carrying out any plan, and fail to see that big ideas do not spring into our heads fully formed but emerge from small ones in a slow step by step way from the midst of action (not our heads).

Franciso Varela, one of the founding theorists of the Enactive Approach to cognition, in a wonderful short book Ethical Know-How proposes a helpful model of how thoughts emerge from embedded and embodied action that cannot be made explicit -- this is what he calls "know-how". The world of know-how grounds and gives rise to what we would call thinking and ideas -- Big Ideas -- and this realm he calls "know-what".

The four stages in this diagram are how I would describe this process:

1. Novel thinking first emerges from embodied novel actions in novel environments as a vague sensation that accompanies action (Making-Feeling).
2. As we engage with things and their embodied affordances vague sensations transform into hunches and quasi-thoughts (Making-Dialoging)
3. These affordances and embodied hunches slowly take a more understandable and distinct shape via further activity, environment shaping, tool construction, practice formation and worldly experimentation and become something like what we would call an unformed idea (Thinking-Making)
4. Big Ideas — those fully formed things that are tossed around in brainstorming or ideation sessions are the final step in this process (Thinking-Thinking)

Now, Small Ideas -- are really the first three steps in this process, and Big Ideas are the last: the final step in moving from know-how to know-what. The problem as I see it is that to be creative we cannot begin with brainstorming or ideation because this is to begin with is already known -- the realm of Big Ideas and to miss fundamentally where novel concepts come from: the space of know-how. This space and this process begins in highly engaged and embodied activities -- that cannot be reached by explicit thinking.

Here Varela and the Enactive Approach draw upon the work of Phenomenological Philosophy which argues that what can be theorized, and conceptualized (explicit knowledge) arises from and is supported by a world of embodied engagement (a way of life) that is fundamentally non-conceptualizable.

Too often we believe Big Ideas -- abstract ideas are their own thing -- but know-how and know-what form a creative whole. When we take Big Ideas to be their own thing -- as we do in creative ideation exercises like brain-storming we mistake a piece of the process for the whole of the process -- fundamentally short circuiting novelty from every arising.

We need to develop attunments to the those vague sensations, odd emotions, strange noticings, low level murmurings, bodily actions, and barely felt hunches -- the world of Small Ideas. We need to fall in love with the whole process.

A last thought that came up in our conversations about Big and Small ideas this week: the same problematic divide is played out with Innovation Methods -- they also act like Big Ideas. They are presented as abstract processes divorced from environments, tools, and situated actions, etc.

If thinking emerges not from our heads but a world -- then we really need to attend to that world.