I had an amazingly productive experience this morning. I stumbled across an article recently published by Jennifer Tann about change agents and innovation, and it proved to be an amazing resource for the history and evolution of change agents! I was able to lay out a timeline of change agent thinkers, and I learned more about how others view change agents – as magicians! Here I thought my experience was unique, but perhaps more people see what I do in the role! It was quite exciting!
I don’t know if I’m doing the conceptual map correctly but I do know my mind is on fire. I mean, here’s what I wrote in response to how creativity reading aligns with my research topic the other day:
“Edgewalking Unicorn” = a high performing change practitioner (Conner, 2016) who is able to walk between worlds – effective by all traditional business measures yet possessing the ability to “sense the future, to build bridges between different paradigms, and to create what has never been created before” (Neal, 2006, Kindle Location 300-301). In particular, this person is internal to their organization (not an outside consultant) and they are not the leading executive of their organization.
While Richards (2007) asserts right of out the gate that everyday creativity isn’t about what you do so much as how you do it, that doesn’t quite hit the mark for me because it doesn’t go deep enough. Even the framings of creativity in Cambridge focus on the window dressings: origins of the concept (Glăveanu & Kaufman, 2019), different people’s theories on how creativity works (Kaufman & Glăveanu, 2019), how we might decide how creative a person, process, or thing is (Plucker et al., 2019), etc.
This is something I have chafed against with creativity studies in general: it always feels like we are trying to kill the goose to understand how it lays the golden eggs, analyzing the parts in hopes of understanding the magical gestalt. As Bohm (1998) might say, creativity research seeks to apply a well-defined order that is functionally wrong” (p. 13).
I do believe that the more self-actualized a person is, the greater a person’s ability to be an Edgewalking Unicorn.
We know from Maslow’s work (cited in Richards, 2007) that creativity correlates with self-actualization, contributing to a person being more open to experience, spontaneous and free, mindful, resilient, etc. While Conner (2016) is not writing about creativity specifically, he gets closer to the heart of the matter: it’s not about what you do, it’s about who you are…how you show up. This meshes nicely with Bohm’s (1998) views that creativity is an intrinsic force of the universe, and that we as humans contain a “philosophy of mind with creativity at its heart.” Rather than any of the Four P’s or other theoretical descriptors one might want to throw at creativity (Richards, 2007; Kaufman & Glăveanu, 2019), Bohm (1998) sees creativity as giving “patient, sustained attention to the act of confusion” (p. xix).
Is this simple attention a “process” that a creative person applies within a creative press to achieve a creative product? Could be, but that implies conscious application and I believe that the creativity at work within Edgewalking Unicorns is a more innate way of being, an automatic way of showing up that we cannot help but be. Or, to riff off of one of the best children’s television shows EVER (and to riff off of Glăveanu and Beghetto, 2021): creativity is an experience. I am a creative experience.
It’s like I’m owning my thinking, making sense of things on my own, like my mind has shifted to another gear. There is such a huge yes inside of me as a result – it’s exciting because I’m starting to see. And now I wonder if the magic is truly in change agents or if by being internal the organization inadvertently snuffs it out. I’m almost researching how we internal change agents keep the magic alive. Because Tann (2021) makes it sound like external agents have it easier in that regard, and I’ve been both. Dang!
