Dancing with the tensions #1
A collection of readings, musings and inspiration from my explorations into the tension between unfocused thinking and focused making.
In my last post, I introduced a new newsletter series featuring curated content around sets of tensions that I am dancing with. As is often the case, as soon as I committed to the work, I started an intense project and life became busy. The good news is that once I had the framework for the first tension, I found it was present almost every day…the dance happens slow and steady.
So I've been collecting and assembling the patterns as I go along. And now that I have an initial collection of signals and links, I am sitting down to write the first edition of the "Dancing with the Tensions" series.
This week, I will be writing about the tension between creation and distraction, of focused making and unfocused thinking. Setting out, even the process of this has been about stepping into the unfocused thinking space, going in mind wide open, following the beat, listening for signals, catching snippets throughout the day...just chasing that melody. And now as I sit to put it into a somewhat coherent format, I shift into another rhythm, a more focused making mode.
One of the more familiar situations to help think about this tension may be the experience of working towards a big presentation or deliverable with a hard deadline. I recently gave a presentation at a conference, and the preparation phase of creating the content and working with the organizers was stretched over an extended period of time. The whole journey included wide explorations and inspiration gathering as well as heads-down time of writing the storyline, the content, building the presentation, and rehearsing the content. But it all culminates in an endpoint of very focused making and sharing.
I am not a natural public speaker; I don't love giving presentations, and I feel the weight of anxiety before presenting to a live audience big time. But then, there is a huge sense of relief after the presentation. As soon as it's done, I feel like I can think more clearly again, which in turn gives me a sense of creativity. I suddenly feel open, and I crave time for lingering in the liminal. The weeks leading up to the presentation, my brain feels closed to inputs. On my daily walks, I choose instrumental music because even familiar lyrics and stories feel too overwhelming. During these phases, I don't seek out new shows, books, or music to explore.
After the presentation, however, my brain is open, and I am hungry for inputs...I seek out new podcasts, music and art. I find myself diving into deep rabbit holes with enthusiasm. So during the phase of focused making, it felt like the music had been paused, and everything had stopped - and as soon as that phase was done, it's as if someone pushed Play, and I was able to step into the rhythm and melody and enjoy the dance.
It's a process of pressure and release, and it's circular, as the release from the previous phase opens up the space for the next phase of the process...
For me, the process of working towards an output or that point of release is often where important learnings emerge - the tensions between the wide-open exploration and the focus on that output. Especially now, as we all embrace or grapple with the developments in AI, I think about what we lose when we skip the process of focus and release, the work, the thinking, the explorations, the journey towards that output. The process of reading, writing, talking, sharing, thinking - if we skip that and go from prompt straight to output, we miss out on the gift of dancing in this tension between unfocused thinking and focused making.
I've been collecting the treasures from my journey through this tension in a Miro board. So in addition to sharing the signals and inputs below, I will also share my messy working space and make the board public here. I'd love to hear if and how the format of the Miro board vs. the more linear list of signals resonate with you or if either prompted something for you.
For this exploration, I didn't go in with a clear idea for a structure. As I started mapping out my treasures and trinkets on the board, I began to think about a spectrum from chaos to order and what this could mean for how I think about "chaos". I took it as an opportunity to reframe chaos as part of this process into something positive and important, as fertile soil for new things to grow and be seeded. My background is in qualitative research, so I've always loved the "beautiful mess". I cherish the liminal space between collecting insights and signals as we work our way towards identifying trends and sensing clear themes emerging. I not only value but enjoy that process.
This led me to anchor my explorations around "unfocused thinking" in the benefits of wandering and the value of imagination. I think a lot of this is the inner journey, and I can set that in tension with the focused making and taking action as the outer journey.
This additional dimension of the inner vs outer journey is something that is present, but I haven't quite put my finger on how it relates fully. As I mapped out my signals, a connection started to emerge to the value of community and connection to others (people and ideas) and how that is an important link between the inner and outer journey. (I have a whole separate post brewing here...something about public writing as bread-crumbing for my future self and writing as a process or tool to find and connect with others on a journey...but that is for another time.)
For now, I'll leave you with the signals, readings, and snippets I've found along the way - sorted by the arch of tension within which they sit...
Unfocused Thinking: chaos, reflection & dreaming (the inner journey)
“Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.” Bertrand Russell
Boredom
”Oh, it’s critical. Boredom is everything, man. I think our loss of boredom in contemporary society is one of the greatest, weirdest, ambient losses. It is one of these things that’s hard to quantify the value of. And we’ve lost it so completely and totally that we very rarely have moments to even re-experience it, unless you do so intentionally. And so for me, yeah the boredom of these walks is, I would say, 50% of the value of it. It’s forcing yourself into a place where you’re not teleporting mentally.”
Solitude, the act of creating and art
Anthony Storr in The Integrity of the Personality
People often express the idea that they are most themselves when they are alone; and creative artists especially may believe that it is the ivory tower of the solitary expression of their art that their innermost being finds its completion. They forget that art is communication, and that, implicitly or explicitly, the work which they produce in solitude is aimed at somebody.
Internet Art, specifically the Simple Net Art Diagram, a 1997 work by Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden:
Katherine Dee on how our culture interferes with the act of creating
"Unfortunately in our society, people have chosen not to be well-informed about art. we are taught to make it some big holy unapproachable thing with a big A and those of us who are not scared shitless of it, look upon the work of imagination as a suspect activity. We do the same thing with play. People who are engaged in professions that center around the exploration of play or art are put into a box that is somewhat similar to the condition of those people who, a long time ago, were “not received”. The child of this attitude is the assumption that anybody who throws any piece of shit up on a wall has, in some way, created a work of art. I don’t agree with that. Not everybody can create art although I think that everyone has the innate capacity to do so. Our culture does not support the desire or passion to make. Our culture actively interferes with making: it sets up white noise, it discourages the inner journey, it dislikes observation, and it is suspicious of people who live non-standard lives."
Gwendolyn Brooks on art and the urge to venture out into the unknown
“Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home”
Wandering, walking and “wasting time”
Hans Ulrich Obrist sums up Discovery
“Discovery is what you do when you do not know what you are doing.”
Against busyness. Walking, the journey, the process by Rebecca Solnit
“Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic. Here this history begins to become part of the history of the imagination and the culture, of what kind of pleasure, freedom, and meaning are pursued at different times by different kinds of walks and walkers.”
Bonnie Tsui reminds us that
“You are doing something important when you aren’t doing anything. We need to rest, to read, to reconnect. It is the invisible labor that makes creative life possible.”
Liminality, not-knowing & in-betweeness
Paul Millerd, the Pathless Path on risk and antifrgagility
“In addition to identifying who we don't want to become, we should seek to identify ways of working and living that might add unnecessary risk to our path. Early in my journey, I identified being a freelancer and having a single type of income as a key risk. This motivated me to try to make money in as many ways as possible, even if it meant sacrificing short term income to do so. I was inadvertently embracing a principle that professor Nassim Taleb calls "antifragility." Antifragility is a well-documented natural phenomenon in which things gain strength through disorder. For example, cities are antifragile. While individual businesses in a city may fail in an individual year, the city thrives over the long-term, fueled by new residents, buildings, and businesses.”
Vaughn Tan talks about the connection of not-knowing and producing meaningful new information
"Because art practice is not primarily functional, it is one of the settings in which humans most clearly create meaningful information. The connection to not-knowing is that it is a necessary precondition for producing meaningful new information."
And he describes living well despite not-knowing as a way to be in our increasingly uncertain realities.
“Learning how to live on and live well in spite of not-knowing is a path to surviving and flourishing in an increasingly uncertain world. The problem is that we’re poorly prepared to even understand not-knowing, let alone know how to respond to it. We urgently need better tools for thinking and action in situations of not-knowing.”
I’ve also written about my experience of in-betweeness.
”I now find that my strengths are rooted in my in-betweeness - my ability to sit with discomfort, the unknown, the "fuzzy" stuff, to question my own philosophies and deeply held believes - to see them outside of myself, to question the status quo and to always aim to be brave enough to ask the questions that truly do. The ability to lean into this sense of otherness and being an outsider as a source for seeking understanding of the "other." A drive towards not answers but more questions, to understanding things as part of complex, connected systems rather than independent events and to consider multiple viewpoints as valid and connected instead of separate and opposing.”
JJJJJerome Ellis talked about not-knowing and the importance of leaving space for unknowing.
“It goes back to unknowing for me. Part of what I struggle with in different ways with our instant culture is that I want there to be space for unknowing, space to say, “I don’t know,” space to say, “I’m waiting,” space to say “I’m working on it.”
Play
James P. Carse in Finite and Infinite Games talks about the different mindsets in finite and infinite players:
“Finite players strive to dominate through winning, while infinite players strive to coexist through playing”
Matt Haig on the act of learning in Notes on a Nervous Planet:
“To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvellous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.”
Allen Pike reflects on the value of play
“When work – in all its forms – pushes out play, we slowly lose ourselves. We burn out.”
and David Graeber talks about play as
“the ultimate expression of freedom for its own sake.”
Erik H Erikson in Childhood and Society, on the power of play:
“The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.”
Scholé / Serious Play
Justin Murphy in Otherlife talks about Scholé
“The ability to produce great work is not dependent on popularity or remuneration, but rather on the capacity to engage in deep thinking and generous, fearless, joyful experimentation. You simply cannot measure your success by likes or followers or money in the bank. You can reliably measure your success by how often you are consistently exercising genuine creative freedom. Rewards will follow, eventually, but only if you write them off at first. One must be capable of serious play—scholé—to produce meaningful work. Scholé is maintained by satisficing on finances, decreasing dependence on social and political institutions, and ruthlessly protecting a certain amount of time every week to think, read, and write.”
Courage, vulnerability, trust
Dr Eve Ewing on challenging our idea of failure
"Small failures and confusion, I think, are really generative”
Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens a brief history of human kind
“There is poetic justice in the fact that a quarter of the world, and two of its seven continents, are named after a little-known Italian whose sole claim to fame is that he had the courage to say, 'We don't know.’”
Listen to Frank Turner’s Journey of the Magi
Now Odysseus sat tired and alone
He'd always held out against all the doubts he would come home
Now he was here, his soul felt estranged
His wife and his dog, his son and his gods, everything changed.
He sang, "I could have stayed and ruled
As an Ithacan prince, could've played safe
But in the end the journey's brought joys
That outweigh the pain
Intuition
Donella Meados’ Dancing with Systems reminds us of the importance of bringing our humanity, including our intuition, to bear:
“Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity–our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.”
JJJJJerome Ellis talked about embracing blocks as opportunities
“Some of the decisions that I have made towards this creative path have been a matter of following. Following not just what gives me bliss, which is so often making music, but also following my curiosities, following my intuition, following where I think there’s maybe an opportunity to make money or make a living, and following other people who I admire. It’s also about following my stutter”
I’ve written about the importance of taking guidance from our experiences and letting the path reveal itself.
“The journey is the destination. This is our guide, our flashlight illuminating all the possible paths. This is the work, how we navigate and grow through it all. As in: this too shall reveal new paths. Maybe it’s more about how we live those moments as the paths reveal themselves…how we respond and adjust…it’s a circular flow of inputs and outputs, a combinations of intuitive sensing and clear-headed action, our principles doing the tango with our responsiveness to the changing currents and emerging signals?”
Seeing, imagination, wonder
Ursula K. Le Guin, in The Left Hand of Darkness says
“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
In the real world of technology, Ursula Franklin contemplates social imagination and reminds us to imagine “the far” as much as “the near”…
“This is why I have a sense of urgency to map the real world of technology, so that we might see how in our social imagination the near is disadvantaged over the far. We should also understand that this does not have to be so.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet
“Perhaps it requires of you precisely this existential anxiety in order to begin. Precisely these days of transition are perhaps the period when everything in you is working..”
And of course, a great reminder to simply run a line around your think
Inner journeys: paths run through people
Robert Macfarlane on Landscape as a Lens on Inner Life
“Paths run through people as surely as they run through places… I have long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it. Landscape, to borrow George Eliot’s phrase, can “enlarge the imagined range for self to move in.”
Community, collaboration, connection
Isabel of Mindmine talks about compatibility and connection or relationships as a function of self-exploration
“We concluded that everyone has a certain number of “layers of depth” to them. These layers quantify how deeply someone has gone inwards—how deeply you know yourself. More layers = more self-knowledge and understanding. The most important aspect of compatibility—or, how “deep” the connection can go is: do you have the same number of layers? Every layer you connect with someone on gives you a jolt of resonance, bringing you closer to each other.”
She also talks about crushes as misplaced ambition and what the people we're drawn to tell us about ourselves:
“And crushes are such a perfect container to encapsulate this desire for more. Because you can see someone right in front of you, living out that ambition that you have. Maybe they're as successful as you'd like to be one day, or as thoughtful, or as close with their family, or as creative, or as interesting and well-read. Whatever you might want to see more of from yourself is highly correlated with the qualities that the people we tend to crush on possess.”
In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna J. Haraway:
“argues and tries to perform that, eschewing futurism, staying with the trouble is both more serious and more lively. Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles.”
I‘ve talked about shared learning spaces as a way to learn out in the open - together, including at PWDR conference earlier this year.
Of course, this idea that Twitter - and public banter - can act as
Focused Making: order & action (the outer journey)
Listen to: Let the process be the payoff by Star Slinger while you scroll.
Learning, process & tension in learning
In Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary, Dan Hill distinguishes between good and bad failure and what that may mean for learning and non-learning systems.
“There is good failure and bad failure. The former is failure that enables a system to learn, becoming more resilient, more adept. The latter is exhibited within a non-learning system. Are these non-learning systems due to their fundamentally out-of-control characteristics, systems whose complexity has grown beyond our comprehension and capability? Or is it simply that policy is too dislocated from its realisation?”
Howard Gray of Wavetable talks about the magic of tension in learning:
“Cliffhangers - and more specifically the tension created - are the moment where there are more questions than answers. When we sit on the edge of shifting from one feeling to another. When we don’t quite know what will happen next. Learning is no different. Effective learning always creates tension. There are moments when you become aware of a cliffhanger - that there’s something you don’t know. These moments happen just before you learn something - just before the tension is released.”
Simon Sarris talks about learning as the consequence of doing.
"The secret of the world is that it is a very malleable place, we must be sure that people learn this, and never forget the order: Learning is naturally the consequence of doing."
Joseph Jebelli in How the Mind Changed: A Human History of Our Evolving Brain says:
“Although learning exists in the simplest animals, human learning is thought to have driven our brains' evolution forward by invoking something called the Baldwin effect. Named after the psychologist James Mark Baldwin, who described it in 1896, the theory says that individual learning enhances the overall learning of our species.”
In The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin reminds us to consider the link between knowledge and experience.
“We hear much less about the human and social effects of the separation of knowledge from experience that is inherent in any scientific approach. These effects are quite widespread and I think they can be serious and debilitating from a human point of view.”
FKA Twigs on Touching the veil:
“After a lifetime of never quite finding my place in company I now realise that my true home is in practice and the learning of new skills. if one day I completely disappear, I am not gone, I am just in a safe space somewhere, learning something new and touching the veil.”
This echos when Louis Pasteur said
“I am on the edge of mysteries and the veil is getting thinner and thinner”
Roman V Yampolskiy published The Universe of Minds which includes a survey of mind design taxonomies and this figure of the universe of possible minds:
Knowledge management
A random collection of frameworks and systems for managing and organizing our thoughts, knowledge and tools
John Unger on the balance in a workspace between chaos and order, specifically with messy materials and organized tools:
“My rule is— keep your tools very organized so you can find them. Let the materials cross pollinate in a mess. Some pieces of art I made were utter happenstance where a couple items came together in a pile and the piece was mostly done. But if you can’t lay your hands right on the tool you need, you can blow a day (or your enthusiasm/inspiration) seeking it.”
Ted Nelson, in Dream Machines speaks about the importance of having structure and accessibility in the tangle of ideas and materials:
“Knowledge then - and indeed most of our civilization and what remains of those previous - is a vast cross-tangle of ideas and evidential materials, not a pyramid of truth. So that preserving its structure, and improving its accessibility, is important to us all.”
Zettelkasten is a tool for managing our thinks and our written words.
“A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thought possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection.”
In the publication Software Development and Reality Construction, one of the authors Heinz argues that:
“Knowledge, then, neither exists merely in a person’s head, nor is it contained – independently of people – in a document. Knowledge is a social entity, manifested in “external memories”. But it then depends on human individuals who have their own thoughts about it. Incidentally, this is also in keeping with hermeneutic ideas.”
Utility, story and planning
Dan Harmon's Story circle, which describes three acts:
Act I: The order you know, Act II: Chaos (the upside-down) and Act III: The new order.
Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind points to Francis Bacon’s manifesto and utility as a test for truth, not knowledge:
“In 1620 Francis Bacon published a scientific manifesto titled The New Instrument. In it he argued that 'knowledge is power'. The real test of 'knowledge' is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.”
The Epistemology of Plex:
Only that which is known-by-definition is known -- by definition.
On “planning ahead”
Public writing and building out in the open
Tom Critchlow pins down the value of writing in public in an open-ended more casual way - small b-blogging: Writing, Riffs & Relationships
“Riffs make your writing small. People’s first instinct with content is to try and make it polished and closed. To be useful by solving something or creating the ultimate guide to something. Those pieces of content can be good - but they’re very hard to write, and even harder to write well! Instead I prefer to take a more inquisitive and open-ended approach. I call this small-b blogging”
In the same spirit, the Live learning review with John Cutler and Dan from DoubleLoop is a great example for learning together and building in public.
Seedlings by Johannes Kleske is a personal micro-blog, in which he describes this space as
a place to “expose thoughts to sunlight”.
The term “OBEYA originated from a long history of learning & improving.
The Obeya can be understood as a team spirit improvement tool at an administrative level. Often associated in product development, an Obeya room can also be a place for software development, a command center, managing new business strategy, workflow and project management. This tool forces people to work together without distractions and creates a great atmosphere to generate new ideas. Conceptually akin to a traditional "war room", an Obeya will contain visually engaging charts and graphs depicting such information as program timing, milestones and progress-to-date and countermeasures to existing technical or scheduling issues.
Miraheze is a tool for building in public!
Modes instead of niches - go wide but with focus
In the Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says
“I suppose part of the reason—in addition to his genius—was that Rank’s thought always spanned several fields of knowledge; when he talked about, say, anthropological data and you expected anthropological insight, you got something else, something more. Living as we do in an era of hyperspecialization we have lost the expectation of this kind of delight; the experts give us manageable thrills—if they thrill us at all.”
Paul Millerd advises us to think about modes, instead of niches:
“Niches can’t be aimed at. They only reveal themselves over time. This is why the most practical thing you can do is to “find a mode” that enables you to stay in the game.” Paul Millerd
Rob Hardy on the perils of niching down
“The problem with niche strategy, in a nutshell, is that it's a reliable destroyer of the human spirit. (…) Niche strategy, which is often presented as the best way to achieve 1,000 true fans, is a short game. It excels at producing immediate, observable results. It's the perfect approach for people who crave maximum control and certainty. Niche strategy is an effective anesthetic for those parts of ourselves that squirm and scream when confronted with ambiguity and doubt, those parts that are too impatient and scared to play long games. The inner dictator loves niches. They're one hell of a painkiller for the anxiety-ridden creative mind.”
Productivity vs busyness & “the downstream of messing around”
Of course, this famous quote by C.S. Lewis
“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.” C.S. Lewis
Anne-Laure Le Cunff wrote about the illusion of productivity
“It doesn’t seem that groundbreaking at first, but the implications are profound: as humans, we will tend to do whatever it takes and to use any justification to keep busy, even if the task is meaningless. In the words of the scientists behind the study: “Our research suggests that many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy.”
And Visakan Veerasamy ‘s timely reminder that we often need a focal point to discover the periphery and that focused making benefits from unfocused thinking…and vice versa.
Here is to the downstream benefits of screwing around ‘unproductively’ and enjoying the dance…
That’s it, friends…for now,
Lena