When we draw a picture, we usually have an image in mind when we begin. We learn at an early age to think, speak, and draw in forms and patterns that both mirror our experience, and express our individual understanding of the world around us.
When we draw a picture, we usually have an image in mind when we begin. We learn at an early age to think, speak, and draw in forms and patterns that both mirror our experience, and express our individual understanding of the world around us.
A Workshop
Michelle James is a consultant who works to help people and organizations unleash their inherent creativity.
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At a recent workshop for a large group of conflict resolution professionals, Michelle had people form pairs, to spontaneously create and improvise together.
The drawing shown above was created by me, Bruce Waltuck, and my improv partner. The simple rules of engagement were that we could not talk to one another, and we took turns drawing just one line at a time. What would we create? How would we know what it should or could become? How can we know the intention of the other person? |
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Reflections
From a single circle, and step-by-step, line-by-line, the picture you see emerged. In the experience of improvisational creativity, we learned several important things:
- There is no "right or wrong" in this joint creative process. You can not make a mistake. As the late television painting instructor Bob Ross used to say, "we don't make mistakes; we have happy accidents."
- Like the mysterious realm of quantum physics, our act of observation collapses many possibilities into one reality. With each added line, my partner and I silently watched, and responded to what each other had drawn. We began with an almost infinite range of possibilities for our picture. But over time, bit by bit, we began to narrow the possibilities with our sense-making. We began to act with more intention. Even in silence, we saw a clown-like figure emerging. We could be purposefully playful in adding various details, and have growing confidence that each of us would know the other's intent, and play off of that with our own next line.
- Everyone is creative. I had never met my drawing partner before we sat together for this exercise. There was no way for either of us to know the artful expressiveness of the other. Yet we joyfully made something from nothing, together.
- There was no fear in taking a risk as we co-created.
Feeling Ahead
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In our daily lives, we frequently hold back from the full expression of our creative instincts.
We are bound by our sense of values- what we hold as important; norms- what we believe others around us expect; and all of this in the context of our relationships and trust with others.
But in the act of co-creating this simple drawing, there was no risk, and no fear.
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Bruce Waltuck, thought leader in Leadership and Change, talks about how he became interested in supporting groups of people making better decisions together. Visit I-Open's library of civic wisdom .
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But in the act of exploring new possibility, the act of creating a future together, we need have no fear.
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Author, Bruce Waltuck, M.A., Complexity, Chaos, and Creativity
President & Owner, Freethinc. . . For A Change-Services on Organizational Change, Employee and Labor Relations, Collaborative Dialogue, and Story-gathering for Insights and Action. Bruce currently serves as a Director, The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open). Box 15, 08561 Phone: Website: www.freethinc.com Now tweeting (C) 2014 Bruce Waltuck, All Rights Reserved. Non-commercial use granted to Betsey Merkel and I-Open, to be distributed under a Creative Commons license with attribution, for non-commercial use |
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