Creativity (40 page)
Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
When I was five—you know, like where you just open your eyes and you look around and say, “Wow, what an incredible trip this is! What the hell is going on? What am I supposed to be doing here?” I’ve had that question in me all my life. And I love it! It makes every day very fresh. If you can keep that question fresh and
remember what that was like when you were a child and you looked around and you looked at, say, trees, and you forgot that you knew the word
tree
—you’ve never seen anything like that before. And you haven’t named anything. And you haven’t routinized your perceptions at all. And then every morning you wake up and it’s like the dawn of creation.
This a good example of Henderson’s spirited and open approach to life. It is reminiscent of the American philosopher C. S. Peirce’s distinction between what he called “perception” and “recognition”; it is also very similar to the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan’s practice of “stopping the world.” But derivative or not, this freshness of perception is entirely consistent with her being.
After high school Henderson made two resolutions: to travel around the world to see how everyone else lived and not to do anything she did not enjoy. For a starter, she wrote to a number of resorts in Bermuda, proposing that she run their hotels in exchange for lodging, good meals, and afternoon lessons with the tennis and golf pros. Her offer was eagerly accepted, and she chose the most glittery resort. This experience greatly improved her tennis game. But what’s more important, it showed her the possibility of stepping out of the money economy and of organizing small-scale,
mutually beneficial exchange systems. She continued to draw on this experience for the rest of her self-made career. And lack of formal education turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It kept her mind open and allowed her to see freshly the economic system on a global scale.
The Blindness of Nations
The problem Hazel Henderson eventually identified as the issue she was going to invest her life trying to resolve is one that many people feel strongly about: the ruthless exploitation of natural resources and the growing inequalities between the rich and the poor countries. Although we are all aware that there is something dangerously wrong with our way of using energy, the very size and intractability of the problem prevents us even from trying to do anything about it. The most natural reaction is to ignore it, otherwise it would hover in the back of our minds, poisoning each mom
ent with its presence.
What makes Henderson’s reaction creative is that she found a way to formulate what is wrong so that she—and others—can do something about it. Like all such conceptual moves, her formulation consists in focusing first on one limited aspect of the problem rather than on the whole intractable mess. Henderson decided to focus on how the seven most industrialized countries—the G-7—and measure their progress and wealth. She concluded that these societies, which represent only about 13 percent of the world’s population but use up most of its natural resources, have blinded themselves to rea
lity by measuring their Gross National Product (GNP) without taking into account the social and environmental costs of their so-called progress. As long as this shortsighted accounting continues, she feels, the real economy of the planet will go from bad to worse.
Behind this one problem, Henderson feels, stands another one: the epistemological bias of the last few centuries of Western thought, which has progressed by abstracting bits of reality from their context and then treating each bit as if it existed in isolation from the rest. As long as we keep thinking of progress in this way, we will never see the real implications of our choices.
It’s basically linear thinking. Its underlying paradigm is that we’re all marching along a time line from the past to the present to the future, and that somewhere along there’s lots of assumptions about what progress is, which is normally measured in terms of material abundance, technological virtuosity, and economic growth.
The policy that industrial countries pursue is “OK, top on the agenda is to do this, and second on the agenda is to do that.” There’s the whole assumption that problems are attacked in that way and solved in that way. I don’t think problems are like that. The kind of policy issues that industrial countries are dealing with, maybe you actually have to do ten things at the same time because you’re dealing with systems that are all interacting. And if you push the system right there and say, “That’s the thing we ought to push on today,” all you do is to create six hundred other effect
s somewhere else in the system that you hadn’t noticed. And then you call them, quote, side effects. Whereas there’s actually no main effect without, quote, side effects.
The Real Wealth
Having formulated the problem of what is wrong with our dealings with the environment this way, Henderson is able to do something about it. As is usually the case, the formulation of the problem implies its own solution. Formulating the problem is conceptually the most difficult part of the entire process, even though it may seem effortless. In this case, Henderson had two goals: to make people understand the long-term costs of progress and to promote a systemic, instead of a linear, mode of thinking about environmental policies. In terms of the first issue, her position is:
People are the wealth of nations, you see. The real wealth of nations are ecosystem resources and intelligent, problem-solving, creative people. That’s the wealth of nations. Not money, it doesn’t have anything to do with money. Money is worthless; everybody knows money is worthless. I do seminars on money. And I start off by burning a dollar bill, saying, “This is good to light a fire but you know it’s not wealth. It’s a tracking system, to help us track transactions.”
And instead of linear thinking:
My view of the world is systemic and interactive. Unless you have a systemic model of the problem that models all of the interfaces and all of the dynamism—and it probably has to be planetary, within an ecosystem framework—you don’t know where to push. When you have a good sense, a good map, of how all of those systems are interacting, maybe the policy will need to be pursued in five places at once in order to have feedback effects, or else your one policy will either dissipate and not change the system, or it will have some bad effect somewhere else, or you may amplify the problem in som
e other system.
In the most general way, Henderson believes, the problem is to redesign the “cultural DNA,” or the set of instructions that keep people motivated—the values and rules of action that direct human energy. The basic question is:
How do you take natural language and compress it so tightly that it begins to act almost like a mathematical formula? What I’m
interested in is the DNA code of societies and of organizations. That is, the program of rules derived from their values. Every culture is really a high-quality program of software, derived from a value system and a set of goals. And every corporate culture and every institution is like that. And so what I like to do is to write the DNA codes for new organizations.
Midwife of Change
Having identified a general approach to the solution of the problem, one now has to devise a method that will do the job. How does one rewrite the DNA of any organization, let alone the entire planet? It is at this point that the really hard work begins. It would be tempting just to bask in the glory of having found a conceptual model for beginning to solve some of the world’s worst problems and let others implement it, if they can. But Henderson’s creativity is not primarily at the conceptual level; what makes her work stand out from that of many armchair environmentalists i
s that she actually tries to carry out her ideas.
How does she do that? Her methods are varied and diverse. She writes articles and op-ed pieces. She writes books about alternative economies. She lectures all around the world. She spends time in potentially sympathetic countries like China or Venezuela, networking with government officials and environmental groups. She tries to influence the G-15 countries to adopt new methods of keeping track of their GNP, methods that take into account the hidden social and environmental costs of technological progress. But the main weapon in her arsenal is the ability to create organizations th
at will implement parts of her vision. These groups may focus on recycling, or alternative economies, or developing an “alternative GNP” such as her Country Futures Indicators, or questioning the environmental appropriateness of consumerism. This involves finding:
The first people and the first resources to bring in around that DNA code, which will be what you might call the business plan for the organization. And to find these people who really understand what that code is, and then find an initial foundation grant or something. My temptation over the years was, I would hang around too long, because I’d want to make sure that that wonderful little DNA code got etched into the stone tablets of the methodol
ogy of that organization so that then I could get back onto the board of directors and generally not worry about it because it was all locked in and everybody agreed on what this organization was. So that it wouldn’t be something that had been designed to be a mouse and turn into a hippopotamus.
But with time she discovered that to “hang around too long” was a mistake, because the volunteers who joined her out of idealism would get stifled and dependent on her. Plus her ego would become too tightly bound up with the success of the enterprise. So now she passes on the leadership of the young organization as soon as possible and doesn’t worry too much whether her initial design will be followed to the letter.
I learned through the school of hard knocks, actually. I was more ego-driven when I was younger, and I found that I started a lot of social change organizations, through the sixties and seventies, and I learned that if you want social change organizations where there’s no money involved, there’s no motivation of money, it’s just a job to be done in terms of an idealized vision of how the society could be in the future, you’d better not be so ego-driven as to want to take credit yourself for having thought of the idea or founded the organization. Because you’re trying to recruit idea
listic, wonderful people and you’re in a position of having to tell them, “Look, the salary’s going to be lousy, or there may be even no salary at first.” And so all you have really to offer them is identity and identification with an exciting new organization where they can put their whole energy into it. What I found is that the more I stepped back out of the way, and the quicker I did that, the better the organization took off and the more satisfaction the people whom I brought in to run it had. And I found over a period of years that I learned to jump clear faster and faster. I mean, first I’d be wo
rried, “Oh, is my little baby going to be taken care of properly?”
Making High Mischief
How was Henderson able to implement these methods? It is not easy to pull off the kind of guerrilla warfare she has been waging for three
decades against planetary economic mismanagement. Certainly having a high goal helps—there are few projects one can devote one’s life to with more self-evident justification. But there are a number of more mundane procedures she had to adopt in order to continue with her work without distraction. One thing she had to resign herself to was doing without a normal family life, and eventually her dedication to the solution of the problem she chose led to an amicable divorce. Another thing she had to give up was the financial security of a good job. But then, as she ruefully admits: “I hav
e always known I was unemployable. Because, you know, I would be fired off any job in the first day for insubordination. Because I’d either tell them how to do it better, or whatever. And so I have always realized that I would have to invent my own job.”
And finally, by moving to a small community in north Florida she was able to protect her privacy, to express in her location the maverick values she espoused, and by keeping a low profile, to disarm her political opponents. (These, by the way, are exactly the reasons why Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann also moved her high-tech polling organization to an isolated fifteenth-century farming estate in the rural south of Germany.) This is what Henderson says about her choice of a place to live:
It gives me great delight to be able to interact with a big system like the United States and live in a place that’s a backwater, where people would say, “What on earth do you live in the wilds of north Florida for?” To me there’s a great delight in that. Because one can be considered by the dominant culture as sort of beneath contempt, you know. I mean, “She’s just sort of messing around on the fringes of things.” The less people know about your effect on various subsystems, the better.
Being hidden away in north Florida does not mean that Henderson is isolated. Whenever she feels it is worth her time, she travels all around the world. And people who are really concerned with helping solve the problems she cares about come and find her—her house is always full of visitors trying to implement the same “high-level mischief” that characterizes her own enterprises. Her best ideas come either when she is involved in a solitary activity like biking, walking, gardening, or washing dishes, or when talking with interest
ing visitors. Without the constant dialogue with like-minded people Henderson could not even begin accomplishing her aims.
Henderson’s unique career has not been smooth sailing all along the way. Like most creative persons, she had her share of difficulties. At a certain point, twenty years ago, she went through a burnout phase. She had been too involved, too busy, too anxious. The constant traveling and stress were giving her neck pains. She was coming close to a breaking point. So she realized she’d better “make her own mode of sustainable operation.” This is when she decided to move to Florida and change her lifestyle. But above all else, she reevaluated her priorities and decided that it wasn’
t important to get credit for what she had been doing, it wasn’t important for her to get anywhere. What mattered was to do the best she could and enjoy it while it lasted, without getting all ego-involved with success. This decision has given her so much peace of mind that now she is busier than before without feeling any stress or pain.
