The following text was written in 2003.  And though some of its particular assertions strike me now as a bit off, I still rather like it since it articulates, in a very general sense, something of the philosophical perspective that informs my work.  Most of the ideas here were inspired by work with Werner Erhard and Thomas Leonard, by my study of the work of Fernando Flores and Humberto Maturana, and by the ontological phenomenology of Martin Heidegger  Some people have enjoyed this piece, and have found it informative, so I include it here.

At the heart of creativity is a practice of continuous adaptaptation.

The world we live in is rich and complex. Many forces interacting generate situations of ambiguity that are impossible to predict or even comprehend.

We use the word "change" to describe situations that are either new or unknown to us.

Most people respond to change in one of 3 ways:

1. Pretend change doesn't happen.
2. Regard it as a "temporary" perturbation -- that things will eventually revert back to normal.
3. Try hard to "change" ourselves in order to become congruent to the particular change at hand.

Such a lexicon of response to change is founded on the beliefs

• that the world is a dangerous place;
• that safety and security is guaranteed;
• that change threatens our safety and security.

Much of what we understand about change is colored by our acceptance of 19th Century models of experience.

The 18th and 19th Century philosophical tradition have a surprisingly strong foothold on 21st Century thinking. The predominant framework still maintains a hard separation between reality and experience.

Accordingly, events which occur in the world happen "outside" of us. We register their occurance through perception, which acts as an information conduit from the world to our brain.

Many coaching and change intervention approaches promulgate this model of experience by applying the 'amoeba theory' of coaching.

According to this theory (from James Flaherty's book Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others), we effect change in others either by poking them with a pin (to get them to move away from some behavior), or by tempting them with sugar (to get them to move toward a desired behavior).

The underlying assumption is that people can be moved to change by intervening in their behavior.

By this approach, we reverse-engineer a desired set of behaviors from the outcome we want to produce.

Bonuses, threats, cajoling, and motivational seminars are among the techniques used to get people to change their behavior.

There is only one problem with this model of change: it doesn't work. >

1. It forces a response to particular change, rather than coexistence within a change culture.

2. It renders people dependent on the source of the intervention and weakens their ability to be self-generating.

3. It places the emphasis on a person's "will power" and "intention," which tends to be an unreliable source for change.

The change-by-improving-behavior model acts as a push system. It demands rather than invites. It forces people into a state of internal conflict, leading them to feel that there is something about themselves which they need to change.

But if we look at the source of motivation -- at the source of high performance -- it may be that something entirely different is going on. Something that cannot be accounted for by the traditional dualistic view of things and the change-by-improvement model which it underlies.

What we need is a different practice for action and performance ... a way of "designing occurance."

Consider the following statement:

People's behavior is in a dance with how the world is occuring.

This statement has the following implications:

1. "Occurance" has a hermeneutic aspect. That is, it is an activity of "interpretation."
2. People's behavior is not simply a matter of intention, or "will power." It is also a matter of how the world appears to be unfolding to them.
3. Trying to get people to perform better by buffing up their intentions or will power, or getting them to change their behavior, may not only be ineffective -- it may be counter-effective.

This heuristic suggests a radically different approach to change.

Rather than improving behavior:

We focus instead on designing occurance:

When people participate in the design of occurance, it becomes conceivable that people can begin to design the alteration of their behavior -- with less effort and pain.

Designing occurance involves a playful set of practices in language, systems thinking, and communication...

... of uncovering and challenging the belief systems and assumptions which inform how we think and act.

... of creating systems and practices that support creative adaptivity and experimentation.

... of re-situating the game people are in such that new approaches and patterns of behavior are elicited.

In designing occurance, we are designing a context for accelerated personal and organizational evolution.

We are no longer concerned only with setting goals and outcomes, etc.; we also become concerned with engendering people's innate ability to spontaneously and intuitively respond creatively to events as they occur for us.

Living (and working) becomes a process of continuous evolution.

Rather than responding to changes as they occur (as though they were outside of us!), we ourselves a generate change.

In otherwords, we become evolutionary.

To be evolutionary means

• to see ourselves within an ecosystem of language, practice, thinking, design, action, and relationship.
• to see that the constitution of that ecosystem is ever-changing and dynamic.
• to see that each of us is responsible for the design of that ecosystem.

Rather than managing change (and hence really trying to avoid it), we're causing it. As such, those changes to which we are "responding" are ones we ourselves generated.

Being evolutionary involves three design practices which together form a synergistic whole.

1. Environmental Design. We all live in environments. These include our physical surroundings, the tools we use, the people we interact with, those with whom we live and work, our language. They also include the ideas and information which inform our thinking and action.

To design our environments is to continuously alter those aspects of our environment such that they support our continual evolution, experimentation, and adaptation. It means designing the relationships, language, tools, information, ideas, and physical spaces within the context of which our actions are engendered.

2. Relentless Experimentation. The continuous practice of generating effects, and of observing, then responding, to the occurances which those effects generate. It is a favoring of serendipity and intuition over setting goals and careful planning. Relentless Experimentation requires a disciplined practice of Environment Design.

3. Create a Gap. Not only having a vision (a critical practice in itself), but having a vision that pulls you out toward an audacious and nearly impossible possibility. To create a gap is to create a game, the playing of which will naturally lead to mastery. However, creating a Gap turns into a cell block without the freedom and serendipity afforded by a practice of Relentless Experimentation.

The following diagram models the three practices, and how the practices benefit and feed off of one another.

Becoming highly adaptive and evolutionary involves a synergy of practices -- Environment Design, Continuous Experimentation, Create a Gap.

The result: you are able to ride the edge of chaos and order -- what some have termed chaordic. When riding that chaordic edge, you have the safety and stability of order when it is needed. At the same time, you can use chaos to inspire new thinking and action, and alter the unfolding of the world around you, which is naturally chaotic.

But you need all three practices. If you only do, say, Continuous Experimentation, without the other two, the result is often pure chaos. There is not the safety, nor the necessary friction needed for creative thinking.

Similarly, if you only work on Creating a Gap, the result is frustration and burnout. People are working too hard, because the environment is not helping them. Moreover, people often feel that they are tied to a schedule of activities that keep them from seeing the bigger picture, or having genuinely new insight.