The Creative Way to Share What You Think You Know

02 Nov The Creative Way to Share What You Think You Know

I’ve traveled to several cities recently, speaking with students and faculty at different universities and introducing performance and improv to them through workshops. It ‘s always provocative and eye-opening to challenge the knowing paradigm at a university (for obvious reasons). Inviting professional knowers and knowers-to-be to perform philosophy as a new way to share what they know is something I love to do. And I’m always somewhat saddened to experience how foreign this kind of thinking/speaking is for them. I like to think our work-play together makes a little kink in their epistemological armor. It’s one way I can use my skills to tap into their tremendous creativity.

Which leads me to share a few paragraphs from my book The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better world. (Have you shared a copy with a friend yet?)

What’s needed to grow, to become, to transform our culture, politics and institutions, to make a better world are ways for human beings to exercise our creative power. I’m not talking here of you, me, Steve Jobs or Mozart making something special—original, novel, unique, and perhaps extraordinary or extraordinarily significant—and being ordained as a “creative person.” That’s the dominant understanding of creativity. No surprise that this understanding reflects and perpetuates the cultural assumptions that place the individual center stage and products as what’s of value.

As these assumptions are challenged, so too is that understanding of creativity (and I’m by far not the only one who’s doing the challenging). Rather than being a trait of certain individuals, we challengers see creativity all around us. We see creativity as a social phenomenon, a relational process, and one of the most important ways human beings give expression to our connection with each other, with the natural environment, and with the cultural artifacts (things and ideas) that—yes, we created. People, in all kinds and sizes of groupings across centuries, created the computer I’m writing with, the print or e-reader screen you’re reading, the very words that are appearing, the modes of exchange that connect us. Every single thing you can see in front of you at this very moment is evidence of the human creative process.

And so is how you see these things and what you understand them to be. We create meanings, conceptions, systems, structures, understandings. And one of the most non-developmentalways of understanding that human beings have created is the one that blocks out the human social-historical process that created the meanings, conceptions, systems and so on. We’re left with unmoored understandings and definitions and “that’s what and how things are,” which then govern what we do and how we relate. The individualized, product-oriented understanding of creativity was itself a human creation. The irony is that this very understanding we created keeps us from exercising our immense capacity to create