creative intelligence and its application to
DESCRIPTION
CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE AND ITS APPLICATION TOENTREPRENEURIAL OPPORTUNITY AND ETHICSContemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice Vol. 4, No. 1. 2012TRANSCRIPT
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Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice
Volume 4(1), 2012, pp. , ISSN 1948-9137
CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE AND ITS APPLICATION TO
ENTREPRENEURIAL OPPORTUNITY AND ETHICS
MURRAY HUNTER
Centre for Communication & Entrepreneurship
University Malaysia Perlis
ABSTRACT. This paper begins with a review of major issues facing society today,
observing how difficult they are to solve. After a review of the nature of the
environment, introducing the concepts of relatedness and influence of time and
space on innovation, thinking, cognition, intelligence, and creativity, the metaphoric
concept of creative intelligence is postulated. The elements of creative intelligence
are described along with other supporting elements like prior knowledge,
imagination, energy, and awareness. The role of creative intelligence in developing
entrepreneurial opportunities and solving ethical problems is then discussed.
Keywords: Environment, relatedness, cognition, imagination, energy, intelligence,
creativity, creative intelligence, awareness, entrepreneurial opportunity, ethics.
“Hard imaginative thinking has not increased so as to keep pace with
the expansion and complications of human societies and organizations”
H.G. Wells1
1. Introduction
On the face of current events one could be excused for thinking that we are
facing a crisis in creativity and original thinking.2 The absence of derived
new meanings from the environment is leading to a vacuum in the
emergence of new philosophies. Generation Y appears to be on a sojourn of
self discovery for meaning. Technology has created a dual economy made
up of exploited unskilled assembly workers on one side and wealthy
consumers on the other. The North-South divide is as wide as ever. We are
not sure whether the economic downturns of late are a cyclic phenomena or
whether there is something structurally wrong with the system itself. Many
decisions institutions within society has made achieved counterintuitive
10
results, where the opposite to what was desired has occurred, i.e., the
restriction of narcotics and enforcement has produced a large underground
industry with a high cost of enforcement. There are so many potential crises
in the world today without apparent solutions (see table 1.), highlighting a
great discrepancy between these issues and our ability to solve them.
Some are calling upon our past growth paradigms to be re-evaluated due
to growing resource scarcity, our damaging effect upon the environment,
and the inability of the economic system to make reallocation adjustments
to account for rapid depletion of hydrocarbon resources.3 As we move from
elite to mass education, students primarily attend universities as a means to
gain a more lucrative career, rather than intellectual enrichment4, Our level
of knowledge is doubling every five years, yet our understanding about the
workings, interrelationships and co-dependence within the environment is
still apparently lacking.
We think in predictable ways5 rationalized in one dimensionality
6,
where idea originality is scarce. Problems that don’t fit into our socio-
political worldview are downplayed, ignored, or even abnegated existence
because of our prevailing biases, vested interests and/or the fear of moving
to new viewpoints and positions. Most often, politically embedded national
agendas prescribe our solutions without giving the opportunity to reflect or
develop new insights. For example, nationalist sentiment, strict border
control, and immigration laws hinder the redistribution of labor migration
from areas where there are acute levels of poverty and unemployment to
areas where there are chronic labor shortages. Positive thinking has become
a form of social control, where dissent is brushed aside and labeled as
pessimism. Our optimistic outlook to the affairs of the world is a delusion of
willful ignorance, reducing our vigilance, and contributing to the creation of
a blind and powerless society.7 Future solutions will depend upon the
ability of humans to escape this moral callousness and think creatively
outside our existing patterning, and predisposed paradigms of thought.
2. Domains, Reductionism and Paths
In the Victorian era scientists began to divide fields into narrow and
protected domains with their own vocabularies, hierarchies, and elites; thus
cementing tightly bounded beliefs into respective disciplines. The
predominating metaphor of these disciplines has been that of the machine,
clockwork, precision, and predictability, reflected in the precision of
mathematics and quantitative theories. The goal of science was to reduce
the world into understandable parts in order to reduce our sense of
uncertainty and anxiousness. The development of these academic domains
where expert specialization takes place has led to little increased creativity
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and original thinking. In fact specialization has seemed to hinder
innovation.8
Many massive engineering developments like the building of the
Hoover Dam, the development of the atomic bomb, and the space program
were not based on science as much as they have been based upon
engineering reductionism.9 Potential new breakthroughs in specific
domains are often resisted by discipline centered experts committed to
established reductionist views based on the models they work from. Some
discipline premises were totally incorrect. For example, economics
preached individualism and decentralized markets, yet our security and
prosperity has been largely the result of collective action to eradicate
disease, promote science, develop critical infrastructure and, provide
widespread education.10
The tools of trade are usually too selective to allow
the big picture to be seen, becoming the ‘rose colored glasses’ of perceptual
and discipline-centric domain imprisonment.11
This can be very clearly seen in the parable of a king who invited a
group of blind men to identify an elephant shows that our understanding is
based on perspective. One feels the tail and says it is a rope. Another grabs
the leg and says it is a pillar. Another feels the side and says it’s a wall.
Another felt the head and said it was a water jug, and so on.
Real science and the development of new knowledge are based on
simple experiments to test hypotheses, more like creative art. As a
consequence the advancement of science is unpredictable. Gathering
intelligent individuals together is not the answer to creating breakthroughs.
Without the element of creativity there is unlikely to be any major
breakthroughs, as we see in so many organizations today.12
Reductionist tools like mathematics and geometry have great difficulty
in explaining everyday occurrences like the operation of a steam value, a
tennis game, riding a bicycle, and catching a ball as there is the element of
chaos (not to be confused with crisis) and unpredictability in any
phenomenon. One can develop complex wave equations but never really
know exactly what is going to happen. Reductionism relies upon linear
perfectionism which doesn’t exist. Even the earth’s rotation is not exact.
Our perfectionist time systems must be regularly adjusted to account for
nature’s imperfection.13
We try to think about the world in a linear way
where the world really behaves in non-linear ways. Most events need to
unfold along particular paths, something that cannot be controlled.
Evolution is an unplanned process.
Table 1. Some of the major complex problems facing the World today
Antibiotics European credit and
currency crisis
Racism
China-Taiwan relations Floods Rising food prices
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Climate change and
global warming
Guantanamo Rising unemployment
Corruption Hate Soil salinity and erosion
Counterfeit medicine Labor shortages Spratly Islands
Decaying infrastructure Migration (Understanding)
sustainability of agriculture
Decline of biodiversity Ozone depletion within
the ionosphere
Urban sprawls
(overdevelopment)
Decline of coastal
fishery stocks
Population growth War and regional conflict
Energy Poverty Water scarcity and
management
Very few humans tend to think far beyond their familiar geographical
territory and immediate future. The majority of our everyday ‘thought flow’
tends to be negative and could reasonably be described as ‘cognitive
garbage’, consisting of random thoughts that lack any substance to be of
any usefulness. We muddle through basing our thinking on unquestioned
patterning influenced by past behavior, beliefs shaped by myths and even
superstitions we gather. Much of what we actually think and do is a
progression and culmination of a series of previous ideas that define the
pathways we follow. Where original ideas were ‘poor ones’, all following
decisions along the defined path will lead to less than ‘optimal’ situations
that eventually accumulate and could lead to a disaster – metaphorically like
drifting into a dark tunnel with no way out. This is reflected in the way the
world economy is being managed, present approaches to poverty
eradication, the history of abandoned medical practices found to be
ineffective, current unsustainable farming practices, poor resource
management,14
and disastrous approaches to river irrigation, coastal
fisheries management,15
and water sharing across major world waterways.16
The decisions we make are primarily dependent upon the context and
circumstances of a particular time and place. For example many countries
focused on national development to promote domestic industries after the
Second World War and started their own automobile industries as an import
replacement strategy. Contemporary development theories at the time
advocated import replacement strategies to assist a developing country save
foreign exchange and create employment17
. However industry protection
measures over time created industrial inefficiency which led to high
domestic prices for automobiles, the inability to create sources of
competitive advantage, with little ability to compete with the rest of the
world. Firms in these import replacement industries struggled to survive and
many industries closed down completely. An import substitution policy
initially brought economic growth, but the industrial base it created became
a basis for economic rigidity and stagnation later on. Management theory
13
over the years has also been value laden providing fixed paradigms that
brought particular types of results, i.e., scientific management, Theory Y,
TQM, Industrial democracy, Re-engineering and lean production
techniques. A good decision at one time based on contemporary theories at
the time can become a poor decision at a later time. The contexts, situations,
circumstances, and benchmarks for judging decisions change, thus
creativity is paramount to society to enable flexibility and dynamism
according to changing economic structures and conditions, i.e., the ability to
break out of rigid paradigms.
Creativity embodies the concept of utility, one of the pillars of classical
economics,18
and is more important than ever before as traditional sources
of growth and prosperity are drying up. From an integrated global
perspective, progress in the future will not be about crude wealth formation,
but more about selected growth, redistribution, and stabilization in selected
regions around the globe, much more complex than fostering crude growth,
requiring coordination on a global scale that has never seen before.
3. Thinking, Creativity, and Society
Our understanding of creativity and thinking has been drastically enhanced
through emerging ideas within the biology, genetics, neuroscience, and
evolutionary psychology disciplines. The advent of functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) and position-emission tomography (PET) which
can measure cerebral blood flow in the brain through sensing magnetic
signals or low level radiation respectively to determine brain activity levels
have greatly deepened our understanding of the cognitive processes
involved.19
Quite remarkably, the cognitive process has many similarities
with computer information processing steps of acquisition, storage,
retrieval, processing, data organization and artificial intelligence structures20
leading to the computer metaphor in the science of cognition.
All our religious doctrines, political ideologies, economic philosophies,
management theories, and technology applications are based on our
collective beliefs and values. Political philosophies of the last century have
been based upon our primal fears of elimination or aspirations about a
defined image of what the future should be, and traditional religious
theologies brought hope of immortality through the promise of forgiveness
of our guilt and an afterlife. We are part of the environment and define it
through our experience, needs, beliefs, values, biases, and motivations.
The paradigm of knowledge has shifted from something seen as factual
and absolute, to a contextual nature. Philosophers and psychologists of the
20th
century changed our conceptuality of knowledge in a massive shift
from the predictable Newtonian order centered on absolute identities of the
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past. Our metaphor of understanding and explaining the environment has
transcended from a detached to an embodied view. Knowledge is a relative
construction, where for example, a coastal foreshore area can be understood
as a hinterland of resources by a geologist, a backdrop for a landscape scene
by a painter, a potential location for settlement by explorers, a place for
children to play, and a romantic place to walk by couples; all deriving
meaning through context, need, aspiration, and experience. There is now
acceptance that the environment embodies multiple realities where meaning
is based upon the context of individual and society.
The importance of creativity can be explained through the metaphor of
the universe as a medium full of drifting matter where distribution and form
changes over time. The universe evolved from being a homogenous
environment of dust particles to becoming a complex haphazard
environment where matter has condensed to form galaxies, clusters, and
super-clusters. Evolution is thus a series of time phased transitions from one
form of matter to another under the influence of energy,21
Therefore the key
to evolution is the ability to reconfigure new combinations of information to
create new knowledge, enacted by energy (discussed later), within our
available resources and capabilities to fit what the environment will accept.
This is creativity.
Creativity and intelligence are two very different cognitive qualities.
Intelligence is more a characteristic and promotes paradigm specific
convergent thinking. Creativity on the other hand is a process and operates
divergently,22
more relevant in finding solutions to problems and
developing new ideas. Creative thinking through various thinking styles
connecting and restructuring information is the process that develops new
combinations of knowledge that manifest new ideas, inventions, and
innovations,23
New ideas must be accepted by peers to catalyze the progression of
society. Sometimes the acceptance of new ideas may take a long period of
time. The delays in acceptance may occur because the significance of some
ideas may not be fully appreciated at the time. The theories of flight and
aerodynamics were not understood until the Wright Brothers found meaning
and significance through experimentation based upon trial and error.
Moreover inventions like Dunlop’s tire may be lost to the world if there is
no apparent immediate application. The tire was only reinvented when an
immediate application (the bicycle and automobile) existed.
What constitutes creativity and original thinking can be very subjective.
There is great argument about whether new ideas and inventions constitute
progress and what simply advocate change for change’s sake or solves
problems people never knew they had. The additional apps and features
built into new mobile phone models are probably not going to advance
society in any way, but may appeal to consumer emotions. Creativity can be
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distinguished from fad creation, where creativity should incorporate new
visions.
The consequences of creativity may only be discovered some time in the
future. The moving of polluting industries out of Europe to Asia in the
1990s was originally seen as an advantageous move by European
manufacturers in lowering production costs and escaping stringent
environmental regulations within the EU,24
but the consequences of this
were not fully appreciated by policy makers at the time. The absence of
these industries has drastically eroded the EU’s tax base and contributed to
higher unemployment levels.25
The application of creativity is primarily concerned with adaption to a
changing environment. Creativity is culturally, geographically, and
emotionally bound. It is also situational, and time phased. Creativity and
original thinking is concerned with technology, organization, social
disposition and the ethical aspects of our lives. This is an important trait for
a firm to posses in order for it to survive within a dynamic environment.26
The top companies on the “500-lists” in 2020 will most likely be
companies that we don’t even know today. Adaptation is grounded on
adopting new understandings that lead to new meanings that turn the
imagination into the explicit which can be acted upon to create value to
society. Testimony to the failure to adapt is the number of firms that drop
off the “500-lists” into bankruptcy, and the number of firms that rise in
times of recession, replacing failed companies on the “500-lists”.27
Creativity facilitates change and enables evolution within society.
Unlike analytical thinking, creativity and the resulting ideas are rarely
constructed upon tangible evidence and information. It’s an intuitive
process and flourishes at the edge where there is the potential for change.
Creativity is the very catalyst of new knowledge itself, resulting in a new
ideas, inventions, technologies, or business models that translate into
change of society. Creative thinking must therefore transcend the thought
boundaries that society has defined; otherwise society will remain static.
4. Complex Systems and Our Thinking Approaches
The environment is part of a larger system, which is part of a larger system,
which is part of a larger system constituting the ever changing ambiguous
medium that we are immersed within. W. Brian Arthur postulated that
complex systems have three important characteristics.28
Firstly complex
systems grow in co-evolutionary diversity where different entities compete
and collaborate in ever diversified activities, some surviving, while others
perish. Secondly, complex systems are on a continual path of structural
deepening where entities will increase in complexity, and thirdly complex
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systems act as ‘capturing software’ where entities interact with other
entities giving birth to new entities, objects, and events. These three
processes work continuously creating new phenomena where actions are not
totally predictable, e.g., the equities market, human immune system, etc.
Consequently the environment continually reorganizes itself to higher
degrees of complexity, capacity, and meaning, through independent but
interrelated actions, while each entity maintains its own identity and
redefines itself according to the changing requirements of the environment.
Opportunities can be recognized in the market through discovery,29
or
constructed through developing a concept over time30
through actions in the
real world.31
This approach sees opportunity creation much the same as the
process of creating new knowledge, a social construction that makes sense
out of the environment.32
The market system can metaphorically be compared to the ebb and flow
of a tide. The market environment is a culmination of time, place,
technology, society, government, suppliers, customers, and competitors. It’s
an emerging system where new entities, business models, inventions, and
ideas spin off the ‘ebb and flow’ of the possible.33
Entrepreneurial
opportunities exist as rocks uncovered by the ‘ebb and flow’ of the tide. It is
a dynamic construct, a result of the continually interacting elements of the
market system. One invention or innovation may provide a platform for a
host of other innovations to spring into existence just like the railways in
America catalyzed the potentiality of many new industries that fostered
economic growth in the late 1800s and the internet that did the same in the
late 1990s. Innovation drives emergence and maintains the sturdiness of the
market system, continually changing the market structure. The market
structure being the skeleton of the market system could be metaphorically
described as shifting sands along a coastline, regularly eroded by the tide,
molded by the winds, and left with impressions of the footprints of animals,
people, and tracks of vehicles that pass over it.
The market structure consists of companies undertaking various
activities, transport infrastructure, supply chains, distribution points,
bookkeeping systems, money, institutions facilitating exchange, regulatory
bodies, and consumers. The structure is a complex web of reciprocal
relationships where each part relies on the rest of the market structure for
existence; i.e., the market structure cannot exist without each component
and each component cannot exist without the market structure. Existence is
relative to the existence of other entities within the market structure, i.e.,
products cannot exist without the means of exchange, transport, and vice
versa.
The concept of relatedness applies to everything. Man doesn’t have a
masculine self identity until he is in proximity to a woman and vice versa.
Without males and females being side by side together there is no gender
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awareness. Although being male and female is biological, the gendered self
is determined learning in childhood and the feelings we develop over our
growth and development.34
Likewise Pluto was considered a planet until
2006, an equal member alongside the other eight planets within our solar
system until many other similar objects of similar magnitude to Pluto were
discovered within the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is now controversially described as
a dwarf planet due to the new set of relationships known as Trans-
Neptunian objects (see figure 1). The discovery of the trans-Neptunian
object Sedna in 2003 changed our understanding of the solar system
dramatically. Our knowledge is enhanced through new understandings of
relatedness. Knowledge is not a static constant but rather an emerging
dynamic phenomenon that continually changes our understandings. Our
knowledge is subject to what we know today, which can completely change
tomorrow. This facilitates change.
The ‘ebb and flow’ of the tide embraces complexity. It appears very
simple, but actually is the manifestation of complex interrelationships. The
tide isn’t an object in itself, but has so much influence on what is going on.
The tide defines and shapes the landscape. The tide is invisible but the
effects are clearly visible. The force of a tide can vary in magnitude from a
small wave covering your feet as you walk along a beach to a massive
tsunami that can wipe out coastlines on multiple continents during a single
event like an earthquake. Tide is similar to the invisible effect that occurs
within the environment, appearing simple but with overly complex motions.
The change we see appears simple but the forces behind it are extremely
complex. Most phenomena are just so complex we just see the effects and
can only hypothesize the causes or the motions. The true nature of a tide
isn’t the water as just the true nature of the environment isn’t the individual
constituents within it, i.e., infrastructure, objects, or activities. This is not
something that can be grasped, touched, clearly defined, or truly understand.
The fall of the Soviet Union, the Asian financial crisis, and the economic
crisis of 2008, and the Arab Spring all came with little warning. Ambiguity
is invisible where only the manifestations can be seen, unable to be
correlated to any causes directly, and thus too complex to be understood – it
can only be known, i.e., we can see the effects of gravity, but not gravity
itself.
Figure 1. The concepts of context and relatedness are metaphorically
illustrated by the two grey inner-circles which are both the same size.35
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From a quantum perspective existence depends upon the relation between
entities and objects. We cannot understand anything in isolation, but only
through what it does.36
The nature of the environment is both a bond
(structure) and a flow (system) that embodies complexity. It is relationship
that gives meaning and forms the tide of the environment – an extremely
powerful concept that gives our identities an existence. Each particle is a
mere abstraction in physics until the interactions with other particles are
understood.37
We see the relationships between things which enable us to
see the ambiguity and contradictions.38
For example, we cannot make sense
of, or understand human beings in isolation. We must focus on the
relatedness, i.e., experience between our self and others. Even the concept
of “I” and “me’ is grounded in relatedness between people. All politics,
diplomacy, economics, are based upon relatedness. The key to
understanding is seeing the relationships and contradictions rather than the
singular entities.
Connections can best be seen where contradictions are perceived;
becoming a starting point for a new understanding of the possible. New
ideas come from where there are errors, not perfections. Errors act as a
trigger to force us to rethink our hypotheses and challenge our
preconceptions. This opens up possibilities to ‘what could be’. Benjamin
Franklin once said “Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, is more
valuable and interesting than that of all the discoveries.” Seeing new
connections through relatedness is the basis of new creative insights that
lead to breakthroughs in new knowledge.
We simplistically understand climate change as global warming,
characterized by rising temperatures, changing weather patterns, melting
icecaps, and rising sea levels. We generally believe in the phenomenon
primarily because of greenhouse gases we as a society collectively emit into
the atmosphere. Anybody who argues against this would be labeled a
skeptic or non-believer, protecting vested interests. However a recent study
suggests the relationship between temperature change and higher CO2
levels in the atmosphere are highly exaggerated where atmosphere is not as
sensitive to CO2 levels as was first thought.39
In addition the Arctic and
Antarctic ice caps are growing, and not in decline as many believe,40
leading to confusion, more debate, polarized positioning and even
skepticism.41
In complexity, truths are not absolutes.
In the field of development economics there is little agreement about
strategy and what should be measured as success indicators. The
Millennium Village (MV) project founded by Professor Jeffrey Sachs and
philanthropist Ray Chambers was started with a host of objectives, desires,
and hopes.42
Overwhelming successes were claimed.43
However, these were
strongly questioned from a number of perspectives, with some claiming
19
better results could have been obtained through other strategies.44
Truths are
not absolutes they are relative to what one believes. Any view we have is
only partially the truth. There are many truths – and it is important to
acknowledge that.45
Reality rests upon these multiple truths which
accommodate ambiguity. Creativity is about continually restructuring and
evolving our worldviews to accommodate change and ambiguity. Within
the quantum view one must accept uncertainty upon the premise that we can
never know everything. Instead of using mathematical formulas, we can
only assume probabilities that certain things may happen. Precision does not
exist.
Our lives and the environments we live within have become so complex
that it is exceeding our cognitive abilities to cope. Our brain has developed
frontal lobes over the last two million years making two significant
contributions to the way we think. If we return to the first scene “The dawn
of man” in Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, the beginning of
our species was sparked off by a moment of creativity – the great ape
gaining an insight on how to use a bone as a tool and weapon. Our
prefrontal cortex has given us the ability to make connections. Secondly our
prefrontal cortex gives us the ability to interact, to have empathy, to
imagine, and to manipulate the social surround. Kubrick’s great apes
defended the group – a social action.
However over time we have become preoccupied with our manmade
systems and ignored natural systems, becoming too logical and linear
thinking. The great sociologist Max Weber called this the process of
rationalization. He characterized this rationalization as efficiency,
predictability, calculability, and control over uncertainty, manifested by
rigid bureaucracy,46
the prime means by which we organize our society.
Author and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes the phenomena as a left
hemisphere dominated society, where the left has no wisdom, just data and
representations, where for example money stands for values and objects,
where maximum utility is sort, where there is need for control, in an
environment where we comply to rules.47
What most don’t realize is that we actually have very little control over
the environment, just an illusion of control. We have developed structures
like bureaucracy and systems like ISO, Six Sigma, and TQM to give the
appearance of order and control around us. But our science is not fact as we
tend to assume. Science is made up of hypotheses about finding
correlations, not necessarily cause and effect, not necessarily fact.
Economics, management and sociology simply reflect our values,
aspirations and fears at the time and thus impasse narrow perspectives upon
environmental phenomena. This is clearly seen in academia today where
according to Tufts Professor Amar Bhídé, most of the big economic
journals today reflect right wing ideology,48
thus suppressing alternative
20
views. People beliefs, expectations, and values influence their views of the
world according to their respective perspectives.49
Change occurs through the development of new ideas, inventions, and
innovations. The environment is a self regulating system evolving through
the trial and error, driven by creative thinkers who take action upon their
ideas. This could be a morphic phenomenon where collective information
becomes an enabler of new emergence, explaining why different groups in
different parts of the world without knowledge of each other or
collaboration can invent the same thing. This drives what Schumpeter called
‘creative destruction’ and what the systems theorists call ‘emergence’, and
is where creative thinking originates. Creative thinking occurs out of the
chaos rather than order of any environment.
Creative thinking is also restricted through our bounding to time and
space.50
What is possible must have the right social, cultural, legal, and
technological ideas, inventions, and innovations in place as prerequisites,
before a new idea, invention, or innovation can exist through what Steven
Johnson calls the ‘adjacent possible’.51
Numerous scientific discoveries
and technological improvements like the steam engine, automobile, or
winged flight, occurred after thousands of cumulative hours of thought
transpired. No single person can be considered fully responsible for these
discoveries or inventions.52
A single idea is a summary of all concepts
which have been learned over the years of living. An idea must be
expressed for creativity to emerge, which is not restricted to any one form.
It could be a narrative, a poem, a model, a picture, or a piece of art.
Any original concept without all necessary ideas, inventions, and
innovations in place will be fantasy rather than something with immediate
potential reality, i.e., the absence of a small engine that could produce
enough thrust over and above its own weight was one of the barriers to
inventing powered flight. The idea of nano-sensors circulating within the
bloodstream to diagnose human ailments currently lacks the ability to
miniaturize such sensors, but will most probably become a reality when the
required nano-technology exists. All new ideas, inventions, and innovations
are created on the foundations of previous works – a summary of all
previous concepts that have been learned over previous years expressed as
an idea, invention or innovation.
For example, an automobile is a compilation of numerous previous
inventions that enable the form of an automobile to exist. Without the ideas
of steel, rubber, fuel, concepts of compression and combustion, electronics,
tires, braking system, new alloys, hydraulic systems, road rules and
carriageways, the automobile cannot exist (see figure 2). The creation of
inventions that become automobiles is a continuous process. Incremental
improvements to the whole idea advance the automobile. New composite
polymer materials and plastics make lighter frames without sacrificing
21
strength, new engine power enhancing systems like turbochargers and fuel
injection systems contribute to the enhancement of car performance. The
automobile is a system of ideas and also forms part of other ideas like
transport systems and city planning, etc. The potential reality is limited by
knowledge and imagination.
The inter-connectiveness of everything is so entangled that looking at
the separate parts of any system will tell us very little about the functioning
of the whole. Anything without the context of the rest of the system has
little meaning, i.e., tires, a braking system, or a chassis will tell us little
about an automobile itself. Everything must exist in relation to other things
in order to have meaning. To the inventor who is making connections,
finding the related meanings between the different objects is the key to
ingenuity. It’s the new meaning that ingenuity provides that advances
society.
Automobile
Chassis Engine Tires Control &
Management
Systems
Braking System Environment
Suspension
Systems
Fuel Rubber Electronics Alloys Road Rules
Steel Compression
&
Combustion
Chemical
Processes
Microprocessors
Transistor
Hydraulics
Laws of Fluids
Roads &
carriageways
Horse &
Buggy
Plantations Heat
Processes
Engineering
principles
Figure 2. Time and Space: It was the previous ideas and inventions that
existed before an invention like the automobile was possible.
The invention process is subject to multiple realities. Entrepreneurs develop
new ideas upon their prior knowledge, existing technology and inventions.
Any new invention is based on the past and is a projection into the future.
Thus the entrepreneur stands on the origin of possibilities and projects his or
her imagination along a new vector of reality of choosing. For example,
22
Anita Roddick’s holiday in America and visit to the Body Shop operated by
sisters Peggy Short and Janet Saunders in Berkeley California, triggered her
to imagine a new reality of ethically based retail outlets around the world.
Without entrepreneurs standing at the origin of possibilities and envisaging
a different future, society could never change. Had each entrepreneur
chosen a different way to go, different realities to what was created would
now exist. An entrepreneur is the creator of new realities.
5. Thought Cognition
The cognitive functioning of the mind is no longer a mysterious black box.
Over the last fifty years we have developed a much deeper understanding
about how we think. With the work of Pierre Paul Broca and Karl Wernicke
in the 19th Century, the different functioning of the left and right
hemispheres of the brain began to become vaguely understood. This
understanding was greatly enhanced with the work of Michael Gazzaniga
and Roger Wolcott Sperry on functional lateralization and how the two
hemispheres communicate with each other when the corpus callosum that
transfers signals between the two hemispheres was severed with split-brain
patients.53
After further work by Robert E. Ornstein, a strong consensus
developed that the brain was fully conscious in both hemispheres carrying
out perception, thinking, storing and retrieving memory simultaneously, but
at the same time providing different and conflicting views of the world.
Julian Jaynes hypothesized in his controversial book The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that the brain was
indeed divided with a dominant left part that spoke and a subservient right
that obeyed – hence the bicameral mind.54
Although at the time Jaynes saw
bicameralism as metaphoric, advances in cerebral imaging in the 1990s
confirmed his early predictions.55
Jaynes postulated that we have a schizoid
tendency due to hemispherical conflict in the way each hemisphere thinks,
which heavily influenced beliefs about consciousness at the time. These
ideas about split brain functioning were taken up by academics and
practitioners in the creativity and education fields.
The functions of the brain was described as split into two hemispheres
where the left side was believed to be sequential, concerned with facts,
splitting the world into concrete and identifiable categories, logical
reasoning, linear thinking splitting things apart, mathematically orientated,
and the centre of words and language. Thus the left hemisphere is able to
bring narrow and sharply focused attention to detail. On the other side, the
right looked at the environment in a holistic manner looking at the whole,
visually and spatially orientated, seeking similarities through analogy,
23
thinking in images, and thus able to believe, be vigilant over the
environment, and transform ideas.
Our education system has been orientated towards developing general
intelligence and critical thinking, all left traits. This is probably due to belief
in the 1960’s that left side traits were more important in earning an income.
This is clearly reflected in the learning taxonomy developed by Benjamin
Bloom in the 1950s.
Edward De Bono brought predominating focus upon the right
hemisphere of the brain as the centre of holistic or what he called lateral
thinking, where creativity was thought to be derived.56
At that time it was
believed that the dominance of one side and corresponding thinking styles
would suit specific activities, i.e., left side dominance would suit activities
like learning languages, mathematics, engineering, and reading, while right
side dominance would better suit activities like social science, education
and the visual arts57
. From a gender perspective it was considered that right
dominance would enable superior interpersonal skills and would be more
common in women and left hand dominance which promoted logical
reasoning would be more common in men.58,59
which supported Anglo
Saxon arguments about male dominance in the Victorian era and influenced
vocational guidance right up to recent times.
The divided brain paradigm was reinforced by medical schools where
students would examine brain anatomy to see the clear division of the brain
down the centre. For many years child psychologists and educators would
look at children’s hand orientation as a rough indication of brain
hemisphere dominance.60
As it was believed that the left hemisphere was
most important to develop scholastically, most children were encouraged to
be right handed which was controlled by the left hand side of the brain.
This belief in the way we thought was built upon by Ned Herrmann a
physicist who worked within the human resource department of General
Electric. After years of research in creativity of the human brain Hermann
developed a metaphorical model of how the four quadrants of the brain have
specialized functions.61
Herrmann believed the brain works as a coalition of
four quadrants that carry out specialized functions. Quadrants A and B are
superimposed over the left side of the brain which is sequential and time-
bound and quadrants C and D are superimposed over the right hand side of
the brain which is holistic and timeless. Quadrant A thinkers think in terms
of words and numbers, logically and analytically. They are achievement
orientated and most people are trained and educated in this way.62
Quadrant
B thinkers are task-orientated and result driven in the way they organize
facts and plan. Quadrant C thinkers are intuitive and rely on interpersonal
stimulations and quadrant D thinkers are conceptualizing, imaginative and
holistic.63
The four quadrants are the basis of our thinking preferences
which determine how we prefer to learn, understand and express things in
24
what are called cognitive preferences or preferred modes of knowing.64
People tend to think from different positions within the whole brain
metaphor. Each quadrant works in tandem in varying degrees within
individuals. When faced with a situation or problem we use our preferred
way of thinking to make sense and solve the problem. When people are
anchored toward one mode, other modes of thinking are avoided. This
greatly affects our intake of information, comprehension of a situation and
overall learning capabilities.65
However this was not reflective upon how the brain really worked.
Functions that were previously believed to only occur on one side of the
brain were found to actually occur on both sides, and it was found that the
corpus callosum played a very important coordinating role, which can vary
from person to person.66
In addition, our whole understanding of
intelligence was beginning to be redefined both in terms of concept and
application.67
Traditional general intelligence was not the only form we
have. We have many different forms of intelligence which vary in
importance according to the time, location and situation we exist within.
The talents and abilities of a New York stockbroker differ from an Olympic
marathon runner, an advocating lawyer in a courtroom, a geologist, and an
Australian aboriginal living off the land in Central Australia. No one can
say which of these people are more intelligent as the necessary talents,
abilities, and underlying intelligences differ just as the tasks, applications,
and required outcomes differ.
Our increasing understanding of the role of the prefrontal cortex through
both cerebral imaging and examination of brain damaged patients indicated
that it is the thinking processes that are of upmost importance in applying
intelligence to problems and challenges we face. The prefrontal cortex is
the centre where we are able to distinguish differences in people, objects,
and events and develop premeditated time phased actions, choose between
alternatives based on set criteria and values, override unacceptable action
pathways that the limbic system may bring attention to. Thus the prefrontal
cortex is able to filter and inhibit inappropriate thought, emotions, and
distractions.68
The prefrontal cortex receives highly filtered data from the senses. It
combines this data with selective memory recall69
to construct a map of
reality that enables us to see the world within our own context. This divides
our reality into, and connects past, present, future together through both
cross temporal and modal association and deliberate potential actions70
– a
totally relational system.
Consequently the prefrontal cortex is a top-down processor rather than
the bottom up limbic system that encourages action through emotional
generation. The prefrontal cortex can also be seen as an integrator of the
two hemispheres, limbic system, senses, and memory functions. Both
25
reason and imagination originate from the prefrontal cortex where both
processes require all facets of the mind rather than being exclusively
domiciled in any one hemisphere. The prefrontal cortex must integrate the
left hemisphere’s narrow focused and categorized view of the world which
lock us into particular patterns with the right hemisphere’s overall open
view seeing the world more as a system – as the right hemisphere sees and
this needs to be made sense of by the left hemisphere which categorizes
what the right sees. A mental map is constructed which will differ from
others in the degree of balance between left and right hemisphere
domination.
The prefrontal cortex selects data that creates our mental maps filtered
with set patterns, values and beliefs contained within neurologically
constructed schemata stored within the memory. Where thoughts, desires,
feelings, and ideas are not consistent with the values and beliefs within
these schemata, feelings of confusion, puzzlement, surprise, guilt and/or
remorse may emerge due to the conflicting way reality is interpreted.71
These types of conflicts must be resolved through reason, imagination and
emotion. Sometimes this leads to great new insights where new connections
are made integrating into what could be called reasoned imagination. The
role of emotion is to draw attention to important triggers and keys in the
process. Due to the empathic nature of the prefrontal cortex, we see
relationships between people, things and events. Creativity and original
thinking is about seeing these relationships. At other times emotions trigger
the initiation of any of a vast array of defense mechanisms that may lead to
some forms of dysfunctional thinking.72
From this point of view it could be
argued that our conscious awareness resides within the prefrontal cortex
and connected tracts leading to the rest of the brain.73
The world we
experience is as much a product of our mind as it is the environment.
The brain is a self organizing system full of neural connections.
Probably one of the closest explanations to how our brain processes
information in the recognition process is the neural network model.74
Information is broken up and stored in nodes that connects with other pieces
of information through the dendrite of a neuron (a branched tree like
structure) to terminal buttons at the end of axons (thin branches of neural
cells), where the terminal buttons connect to the dendrites of other cells at
the synapse (junction between the terminal button of one neuron and the
dendrite of another neuron). These neuron connections are numerous
creating (or arranging) our thoughts from a relational database of
information that can be assembled to form meaning when electrical
impulses go above a threshold that makes us aware of a piece of
information.
Neural networks accommodate learning through changing the weights of
node activation through excitatory or inhibitory actions. This improves the
26
efficiency of the network in making identifications through being able to
process information in parallel, through both top-down and bottom-up
processing. This enables a person to look, in the case of writing, either at
the word level, letter level, and feature level, which implies we can interpret
incomplete words and sentences.75
The controlling mechanism of
communications (i.e., connections) between neurons is located within the
prefrontal cortex.76
6. Memory and Prior Knowledge
Our memory stores information about people, objects, and events; in
something like a web of connections explained above. We are not exactly
sure where memory is stored, but it is believed to be around areas of the
brain responsible for language, vision, and hearing, etc, connected through
millions of complex synapses. The hippocampus performs the role as a
mediator in forming memory and as a coordinator in connecting the
respective memory centers of the brain.77
Consequently information is not
stored whole and divided into relational bits. Recent research has shown
that when new experiences occur, a gene activates within the hippocampus
that triggers modifications in neural connections by adjusting the strength of
the synapses.78
Our life experiences, knowledge, knowhow, values, and beliefs are all
stored within the neural systems within our memory. Prior knowledge is
information and knowledge a person accumulates over their lifetime.79
As
one’s experience grows the mental matrix of prior knowledge becomes
richer and more complex. However prior knowledge is not all truth, it is
made of perception, beliefs, and imagination which make up the
components of our memory (see figure 3) – our constructed reality.
The content of prior knowledge can be demonstrated by thinking about
Leonardo da Vinci’s mural Il Cenacola or The last Supper . In the picture
many people believe that a holy chalice is present. On viewing the painting
one will find there is actually no holy chalice on the table whatsoever
(however there are cups). This is how our beliefs developed through
Biblical stories around the last supper shape and influence our mental
construction of what we would expect to see, i.e., how we construct our
reality. Our prior knowledge as well as being influenced by the world
around us also influences our general perception of the world.
27
Knowledge Belief Truth
Imagination
Memory
Figure 3. Prior knowledge consists of truth, belief, knowledge, imagination, and
memory.
We build up knowledge upon a pool of metaphors as a way to comprehend
and construct meaning about the environment around us.80
The advantage of
metaphor is that it can be loosely applied to contextual situations in a
flexible manner to help clarify uncertainty through analogy. Metaphors
make things more familiar to us and if they can explain new experiences to
our satisfaction, our current schemata and emotions are reinforced. Through
the use of metaphor, prior knowledge assists in problem solving by
providing simpler analogies where complex cause and effect cannot be
easily understood and evaluated. Metaphors help a person make sense of
their experiences, perceptions, develop plans for the future, and
communicate these ideas to others.81
For example, business strategy is often
referred to through sport and war analogies which make concepts easier to
understand and visualize. In a similar manner, blood circulation is often
explained in pumping and pressure analysis.
Metaphor is not restricted to narrative and relies very heavily upon
mental imagery. Spatial based mental imagery is extremely important in
conceptualizing and solving problems. Imagery is powerful in arousing
emotion as we see when the majority of people are exposed to sexually
explicit and violent material. Mental imagery originates within the visual
cortex located in the occipital lobe in the posterior of the brain, thus sharing
the same processing space with the visual perception area.82
Much of our
imagination is generated in the visual mode which is sometimes confused
with reality.83
Imagery is a composite picture just like a mental map. We cannot
reconstruct an entire image of a scene we can only make a composite
simulation, which is actually what we also do when we look at a scene
through our eyes84
- remember the Last Supper example. What we see is the
28
composite we construct and not reality. Images cannot however serve as
concepts or ideas themselves, they can only serve as the meaning of words
like a dictionary.85
Metaphorical language evolves into existing imagery and narrative
frameworks within prior knowledge, where ideas can be shared with others.
If current metaphors cannot explain our interpretations of current
experiences and solve particular problems, then new experiences need to be
blended in with prior knowledge to create a modified schemata and new
emotions. This overtime develops much more sophisticated and richer
mental models which assist us when issues and problems we consider
become much more complex – the development of wisdom.86
Experience differs from knowledge in that it introduces feeling and
emotion. For example one could read about snorkeling and diving but until
one has gone diving where they can feel the pressure and experience the
undersea life, knowledge has no feeling. As individuals experience things
differently, i.e., diving around the surface verses diving at the depth of 25
feet and diving in clear tropical waters verses murky lake water. To a great
degree knowledge is individually orientated. No one has the same
experience of the same event and this adds to the concept of understanding
as something relative rather than absolute. The enrichment and
transformation of our schemata over time occurs through learning and
experience.87
The key to our ability to continue learning is to be able to
integrate the knowledge we acquire with the knowledge we already have.
The belief and imagination components of prior knowledge influence
our thinking and decision making processes. Our current beliefs are like an
anchor that prevents us from thinking of new ideas. We are also strongly
influenced by the beliefs of others and emotions tied to similar past
experiences.88
Prior knowledge manifests as stereotyping which assists a person
comprehend a story and judge its plausibility, bringing in judgments and
biases to our thinking.89
In addition, biases guide our decision pathways.
Any first decisions we make on any matter creates a pathway upon which
future decisions will be guided. Biases tend to keep us on a consistent path
through an “escalation of commitment”, even though we may know that the
original decision was wrong.
We are also bound by culture. Culture has a strong bearing on our ability
to be creative both at a social and organizational level. For example, culture
influences how employees feel in a workplace; are people linked or work
within a ranked hierarchy?, do people seek ideas through collaboration or
take on ‘top-down’ ideas?, are people empowered or controlled?, do people
exist within an environment of ambiguity or certainty?, do people make
decisions spontaneously and intuitively or through formal processes and
procedures?, is the organization flexible and quick to act or inflexible and
29
slow to act?, and does management make work play or work under an
environment of seriousness?
Creativity and original thinking is about making new connections, i.e.,
developing new neural networks. Thus our thinking is limited by the
knowledge we already have within our memory and the process of how we
integrate new perceptions into existing prior knowledge. As perceptions are
influenced by our beliefs and biases, new ideas are actually the result of
logical hindsight rather than foresight.90
Therefore creativity can be seen as
being a restructuring of our knowledge to fit the elements of the problems
we face. In these cases the role of creativity is to find new ways to define a
problem so it can be solved with the knowledge we have. From this
perspective the mind’s self organizing system is restricted by the boundaries
of environmental perception and our prior knowledge, placing limits on the
scope of possible emerging ideas.
Virtually no idea or invention has occurred in isolation. We learn
through various methods from others i.e., James Watt used pre-existing
knowledge to develop his version of the steam engine. New ideas and
inventions tend to be incremental steps rather than breakthroughs outside
the bounding of prior knowledge. Humans are social animals and
communication is central to our evolving thinking. As our prior knowledge
increases through social interaction, learning and experience, so does the
number of potential possibilities for making new connections that lead to
new constructions, just as our ability to speak a foreign language increases
exponentially once we know the basic syntax rules and increase our
vocabulary.
The way our cognition system is designed and the role prior knowledge
plays is extremely useful for people carrying out their work like doctors
making a diagnosis, mechanics inspecting an engine for faults, airline pilots,
and farmers, etc., doing the routine parts of their jobs. Prior knowledge
guides them through a number of frames each representing pre-existing
mental models through which they perceive – shaping our reasoning and
decision making process. This is also the basis of their specialist intuition.91
Any new idea is anchored to our life experience, formally or informally
acquired knowledge and associated emotions attached to vision that enables
new connections.92
The key to original thinking is reflection, plasticity and
flexibility at both the neural and thinking levels.
7. Imagination
Imagination is the ability to form mental images, phonological passages,
analogies, or narratives of something that is not perceived through our
senses. Imagination is a manifestation of our memory and enables us to
30
scrutinize our past and construct hypothetical future scenarios that do not
yet, but could exist. Imagination also gives us the ability to see things from
other points of view and empathize with others.
Imagination extends our experience and thoughts, enabling a personal
construction of a world view that lowers our sense of uncertainty.93
In this
way our imagination fills in the gaps within our knowledge enabling us to
create mental maps that make meaning out of the ambiguities of situations
we face where information is lacking,94
which is an important function of
our memory management. This partly explains why people react differently
to what they see due to the unique interpretations they make based on
different prior knowledge and experience. Imagination enables us to create
new meanings from cognitive cues or stimuli within the environment, which
on occasions can lead to new insights.
Our knowledge and personal goals are embedded within our imagination
which is at the heart of our existence, a cognitive quality that we would not
be human without.95
Imagination is the means novelists use to create their
stories.96
The Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk imagined a world he
retreated into as a child where he was someone else, somewhere else in
creating the narrative and story of his novel “Istanbul”. Imagination is
needed in marketing to create new value sets to consumers that separate
new products from others. This requires originality to create innovation97
.
Imagination is the essence of marketing opportunity98
that conjures up
images and entices fantasy to consumers, allowing them to feel what it
would be like to live at Sanctuary Cove in Northern Queensland, Australia,
receiving a Citibank loan, driving a Mercedes 500 SLK around town, or
holidaying in Bali. Imagination aids our practical reasoning99
and opens up
new avenues of thinking, reflection, allowing a mentally reorganized world,
to enable concepts of doing things differently. Imagination decomposes
what already is, replacing it with what could be, and is the source of hope
fear, enlightenment, and aspirations.
Imagination is not a totally conscious process. New knowledge may
incubate subconsciously when a person has surplus attention to focus on
recombining memory and external stimuli into new meanings. Most people
tend to spend a great deal of time while they are awake “daydreaming”,
where attention shifts away from the present mental tasks to an unfolding
sequence of private responses.100,101
This may be enough to activate our
default network, a web of autobiographical mental imagery, which may
provide new connections and perspectives about a problem we have been
concerned with. Recent research has shown that the brain periodically shifts
phase locking during a person’s consciousness,102
where neural networks
activate and these brief periods may be enough to allow the dominant left
hemisphere give way to the right hemisphere, enabling a person to see the
environment, problem or issue from a new perspective.103
This has been
31
corroborated with research that found where people engage in mildly
demanding intellectually challenging tasks during breaks from work that
they are doing, there is a higher probability of finding solutions to problems
that they have been engaged within their primary activity.104
These
processes originate from the prefrontal cortex where we imagine ourselves
and the feelings of others, the posterior cingulate cortex connecting our
personal memories throughout the brain, and the parietal cortex connecting
the hippocampus which is reported to store episodic memories.105
Unguided imagination (or what was once termed “free association”)
through dreaming and “daydreaming” enables the gathering of information
from different parts of our memory, which may not be easy to access
consciously. This information may come from a within a narrow domain or
a much wider field. The more imagination takes account of the wider field,
experience, and prior knowledge, the more likely these ideas created
through imagination will have some originality – through complex
knowledge restructuring. Allen McConnell writing about Steve Jobs in
Psychology Today postulated that the large array of fonts designed for the
Macintosh computer were inspired from Job’s interest and knowledge about
typography he learned while doing a calligraphy class at Reed.106
It was
Job’s imagination of seeing an array of fonts in the Macintosh that made it
reality. There are very few serendipitous occurrences in creative insight.
Most are the result of triggers and slow incubation periods that lead to a
revelation.107
Marsh and Bower called the above types of insights inadvertent
plagiarism.108
Most cases of insight were inspired by something in the past;
although though imagery these new concepts may have been given new
types of manifestations. It is through the imagery of analogies that many
breakthroughs in science have been achieved.109
Einstein developed his
insight for the theory of relativity through imagining what would happen if
he travelled at the speed of light, Faraday claimed to have visualized force
lines from electric and magnetic fields from a wood fire giving insight into
the theory of electromagnetic fields and kekulé reported that he gained
insight into the shape of the benzene molecule after he imagined a snake
coiled up in a circle.
Imagination is a multidimensional concept and encompasses a number
of different modes which can be described as follows;
1. Effectuative imagination combines information together to synergize
new concepts and ideas. However these are often incomplete and need to be
enhanced, modified, and/or elaborated upon as more information from the
environment comes to attention and is reflected upon. Effectuative
imagination can be either guided or triggered by random thoughts, usually
stimulated by what a person experiences within the framework of their past
experience. Effectuative imagination may also incubate from pondering
32
over a specific problem within the occasional attention of a person.
Effectuative imagination is extremely flexible and allows for continuous
change. This is an important ingredient in entrepreneurial planning, strategy
crafting, particularly in opportunity construction, development, and
assembling all the necessary resources required to exploit any
opportunity.110
Effectuative imagination also leads to other forms of
imagination that assists in the construction of concepts, ideas, and action
scenarios. Effectuative imagination enables flexibility in our thinking.
2. Intellectual (or constructive) imagination is utilized when considering
and developing hypotheses from different pieces of information or
pondering over various issues of meaning say in the areas of philosophy,
management, or politics, etc. Intellectual imagination originates from a
definite idea or plan and thus is guided imagination as it has a distinct
purpose which in the end must be articulated after a period of painstaking
and sometimes meticulous endeavor. This can be very well illustrated with
Charles Darwin’s work which resulted in the development of his hypothesis
explained in his book The Origin of Species which took almost two decades
to gestate and complete. Darwin collected information, analyzed it,
evaluated and criticized the findings, and then reorganized all the
information into new knowledge in the form of a hypothesis.111
This can be
a long drawn out process, sometime decades long, with intermittent periods
of high intensity and other periods where very little thought is given to the
problem. Intellectual imagination is a very conscious process, although it
may slip into other forms of imagination that enable new insights.
3. Imaginative fantasy creates and develops stories, pictures, poems,
stage-plays, and the building of the esoteric, etc. This form of imagination
may be based upon the inspiration of some fact or semi-autobiographical
experiences (James Bond), extrapolated or analogized into new persona and
events (Star Trek) that conform to or stretch the realms of reality into
magic, supernatural mythology and folklore (The kane Chronicles, King
Arthur). Imaginative fantasy may be structural with mythical people in real
world settings (The Planet of the Apes), past, present, or future, with real
people in mythical settings (Lost in Space). Fantasy may totally disregard
the rules of society (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), science and nature (The
Time Machine, Back to the Future), or extrapolate them into the future with
science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey). Fantasy can also be based upon
human emotions (Romeo and Juliet), distorted historical facts (The Patriot),
historical times and political issues (Dr. Strangelove), take a theme and
fantasize it (1984, Animal Farm), encapsulate dark fantasy (Wag the Dog),
or evoke urban legend (The Stepford Wives, Dusk to Dawn). Imaginative
fantasy can be a mixture of guided and unguided imagination and is
important to artists, writers, dancers, and musicians, etc.
33
4. Empathy is a capacity we have to connect to others and feel what they
are feeling. Empathy helps a person know emotionally what others are
experiencing from their frame and reference.112
Empathy allows our mind
‘to detach itself from one’s self’ and see the world from someone else’s
feelings, emotions, pain, and reasoning.113
Empathy can assist us in seeing
other realities, alternative meanings of situations, which may consist of
many layers. Empathy shows us that there are no absolutes, just alternative
meanings to situations.114
Empathy links us to the larger community and
thus important to human survival in enabling us to understand what is
required to socially coexist with others. Empathy shows that realities
sometimes conflict. Seeing conflicting realities is a sign that we are starting
to know. Howard Gardner postulates that the concept of empathy should
also include our empathy with nature and our place within it.115
High ego-
centricity leads to reduced empathy and the inability to see other
viewpoints. However recent studies on narcissistic individuals has shown
that there are two types of empathy, affective empathy discussed above and
cognitive empathy which involves the ability of people to see person’s
emotional state without being able to feel what they are feeling.116
Lack of
empathy can also be compensated by strategizing and spontaneous
mentalizing to manipulate others to their advantage. These Machiavellian
personalities don’t necessarily feel the same emotions as those with
empathy receive, so don’t feel guilty when manipulating others.117
This type
of behavior can be seen in short-term mating strategies by males.118
Besides
being extremely important in interpersonal relationships, empathy is an
important tool for competitive strategy as it enables one to think about how
our competitors would react to our moves and what they would do.
Branding can also be considered a result of empathy as branding is designed
to try and capture connections with potential customers by appealing to
their emotions, self identity and aspirations.
5. Strategic imagination is concerned about vision of ‘what could be’, the
ability to recognize and evaluate opportunities by turning them into mental
scenarios, seeing the benefits, identifying the types and quantities of
resources required for taking particular actions, and the ability to weigh up
all the issues in a strategic manner. A vision helps a person focus upon the
types of opportunities suited to their disposition. This sense of vision is
guided by a person’s assumptions, beliefs and values within the psych.
Vision has varying strengths in different people depending upon their ego
characteristics and motivations. The ability to spot and evaluate
opportunities is closely linked with a person’s imagination, creative
thinking, propensity to action, and perceptions of their talents and available
skills. According to Bolton and Thompson entrepreneurs spot particular
opportunities and extrapolate potential achievable scenarios within the
limits of their skills and ability to gather resources to exploit the
34
opportunity.119
These extrapolations from opportunity to strategy require
both visual/spatial and calculative thinking skills at a strategic rather than
detailed level. Adequate concentration is required in order to have a
strategic outlook upon things. This requires focus in strategic thinking,
creativity, a sense of vision, and empathy. Strategic (and also intellectual)
imagination can be utilized through thought experiments, the process of
thinking through a scenario for the purpose of thinking through the
consequences. Too little focus will result in random jumping from potential
opportunity to opportunity without undertaking any diligent mental
evaluations. Too much focus may result in narrow mindedness and even
obsessive thinking which would result in either blindness to potential
opportunities or at the other end of the scale taking action without truly
“objective” evaluation. Strategic imagination in some cases is a form of
wisdom.
6. Emotional imagination is concerned with manifesting emotional
dispositions and extending them into emotional scenarios. Without any
imagination, emotion would not be able to emerge from our psych and
manifest as feelings, moods, and dispositions. Fear requires the imagination
of what is fearful, hate requires imagination about what is repulsive, and
worry requires the imaginative generation of scenarios that make one
anxious. Through emotional imagination, beliefs are developed through
giving weight to imaginative scenarios that generate further sets of higher
order emotions. Emotional imagination operates at the unconscious and
semi-unconscious level. People who show excessive emotional imagination
would most probably be defined as exhibiting psychotic tendencies.
Emotional imagination is one of the most powerful types of our imagination
and can easily dominate our thinking processes.
7. Dreams are an unconscious form of imagination made up of images,
ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur during certain stages of sleep.
Dreams show that every concept in our mind has its own psychic
associations and that ideas we deal with in everyday life are by no means as
precise as we think.120
Our experiences become sublimed into our memory
passing into the unconscious where the factual characteristics can change,
and can be reacquired at any time. According to Jung, dreams are the
invisible roots of our consciousness,121
and connect us to our unconscious.
However the meaning of dreams is can only be based on our speculative
interpretation. Some dreams are very straight forward, while others surreal,
magical, melancholic, adventurous, and sexual where we are most of the
time not in control.
8. Memory reconstruction is the process of retrieving our memory of
people, objects, and events. Our memory is made up of prior knowledge
consisting of a mix of truth and belief, influenced by emotion. Recurring
memory therefore carries attitudes, values, and identity as most of our
35
memory is within the “I” or “me” paradigm. Memory is also reconstructed
to fit into our current view of the world, so is very selective. The process of
memory reconstruction occurs within our subconscious emerging into our
consciousness without us being really being aware of the source elements,
i.e., what is fact and what is belief. Memory reconstruction is assimilative
and can construct new knowledge out of random facts, beliefs and
experiences which may lead to insight.
Each form of imagination outlined above certainly overlaps and may
operate in tandem. Imaginative thinking provides the ability to move
towards objectives, and travel along selected paths. Imagination is much
more divergent than logical thought, as imagination can move freely across
fields and disciplines, while logical thinking is orientated along a narrowly
focused path. From this perspective imagination is probably more important
than knowledge as knowledge without application is useless. Imagination
enables us to apply knowledge.
However imagination can also be dysfunctional. Personality disorders
and the emerging emotion can dominate our imagination with fear, anxiety,
paranoia, and/or narcissistic tendencies, etc.122
This may prevent a person
from imagining new alternatives to their current goals and behavior, thus
allowing their past fears and anxieties to dominate their thinking.123
Imagination can consciously or unconsciously dissociate a person from the
reality of their everyday life where they may fall into the life of fantasy.
Abstract imagination can very quickly take a person away from reality
where current problems are ignored in favor of fantasy.124
8. Emotion
Cognition as a discipline has emerged over the last sixty years with the
brain as a computer metaphor, leaving the study of emotion to behavioral
psychology. But recent research has determined that our cognitive
processing has an emotional element, and is paramount for effective
functioning.125
Our thinking and decision making is influenced by two
distinct, yet interwoven processes. One involves conscious deliberation and
analysis through the prefrontal cortex where facts are considered and
weighed, options generated and compared with reasoning to determine an
outcome. The second system is non-conscious rapid emoto-based pattern
recognition with emotionally weighted biases.126
Emotion triggers
memories, and perceptions, and memories also trigger emotions which
define the nature of our existence relative to the past and future, and our
sense of power over any situation.
Emotions are part of our fundamental irrationality and unpredictability
and thus an important influence in creativity and original thinking. Our
36
basic emotions come from inner extra-rational dynamics deep within our
psych that are expressed as feelings, dreams, fantasies, and other imagined
aspects of our lives.127
Our more complex emotions like loyalty, sympathy,
pride, confidence, achievement, embarrassment, indignation, bewilderment,
pity, elation, satisfaction, boredom, shame, disgust, frustration, and surprise,
etc, tend to be socially related and constructed.128
Everything we perceive
evokes some form of feeling and the process of creativity, innovation and
invention is always an emotional and even sensual experience in people as
concepts are translated into words, numbers, diagrams, or objects, leading to
something inspirational.129
Emotions decide what we like, dislike, what is
agreeable, disagreeable, giving meaning to our world. Emotions can
sometimes help us see similar patterns across fields without conscious
deliberation and plays an important role in signaling preferences for
opportunities by arousing positive emotions, kindling enthusiasm and
determining our reactions to shocks and the behavioral trajectories we take.
Our view of the world is filtered through emotions which guides our self
awareness to a past or future orientation. Our thinking is swayed by our
time orientation within an emotion matrix depicted in figure 4. Any past
orientation will be full of stories which influence our sense of meaning
about the present. Some of the stories we remember will be full of regret for
past mistakes, disappointment for what was not done, or full of satisfaction
and/or pride for what was achieved. The past influences our interpretation
of the present. Positive and negative experiences influence what we
perceive, contemplate and put our focus upon in the now. The positive and
negative memories of the past also guide our direction in the future. Positive
memories guide us towards action where we have a high sense of self
efficacy and negative memories tend to make us averse to taking action
where we have a low sense of self efficacy. The future represents our
positive hopes and aspirations, or negative fears and anxieties where
positive emotions may lead to a sense of high self efficacy and become
powerful motivators for action, while negative emotions may lead to sense
of low self efficacy feasibility and take an averse attitude towards action.
Extreme feelings of low or high self efficacy can lead to either reckless
overconfidence in a positive emotional state or an aversion from action out
of fear and anxiety in a negative emotional state. The same feelings are not
uniform across the all activities, where a person may feel a high sense of
self efficacy in some areas and low sense of self efficacy in other areas.
37
Present
Orientation
Future Orientation
Past Orientation
Memory
Imagination
Belief System
Patterning
Optimal learning
Sense of
high self
efficacy
Sense of
low self
efficacy
Bad memories Good memories
Negative emotions Positive emotions
Action adverse Reckless overconfidence
Heuristics Imagination
Optimal drive
Value sets
Figure 4. The emotion matrix
There is a strong nexus between our experiences, prior knowledge and
emotion. We see the world through the perspective of our own identity
shaped by our emotions. The interaction of experience, prior knowledge and
emotion leads to the formation of our beliefs, which lay the foundation of
our values and aspirations, expressed through patterning, and sets of
heuristics which guide our thinking and decision making. The above
dynamics fuels our imagination which translates our memory, into beliefs,
aspirations, and emotions into scenarios that create feelings of self efficacy,
motivation, energy, and drive. Our optimal position for learning is within
the present orientation where the influence of future fears and hopes, past
disappointments and successes are minimized and within our conscious
awareness. Too much past or future orientation may lead to personal
delusion such as unrealistic hopes that an entrepreneurial opportunity really
exists,130
or massive overconfidence in one’s ability to successfully
implement a complex strategy in the field. Alternatively too much future or
past orientation may lead to undue pessimism where the feeling of self
efficacy and motivation is low, leading to states of anxiety and inaction.
Orientation in the past will anchor one into previous patterns of success,
which promote rigidity, while too much orientation into the future may lead
38
to fantasy, thus leading to unrealistic objectives and the ability to consider
realistic scenarios.131
The impact of our past and future orientation and sense of self efficacy
upon our behavior is strong. Emotion is embedded within our culture and
forms part of our domicile outlook.132
Philip Zimbardo postulated that
people living in tropical climates where there is little change in the weather
and where a language has no future tense leads to an inept propensity for
action.133
Rural youth unemployment within developing and post industrial
societies appear to be developing a generation of youth that feels little hope
about the future, while societies in countries like Malaysia where sections of
the population seek to cling to the order of the past may do little to prepare
for the challenges of the future. Max Weber attributed the rise of capitalism
in Europe to the present and future orientated Protestant work ethic and the
relative backwardness of Catholic centered Europe to the past orientation of
Catholic doctrines.134
Our emotional orientation influences our pace of life,
belief systems, aspirations and propensity for action.
9. Energy
Recently, the concept of energy has been related to a person’s ability to be
creative.135
However there is very little agreement on the definition of
energy, what it really is, what it does and no way has been found to actually
measure it directly.136
A number of different types and terms for human
energies have been cited, but probably out of these, three are of importance
and are somewhat interrelated.
The first of three energies is our physical energy that is necessary to do
physical things like moving from place to place, running, sports, and any
other activity that requires kinesthetic movement. Our physical energy is
managed by food for fuel, rest and exercise to build strength and discipline.
The next energy is our emotional energy which enables the expression of
our general emotions like happiness, surprise, hate, envy, and jealousy, etc.
Emotional energy helps to give us focus, interest and attention to different
things we sense, encounter, or exposed to and is one of our primal
mechanisms to keep us alert to danger in the environment.137
Finally there is
our mental energy which fuels our ability to make calculations and
undertake judgments. Sometimes emotional energy and intelligences are
called psychic energy, but breaking them into two separate energies allows
us to understand the very different roles they play in our life.
The level of energy we have either supports or inhibits our creativity and
problem solving abilities. These three energies are all interrelated, where for
example a physically tired person will not perform mental calculations well,
or an emotionally tired person will not be able to undertake either physical
39
work or mental thinking very well. These different states show the
interconnection between our various types of energies.
Our energy is chemo-electric in nature, where proteins, enzymes and
other electrically sensitive chemicals produce and transfer electricity
through our neuro-system to make us move, feel and think.138
Our energy
links our cognitive and kinetic systems together as one interdependent
system something like the Chinese concept of Qi that governs our bodily,
mental and emotional disposition.139
Energy is a dynamic force that fuels all
our processes and like all energy behaves according to the first law of
thermodynamics where it can be stored, released, focused and drained
according to stimulation, demands, needs and distractions coming from the
environment and within our self.
Our physical energy is responsible for our kinesthetic movements.
However, like nutrients, rest and training; our emotional energy also effects
our levels of physical energy. Take for example an athlete overly nervous
before a race, feeling ‘butterflies in the stomach’. With extreme anxiousness
and fear (presumably an under-confidence bias and anxiety), the athlete’s
physical energy will begin to drain making the person feel lethargic, tired
and weak. This contrasts with the athlete who is ready to do their best,
focused and determined to perform well and ready for the challenge without
allowing doubts and anxiousness to drain his or her energy. Another
example is the inability to reason logically when one is in a state of anger
and the tiredness one feels after being angry.
Emotional energy helps a person deal with everyday frustrations,
conflict and pressure. Our emotional energy is influenced by the
surrounding environment, people, objects and events. Emotions in the form
of moods ebb and flow during the day, week, and month.140
We are mostly
unaware of our moods which tend to influence the way we think about
things141
. Other emotions are triggered by a potential crisis, a crisis, our
health, our concern for something or general stress. A person with a high
level of emotional energy will be able to cope with the normal stresses of
the day while a person with a low level of emotional energy will quickly
succumb to any crisis, becoming stressed, anxious and/or frustrated very
quickly. Under such situations a person losses focus, where their attention
becomes diverted on other tasks that lower general energy levels.
Emotional energy is a source of determination providing a person with
the emotional motivation to get on with a job whether it is physical or
mentally orientated. Emotional energy provides our enthusiasm, drive and
resilience to do things. This is fine in a person who has a clear mission to
attend to, but where a person’s emotions are deluded with paranoia,
compulsiveness, depression, or other forms of neurosis, their emotional
energies are diverted into the fantasies these various pathologies might
generate142
. For example, a paranoid person will spend all their emotional
40
and mental energies on suspecting conspiracies against them, leaving little
energy available for creative or other problem solving issues facing them.
These types of emotions lead to immense fatigue and inability to function
logically. Emotional balance is very important so that both our physical and
mental capacities are at their optimum.
Mental energy is very important for creativity and supports two types of
cognitive operations. The first is the ability to make mental calculations and
draw inferences from logical and spatial relationships. The second is the
ability to make judgments, recognize similarities across different categories
of information using induction and logical reasoning.143
We tend to slow
down in the ability to make quick and accurate mental calculations during
aging but on the contrary improve in our induction and logical reasoning
with age. Mental energy is created through our interest, desire, curiosity,
passion and concern for something. Our mental energy levels can be
affected by drugs, food, sleep deprivation and various levels of health.144
The tension between a person’s current identity and future aspirations
manifests as dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction potentially creates the
energy and drive needed for action by an entrepreneur.145
The emotions
connected with dissatisfaction create a form of cognitive dissonance about
the current situation and a desired future outcome, thus channeling energy
and creating drive. It is an intensively emotional rather than rational
experience that creates the physical, emotional and psychic energy that are
required in new venture start ups and the pursuit of opportunity.
10. Intelligence
There is no conclusive agreement about what the concept of intelligence
really is. Some concepts of intelligence focused upon achievement, i.e., how
much a person really knows relative to others in an age group, or aptitude
orientated, i.e., the person’s ability to learn.146
Traditionally intelligence has
been considered as a general trait “g” where people would differ in the
level they possess. However as separate abilities (e.g. verbal, memory,
perceptual, and arithmetic) were recognized as intelligence, the concept of
intelligence widened.147
Howard Gardner took an interest in Norman Geschwind’s research
concerning what happens to normal or gifted individuals after the
misfortune of a stroke or some other form of brain damage. Gardner was
amazed at how a patient, counter to logic would lose the ability to read
words, but could still read numbers, name objects, and write normally.148
This suggested that different aspects of intelligence originate from different
parts of the brain.
41
Gardner synthesized his knowledge of the study of brain damage with
his study of cognitive development and believed that peoples’ endeavors
were not based upon any single type of intelligence, but rather a mix of
different intelligences. Intelligence needs to be applied in various ways for
survival in different environments and thus the abilities of a banker, medical
doctor, and Eskimo looking for fish are situational specific, all requiring
high levels of competence. Western society heavily values verbal,
mathematical, and spatial competencies while other competencies may be
more important in other cultures. Intellectual competence must therefore
entail the possession of a set of skills that can enable someone to solve
problems, resolve difficulties they may find in day to day living, have the
potential to find problems, and have the ability to acquire new knowledge
from their personal experiences.149
Every form of intelligence can be seen
as a specific paradigm having its own symbols and logic that will define,
enable evaluation, and solve problems.
Gardner hypothesized the multiple intelligence theory in recognition that
broad mental abilities are needed in society and that every person has a
unique blend of different intelligences.150
Gardner initially listed seven
types of intelligence, body-kinesthetic, verbal-linguistic, logical-
mathematical, visual-spatial, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal
intelligence. Gardner also affirmed that our separate types of intelligences
may not just be limited to the seven above and that others may also exist.
Brilliance and achievement most often depend upon the individual finding
the right vocation in life that suits their intelligence mix.
One of the other forms of intelligence that Gardner speculated about was
spiritual intelligence. Zohar and Marshall postulated that spiritual
intelligence is a moral base enabling us to question issues of ‘what’ and
‘why’ about things, and whether we should or shouldn’t be involved in
particular activities.151
Unlike general intelligence which is logical and
rational, spiritual intelligence enables us to question, which is central to the
concept of creativity.
Expanding upon Gardner’s concept of interpersonal intelligence is the
concept of emotional intelligence (EQ), which has become very popular
over the last two decades. Emotional intelligence places emphasis on a
number of characteristics that are important for creativity within a group or
social setting.152
However emotional intelligence may have a dark side. Some individuals
are able to utilize only the perception traits of emotional intelligence
without feeling the emotions of sympathy, compassion, and altruism. They
are better able to manage and manipulate others emotions better than their
own.153
This ability to manipulate and deceive others, albeit creatively, has
been dubbed Machiavellian Intelligence by Andrew Whiten and Richard
42
Byrne.154
This appears a primal ability in humans as primates have been
observed manipulating groups in order to gain support and rank.155
Intelligence and creativity are very different. The narrower definition of
intelligence tends to be the basis of convergent thinking, while creativity is
about divergent thinking in this regard. Creativity is a much wider concept
than intelligence. Our creative style has very little to do with our general
intelligence.156
Our creativity has more to do with the particular
characteristics of our intelligence and thinking styles we rely upon (see
figure 5). Creativity relies upon imagination to assist us see patterns and
similarities between unrelated things through metaphor and analogy, etc.
Creativity occurs across our various intelligences, bringing them into
synergy.157
Original thinking is about making these connections.
Wisdom
(emotion &
experience)
Cognitive processing (creativity)
Multiple
Intelligences
Thinking Typologies
General
Intelligence
(Memory & I)
The basis of our skills and
abilities used alone or
supplement other thinking
typologies (our most primitive
type of thinking) – wider than
Gardner’s MI
Mainly developed academic
learning which creates formal
knowledge. This formal
knowledge can supplement
other thinking typologies as it is
fairly useless on its own. – left
hemisphere
Based on experience, awareness,
reflection, mixed emotion and
imagination, very intuitive based
thinking. Useful for strategic and
visionary thinking and solving
problems based on past patterns.
Can be and is influenced by G and
MI – more right hemisphere but
uses both
Frontal lobe and coordinated
right/left hemisphere thinking. Can
be greatly enhanced using specific
cognitive tools that can be learned.
Can be supplemented by other
thinking typologies. Heavy use
imagination/metaphor/symbolic.
Problem solving & creating new
ideas
Instinctive
Solution
Knowledge
Application
Co
nn
ect
ive
Flu
idit
y
Me
mo
ry
Em
oti
ve
Figure 5. The four major thinking typologies
Multiple intelligence recognizes that different skills originate from different
areas of the mind and offers a different insight into how we think. There are
multiple paths of perception and reasoning patterns. A single form of
intelligence restricts the very way a problem is seen, what data is useful,
how the data is organized and analyzed, and what alternatives are
acceptable. In addition, domain paradigms that the majority of people have
been trained within, can act as barriers to breakthroughs and this is often
why a person from outside a domain may have an advantage. Prior
knowledge can be restrictive and anchor one to existing assumptions and
beliefs that prevail within the domain. This is why prodigious performance
is much more likely in fields where prior knowledge is not so important like
43
chess, music, and mathematics, than in fields that require extensive
knowledge like medicine, biotechnology, and nano-electronics, etc. Some
entrepreneurs are able to successfully enter new domains without any
formal training because they are not restricted by the patterned thinking of
the relevant disciplines to the industry.158
The ability to change thinking
paradigms is a pathway to creativity.
If we view intelligence as a wide concept and focus upon the outcomes
then intelligence becomes cultural, geographic, time-bound, and a
situational and contextual process rather than a trait.159
Therefore it’s not
intelligence itself that is important, but how knowledge is processed and
what is done with it. Recent research into children with learning disabilities
indicates that it is the capacity of the working memory, i.e., the capacity to
store and manipulate information and domain related knowledge, is more
important than IQ in academic attainment.160
However social bounding restricts acceptance of what is original and
what is not. For example whether Yoko Ono’s avant-garde art expression is
considered original depends upon her peers. The Royal Society overlooked
Edmund Stone’s discovery that willow bark relieved fever, leading to the
discovery of aspirin.
The consequences of something new may not be seen for many years. It
took more than a decade for the value of powered flight to be realized, as it
was only when a need for spotting on the battlefield emerged during the
Great War that led to rapid development of the aircraft industry. While the
development of the automobile industry was restricted in England with laws
requiring a man with a flag to walk in front of any automobile on the road,
the European industry grew rapidly and flourished without these social and
legal restrictions.
Although the cognitive processes of creative thinking may not change,
the knowledge, surrounding culture and applications will. Thinking is
usually based upon historical precedent and thereby path dependent,
focused upon solving contemporary problems. Over time the paradigms,
values and ethical orientations we think within will change. Thinking tends
to be dominated by major themes and contemporary issues (societal
patterning) of the time such as centralization and mechanization in the
1950’s, technology in the 1960’s, low cost labor intensive manufacturing in
the 1970’s, capital intensiveness of the 1980s, globalism of the 1990’s,
sustainability in the 2000’s, and localization over the last decade.
Economists, medical doctors, psychologists, scientists, and managers are
bounded to the current thinking of their respective fields, anchored to the
current values and philosophies (domain patterning). Organizational
thought is often restricted through the assembling of ‘like minded’ people
sharing the same beliefs and values where differing opinions may be subtly
suppressed (organizational patterning).
44
The tacit influence of political correctness is intrinsic censorship that is
much more powerful that formal means of censorship ensuring compliance
to the beliefs and values of the time and place. What we read, study, and
learn most often dominates our thoughts locking us into existing flows of
ideas, anchoring our thoughts to the current ‘realities’ that society defines
as ‘truths’. Peer and group acceptance is a very important personal need
which may inhibit the expression of ideas unacceptable to the group.
11. Towards the Concept of Creative Intelligence
To be creative in the social arena, a person should have a high level of
emotional and spiritual intelligence.161
Sternberg mentioned the concept of
practical intelligence which is necessary for a person to adapt, shape and
make selections in everyday life in order to cope with everyday issues and
problems.162
Practical intelligence is thus a measure of tacit knowledge,
where tacit knowledge is what is needed to survive and be successful in a
given environment.163
In the same article Sternberg mentioned the concept of creative
intelligence. This concept is also mentioned by a number of other authors,
although the term is used broadly and there is little consensus upon what it
really constitutes. Creative intelligence is a term grouping together the
cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of creative generation like intense
interest, motivation and other social influences,164
or a term that refers more
to styles of creative thinking.165,166
So both concepts of creative intelligence widen the concept of creativity
by placing importance on the contextual and environmental variables on one
hand and on thinking processes, applications, or styles on the other. Rowe
outlines four styles of creative intelligence;
• Intuition which is based on past experience to guide action,
• Innovation which concentrates on systematic and data orientated
problem solving,
• Imagination which uses visualization to create opportunities, and
• Inspiration, which emotionally focuses on the changing of something.167
Khandwalla focuses on a number of personal characteristics like
sensitivity, problem restructuring ability, fluency, flexibility, guessing
ability, originality, elaboration and the uses of various thinking processes
that support them, e.g., convergent thinking, problem restructuring, and
elaboration, etc.168
These approaches show that creativity is both influenced
by the environment and thinking processes employed.
45
In such a context creativity can be broadly considered an ability, or an
intelligence in its own right. A metaphorical construct of creative
intelligence would look something like Figure 6. A person is surrounded by
their social environment. The social environment stimulates an individual’s
perceptions, socializes beliefs and makes judgments upon creative efforts.
The family, domicile outlook, generational influence, age, education, work
and life experiences, etc, all have some influence on interest and motivation,
which should skew an individual toward interests and passions like art,
teaching, engineering, science, home duties, sports, etc.
The environment is completed by the field where contemporaries and
peers within it ultimately make social decisions about what is creative and
what is not. For example the art community decides what art is outstanding
and what art is mediocre. These judgments may only occur years after the
object of art was created, as it may take an artist many years to become
recognized. Although Vincent van Gogh painted most of his life, it wasn’t
until the end of his life that he became known. It was only after his death
that his vivid post-impressionist paintings were fully appreciated. Likewise,
peers in each science through journals and conferences decide what new
information to the domain is acceptable or unacceptable. The work of
Alfred Wagner on Polar air circulation and his hypothesis about the jet
stream and continental drift was not widely accepted until 20 years after his
death. A new product or fad may be considered something creative during
‘the fad period’, where the product’s creative edge disappears afterwards.
Products like the hula-hoop, Frisbee, virtual pets, lava lamps, pet rocks,
cabbage patch kids, and Pokémon rose in popularity quickly and eventually
declined. This fad phenomenon can be seen in many widely disused
management philosophies like management by objectives (MBO), matrix
management, one-minute management, and business process reengineering,
etc.
46
New Ideas
Unknown Opportunities
Developing Strategies
Solving Problems Surrounding
Environment
“Domain” &“Field”
Environmental
Factors conducive
to creativity
Environmental
Factors that
hinder creativity
Motivational
Trigger
Internal Influencing
Factors
Focus & Attention
Creative
Sensitivity
Energy
Emotion
Curiosity
Empathy
Confidence
Discipline
Interest
Passion
Prior
Knowledge
Perception
Patterning
Patterned Thinking
Processes
Creative Product
Applied Thinking
Tools,
Manifestations &
Elaborations Domain & Field
Acceptance/
Rejection
Memory
Heuristics
Belief
Imagination
Fantasy
Experience
Tacit Knowledge
Aw
are
ne
ss
Source of
intelligence &
Thinking
Processes
(Self Organizing
System)
Figure 6. A Metaphoric Construct of “Creative Intelligence”
Within the field of entrepreneurship four types of situations require creative
intelligence. These are the quest for new ideas, the search for yet unknown
opportunities, the development of strategies to exploit potential
opportunities and solving a multitude of problems that face individuals
through the life of the venture. Within the gambit of ethical strategy and
behavior creative intelligence is paramount to being able to implement
ethical principles into complex and ambiguous situations.
Our perception of the outside world is greatly dependent upon our
patterning, heuristics, other biases, and prior knowledge. What we notice or
don’t notice depends upon our creative sensitivity, focus and attention.
What we are interested in, have passion for and confidence in, all influence
47
our perception of people, objects and events. Our perception and reaction to
external stimuli and how our cognitive system will process incoming data
depends upon the existing psychic tension and developed cognitive
dissonance. If there is tension between ‘where we are’ and ‘what we
envisage, desire or aspire’, attention and energy will be drawn into the
following cognitive processes.
Our cognitive operations are independent from the external environment
and our consciousness. All cognitive processes are the result of changing
neural and receptor interactions that occur within different parts of the
brain. Information within the brain is distributed in a decentralized
configuration, functioning as a whole through a strategy called assembly
coding.169
This is a very flexible coding strategy as it can reorganize and
recombine information in a numerous number of ways. Through this
mechanism we are able to continually make perceptions in an ever changing
world.170
Our perceptions, reasoning, concept of self are not concentrated on one
part of the brain, as the brain is a decentralized processor. The brain is a self
organizing system which coordinates these functions. There is no centre of
convergence. Therefore the brain is a decentralized system that utilizes
information in different locations to produce our perceptions, thoughts,
reasoning and intuition. Cognitive processes are not serial, but operate in
parallel, reciprocal and distributed interaction.171
For example when we see
an object and touch it, our sight and tactile preceptors make independent
contributions to the identification of the object – the brain utilizes multiple
strategies to achieve this. There is thus no single locus or point for the
identification of objects. The representations of objects are made up of
spatial-temporal patterns of distributed neural activity.172
The way information is organized is of paramount importance to how
we see things and in solving a problem. As the brain processes in parallel
and can recombine information in numerous ways, this assists an individual
develop new thoughts, new ideas and to solve problems. Making analogies
is a matter of comparing two different concepts that share some similarity in
parallel. The creative process goes through a number of steps, which relies
on the mind as a self organizing system to restructure information and make
new associations, enabling problems to be solved. This usually occurs
during a period of incubation which because of the need to reorganize
information could be one of the most important aspects of seeing new
associations and finding solutions to problems.
Rather than rely on our raw natural thinking processes, we can utilize
disciplined and controlled thinking styles and tools that channel our
thinking processes for enhancing creative thought.173
These tools can assist
us to look at situations and problems in different ways so we can see new
48
associations and linkages which may lead to new ideas or solutions to
problems.
So broadly speaking a metaphoric concept of creative intelligence is
made up of our environment, the factors and variables that influence our
perceptions and cognitive thinking processes, a motivational trigger, our
prior knowledge, our thinking styles, tools that we can employ to enhance
creativity, and the product of the process itself, which will be accepted or
rejected as being something creative. If this model is representative of what
creative intelligence is, then by manipulating the environmental parameters,
being aware of our emotions and other influences upon our perception and
thinking, and by developing new thinking styles through the use of thinking
tools we can enhance our creative ability.
12. Awareness
The environment is full of inconsistencies, discontinuities and disparities
concerning objects, people and events in life. Our association with the
environment is a complex one. It is full of peculiarities and subtleties of
meaning, if we are sensitive enough to pick them up. Awareness is related
to our ability to perceive and understand the complex content rich
environment. A high awareness level implies that we are more observant
and alert about situations around us and feel comfortable with the
complexity rather than exerting a great effort in trying to simplify
meaning.174
People who can perceive the rich layers of content of the
environment have higher levels of creative sensitivity and should therefore
be able to pick up associations between seemingly random facts and
information. They will be better placed to make connections than someone
who is less sensitive to the environment.
Awareness is linked but not dependent upon our intelligence. Without
awareness our intelligence would not function optimally. In order to solve
problems it is necessary to be able to perceive them. Therefore awareness
plays a role in cognitive processing where intelligence may play an enabling
role; especially if we view intelligence as the ability to perceive, recall, and
process information spatially, linguistically, musically, and kinesthetically,
etc. Within the creativity mode, the brain partly relies on external stimuli to
act as cues to assist in long term memory recall. Awareness and attention
assists in picking up these subtle cues which will aid in the recall of
experience and information manifested as prior knowledge, deeply locked
away in the long term memory,175
aiding associative processes and
imagination. This is not a uniform characteristic within the population and
some people are more endowed than others. Therefore people with low
awareness would not pick up as much stimuli from the environment as
49
someone with high awareness, which will result in a lower number of cues
to stimulate recall from the long term memory. Research also indicates that
our perception of the environment may be culturally influenced. Miyamoto
et. al. found that Americans tend to view scenes context independently,
while East Asians are more context dependent upon the way they view
scenes.176
Our level of awareness is related to various groups of emotions that may
influence our perception and thought processes, and thus organization of
information.177
Emotions play a major part in developing our self concept
“I” and “me” with different sets of emotions are related to different levels
of awareness.
At our primal level we are concerned about our basic physiological
needs. Our awareness is physical and immediate, concerned about now.
Associated with our primal self are the basic emotions concerned about
survival, physical fulfillment and enjoyment. The material level is
concerned with pleasure, comfort, and the avoidance of pain. The
boundaries of a person are metaphorically extended by the things we own.
The social self is very much based in feelings of one’s position in relation to
others. Empathy exists at this level and our emotions are concerned with
belongingness. The ego self is the most common domain where we are
concerned about ‘how we see ourselves’ and ‘how others see us’. The ego
self is about glorifying ourselves. This level of awareness leads to very
sophisticated coping mechanisms to deal with realities that don’t fit in with
our world view. The spiritual self enables us to attach different sets of
values to “I’ and “me”, where people begin to feel integrated with the
world around them. At this level self esteem comes from doing what a
person feels is right, and where a person may be willing to sacrifice their
interests for the interests of something greater than themselves. At this
higher level people can transcend their basic emotions of excitement, fear,
anger, and anxiety, and will be aware of their defense mechanisms that
operate at the ego level.
One is immersed within their own sea of emotional orientation with
each level of awareness differently influencing perception and thought.
Within the lower continuums people’s streams of thought tend to be
negatively based where fear manifests itself in worry, anger, judgment, and
general anxiety, leading to generally pessimistic narrative. At the spiritual
level there is little negative narrative on the part of the person.178
Geshe Tashi Tsering postulated that every feeling whether good or bad,
powerful or light should be paid attention to through mindfulness179
that can
be used as a force to protect the psych.180
This has two important
implications. The first is to be aware of our own biases and distortive
tendencies in our perception of objects. The second implication is that we
protect ourselves from harmful influences and ‘emotionally’ learn. Research
50
has shown that mindfulness can activate the ‘default network’.181
The
‘default network’ is active when an individual is at rest, not engaged in
deliberating thoughts, and shuts down when an individual becomes active
and focused on the outside world.
Emotions dominate our deep intrinsic abilities like attention, alertness,
interpersonal abilities, creativity, propensity for action, and strategic
outlook, etc., shape our view of the world, and influences our intentions,
and actions. This approach in explaining behavior is probably better than
previous schools of entrepreneurial thought.182,183
For example, people
through history like Gandhi, Churchill, Stalin, and Hitler were dominated
by their emotions of concern, compassion, destiny, legacy, ruthlessness,
revenge, Machiavellianism, hate, fear, and insecurity respectively. Emotions
greatly influence peoples’ sense of self efficacy which infers that thinking is
heavily influenced by life experience, time and place, and the levels of
awareness they are attuned to.
Awareness can be selective and may give a person some heightened
sensitivity to some aspect of their life. There may be more awareness in
some areas than others, such as increased sensitivity to color, pictures,
sounds, music, values and ethics, human behavior, empathy, spiritual and
spatial dimensions, etc.184
People’s sensitivity also ebbs and wanes during
the day, month and different times in a person’s life.185
At mean levels of
awareness, a person will tend to perceive more in their area of sensitivity
endowment and experience subtle satisfactions or disappointments
concerning certain pieces of art, music, performance, etc. Pleasant
appreciations can lead to increased vigor and energy in a person’s area of
sensitivity. This leads a person to better intuition in their particular areas of
sensitivity. However, too much sensitivity on the other hand can lead a
person to suffer pain, as nothing will satisfy their expectations. This can
lead to deep emotions, i.e., feeling sorry for employees, pain for the poor,
and in the extreme, feelings of depression and lethargic states, mooting
them as ineffective people.
Awareness assists a person develop a deeper understanding within their
domain of sensitivity than what the average individual would. Consequently
a sensitive person becomes aware and concerned about what is wrong
within their area of sensitivity. This is where creativity begins, with the
finding of a problem. Only after sensing that there is a problem can a person
put their attention to solving the problem. Creative people focus on what is
wrong, out of place, missing, not complete, lacking something, knowing
that something needs to be changed for the better. Problem solving is not
the centre of creativity and not the process that actually creates the
opportunity. It is the finding of the problem and the way a person mentally
structures it that creates the birth of a potential opportunity and original
thinking.
51
13. Entrepreneurial opportunity and developing ideas
At the cognitive level our mind is full of mental imagery and other forms of
information stored in our memory in the form of schemata. Our schema
play a paramount role in our beliefs, values, and how we make sense of the
world, influencing the way we think about things and make decisions.186
Schemata provide a cognitive structure where algorithm-like sequences
assist the individual understand events and situations.187
Schemata also
enable an individual construct scenes or vignettes in our mind,188
which
manifest our thoughts, desires, and fantasies. Generally our schemata
maintain the rigidity of our belief systems,189
which enables the individual
to maintain their inspirational and behavioral trajectories forming the
informational basis of our thinking and decision making.190,191
Our schemata
forms the basis of what could be called our dominant logic (or what the
author likes to call dominant narrative), that encapsulates our identity.192
When new information is perceived, it may conflict with our existing
dominant logic. This could arise from any number of displacements like the
unexpected dropping of a set of keys onto the ground, or a much more
drastic event like the loss of a job or death in the family. Shocks or
displacements bring attention to a state of disequilibrium where the
dominant logic is challenged. If these challenges are not suppressed or
denied by our defense mechanisms, an individual may be able to think of
and develop solutions to these discontinuities to bring back stability193
and
view alternative courses of action.194
These shocks will be accompanied
with either positive or negative emotions which may generally influence the
trajectories we take.195
Shock or displacement may lead to a situation where the individual
doesn’t know how to respond and begins to use effectuation to handle the
situation, thereby making connections and constructions out of different
pieces of information the person has available within their memory at the
time. Existing schemata will integrate the person’s knowledge into the new
thought vectors which brings congruency in thoughts and judgment.196
After
a period of confusion these thoughts after some re-assessment begin to form
a catharsis, which may lead to seeing new ideas.
Concepts are the building blocks of ideas, very general abstract notions
that can be built into specific ideas. Concepts are built upon images and
perceptions. They tend to have vague and descriptive meanings, rather than
actionable notions. Concepts are descriptive views of something in the
environment that exist, or something from the imagination that exists only
in fantasy. These may not necessarily be in the form of language, but may
be images, symbols, spatial visages, or musical themes, etc. One or more
conceptualizations will usually be combined together to form an idea, which
52
can be refined, developed, enlarged, and elaborated upon to form something
that can be acted upon.
A description of a restaurant is a concept that provides a list of
characteristics with little actionable meaning. Mexican food is another
concept that is also descriptive of something, but when they are combined
together they become a Mexican restaurant which becomes an idea that can
be elaborated upon, expanded, refined, developed, and action taken.
Likewise the concept of a theatre company and the concept of a restaurant
can be combined together to form a theatre restaurant. In Melbourne,
Australia, the concept of a tram running around the city was combined with
the concept of a restaurant to form the Colonial Tramway Restaurant.197
The
first airplane, the Wright Flyer 1 was invented from a number of concepts
including the basic concepts of aerodynamics (thrust, drag, lift, and gravity),
the box kite, and a petrol engine powering a propeller to create thrust,
balance, and stability. In each case individual concepts were observed,
considered, assembled, synergized, and tested, to make a complete form.
These emerging concepts must develop a critical mass of thought that
connects snippets of information that merge into meaning that both the
thinker and society can share. Entrepreneurial opportunities may be
developed through effectuative imagination (thought experiments), and
invention by experimental engineering.
Concepts can be formed from information where ideas can be developed
by fusing the different pieces together. For example:
Information (1): the population in many developed countries is aging.
Information (2): As there are less people at study age, universities are
developing excess capacity.
Information (3): Universities are subject to funding cuts.
Information (4): Many developing countries have young populations at
study age who wish to gain an education.
These threads of information can be developed into the idea of taking
foreign fee paying students into developed country universities that have
excess capacity. Similarly,
Information (1): the costs of running a service department in a firm within a
developed country are very high.
Information (2): Operational costs in countries like India are much lower.
Information (3): Countries like India have abundant and highly educated
people, who speak English very well.
Information (4): Voice over internet protocol (VOIP) allows direct and
cheap communication around the world.
53
Therefore this information can be developed into the idea of a customer
service centre located in Mumbai to service customers over the phone in the
United States.
Each concept is situational to a particular time and place, as words,
images, objects, signs and symbols. The individual concepts must be
arranged in a manner that creates some form of shared and valued meaning.
Narrative is a store and carrier of knowledge, particularly within social
contexts. An idea becomes a narrative of meaning which members of the
community can embrace and benefit from the revelation of another’s
imagination.198
Narrative conveys ideas through conversation, action, and
symbols to others who in turn become able to share experiences and
perceptions through the same stories. The new narrative must trigger
peoples’ memory199
and transplant an appreciation them into the story200
that inserts emotion which plays a major role in creating these
associations.201
The process of developing a narrative is critical to creating a
new idea and the identity of the idea is critical to the legitimacy it receives
from stakeholders.202
Narrative, symbols, and images of successful ideas
become embedded within our social knowledge structure. Social change can
be seen as new themes running through the community that binds people
through common perceptions and tacit agreement.
Developing concepts into ideas is very much a learning process that
creates a linkage or nexus between real world experiences and the
conceptual world of how we see the world ought to be. The first step of this
process is to identify concepts. An idea that can’t be physically tested may
be developed through the socio-cognitive process of ‘talking through’ the
issues as a means of thinking and articulating them to create clarity203
-
developing an idea as a narrative. An invention can be tested in the real
world, crafting concrete experiences and then reflecting upon the outcomes.
Unsatisfactory results will trigger further reflection and another round of
experimentation, refining the idea further. This process may continue a
number of times until ideas are refined. If after continued experimentation
the results are still not satisfactory, then a complete evaluation seeking
further information may be required before further testing and
experimentation. Eventually new divergent knowledge is created. This
process of trial and error is how Orville and Wilbur Wright learned how to
build a powered airplane and fly it. This learning process is seen on the left
hand side of figure 7. This is also the way many entrepreneurial ideas are
constructed.
Individuals develop knowledge and wisdom through the learning
process.204
Some people will learn better through actively testing their ideas
in the real world, while others learn better through reflection upon the
different attributes of their experience and ideas. Some people’s learning
styles may be more suited to different challenges through the
54
entrepreneurial process during venture development.205
According to Ward
people have their own preferred ways of learning where each cognitive
approach to learning will utilize emphasize different types of information in
developing idea constructs.206
Images and
Connections
Concepts
Ideas
Opportunity
Vision Platform - Perception
Time & Space Potential
Concept Generator –
Making Connections
Sources of Opportunity Learning:
Conceptual World
Identifying
concepts
Evaluation after
experience
Complete re-
evaluation (seek
further
information)
Real World
Experimentation
& Testing
Structure common to all
opportunities
Vision – Outcomes
Time & Space
Resources
Networks
Skills, Competencies & Capabilities
Competitive Environment
Strategy – scope & depth
“A Narrative”
Evaluated and
Elaborated Upon
Figure 7. The opportunity creation process
Some people may prefer the method of assimilation and grasp experience
by thinking and theorizing, then transforming the information by watching
and reflecting. Assimilators conceptualize in abstract and undertake
55
reflective observation. People with assimilative learning preferences will
tend to stew over potential solutions to problems and directions to take.207
Assimilators are excellent at pulling together disparate observations and
building these separate information strands into coherent ideas.208
In their
ideas, assimilators will tend to be logically precise putting more emphasis
on the theory behind the concept than the practical side.
The converger grasps by thinking and theorizing and then transforming
the information by doing and applying. Convergers rely on abstract
conceptualization and experimentation. While convergers may not be doing
something all the time, they never stop thinking about problems and their
solutions.209
They will build up their technical knowledge and platform,
ready to utilize it on developing solution and products once they understand
all the issues involved.210
They tend to be more technical rather than
socially orientated.211
The diverger grasps by feeling and doing and then transforms the
information by watching and reflecting. Divergers have the opposite
strengths to convergers. They have a strong imagination and ability to read
people and situations through their social awareness abilities. They are able
to look at situations from many perspectives and organize many
interrelationships into a meaningful gestalt. They are strong at evaluating
concepts through the market, financial, and operational issues, etc., through
rich personal networks they build up.212
The accommodator grasps experience by feeling and doing and then
transforms the information by doing and applying. Accommodators tend to
have the opposite strengths to assimilators. Accommodators prefer concrete
experiences and active experimentation. They prefer to do rather than to
theorize. They are opportunity seeking and like to act rather than spend a
long period of time evaluating the opportunity. They are able to implement
plans extremely well and their strength is towards opportunity exploitation.
Robinson and Rose postulated that we tend to learn from personal
disturbances which bring chaos and then allow us let go of existing
knowledge to replace it with new knowledge.213
This is consistent with the
entrepreneurial process where a trigger like losing a job or seeing a shop
vacant for rent may launch a person onto taking new trajectories like
pursuing an opportunity.214
Robinson and Rose postulated that emotional
awareness will facilitate the transition from disturbance to chaos in order to
begin critical reflection to facilitate the transition to ‘letting go’ of past
beliefs, to enable the learning of new knowledge. This process involves
synthesis in thinking rather than linear thinking and is a deep emotional
experience.215
Learning can be hindered or distorted by a number of cognitive
mechanisms.216
For example many entrepreneurs are flawed in their
thinking due to the use of small samples, and display overconfidence in
56
their abilities when evaluating opportunities. Other cognitive biases such as
‘obstacle thinking’ leads an individual to focus on the negative aspects of an
opportunity, providing reasons for giving up and abandoning an idea.217
People have cognitive structures that limit their field of vision allowing
only selective perception and interpretation.218
This plays an important role
in what people become interested in and what they see in the environment
and behave in response.219
Individuals are steered by their dominant logic
which acts as a lens through which they view the environment and see
emerging opportunities.220
These interpretive schemata act as mindsets or
mental maps that create a particular world view for any individual.221
Thus
dominant logic makes a person’s perception and responses unique.
According to March the commitment brought through a person’s dominant
logic is more important in action than a person’s thoughtfulness,222
thus
motivation, drive, and passion are central to the development of ideas.
Evolving ideas become a personal narrative of the entrepreneur, a
conceptual framework with a motivated objective. The idea is attached to
excitement and a set of other emotions becoming the individual’s gestalt, ‘a
theory of success,’ or a new mantra for the future. Narrative becomes
absorbed within the person becoming a source of drive and momentum.223
New narratives call the present into question, replacing it with an alternative
future. Through narrative, ambiguity is eliminated and replaced with a clear
and guiding path of action, a new trajectory which becomes the new
meaning for the entrepreneur and venture, exerting influence on those
involved to accomplish it.224
New narratives are introduced into society
where they are tried, some rejected, and some accepted, emerging as a
shared meaning to all. As we see, many narratives are archetypal with
common structures, allusions, and metaphors to convey to society through
public discourse by our corporations today. We can see common themes of
responsibility, transparency, sustainability, accountability, and caring, etc.
Entrepreneurs develop their ideas from personal rather than abstract
perspectives where possibilities are explored within their own personal
constructs and constraints.225
With a map of the future by which to navigate,
the vision is set out so the idea can take on a framework where structure can
be added by assembling skills, competencies, organizational capabilities,
and resources together, and identifying which parts of the entrepreneur’s
networks are required, or what new networks need to be created, and what
action is required within the competitive environment through a formulated
strategy. Once an idea has structure the process of action can commence.
The assembly of various components to enact an idea into action and
reality requires retrospective reasoning to assemble all the components
through our strategic imagination. This process may take a long period of
time to develop into something that action can be taken upon and may even
continue after the entrepreneurial start-up is in operation. This is not any
57
predictable staged or linear process and it is haphazard and something
unique to each individual.
The narrative that the entrepreneur develops about any opportunity
provides insight into his or her future effectiveness.226
How the opportunity
is described, what histories, analogies, and metaphors used will provide
insight into the meaning and commitment towards the opportunity. There is
nothing mysterious about creating ideas, it is a ‘mind-flow’ of thought that
eventually reaches a critical mass and through rearrangement and
recombination the resulting narrative becomes the basis for action. Some
ideas drift away while others continue to be built upon like Darwin’s
concept of ‘natural selection’ and the Orville and Wilbur Wright’s quest for
powered flight. There is rarely any eureka moment, although insights are
gained along the way, as most ideas travel along a slow path of
development, which on the whole maybe mundane and boring to most.227
This eventually leads to the construction of new knowledge that develops
into the narrative of a new invention, idea, opportunity, or venture. Within
the process of effectuation, some narratives are picked up and others
dropped as ideas develop and are refined.
From the entrepreneurship perspective, an opportunity can be
constructed from the imagination where products, themes, and brands create
a story of new experience. Alternately there maybe the discovery of a
potential incongruence where perceived latent demand exists in which case
the primary narrative will be aimed at satisfying these perceived needs.228
As this process emerges our ideas manifest as stories, new opportunities and
ideas are very much a socially constructed process where the outcomes
develop new knowledge which provides new shared meanings.229
The
narrative of new ideas, entrepreneurial opportunity, and invention is about
‘what might be’ and ‘how the world might look and act’ as they are created
and developed.230
Imagination and the resulting stories are turned from
fantasy and fiction into reality.
14. Creative Intelligence and Ethics
At the beginning of this paper a number of impending issues and potential
crises were listed. These relate to the environment, ecology, climate,
poverty, economy, mega-cities, education, racism, hate, rising food prices
and the like. All these issues and problems mentioned are ethical problems,
or at least have major ethical components. The complexity of most of these
issues is so overwhelming that people give up and stay with the present
situation, even knowing that less than optimum utilities exist and potential
disaster may be imminent. Solutions for various reasons are too hard, such
as the difficulty in getting common agreement and consensus. Many
58
solutions require massive changes in habits which are not acceptable to
people. So the action taken is to defer taking action. The solutions for many
of our problems today are yet to be thought out.
In addition, there seem to be a lot of poor ethical decisions going on
around us. Companies still cheat on food ingredients, suspected carcinogens
are still used in a number of products, luxury goods still coming out of the
exploited sweatshops of Asia,231
company directors still withholding and
distorting information to shareholders through the way they present it,232
and stories about the egotistical, greed, fear, and self-preserving decisions
US financial institutions took during the 2008 crisis are becoming public
knowledge.233
There are no international agreements being made about the
issues that matter most to the Earth, leading to criticisms about the lack of
political leadership today. Political and corporate leadership is just as
confused today as political leaders were confused in Europe during 1938.
Leaders have learned to appease, just as Kyoto provided bidding time. The
world has not acted in unison for a long time, but rather acted in favor of
tribal interests, as everyone appears to be heading in their separate
directions.234
Society’s issues can be extremely complex, and often break down into a
host of other complex sub-issues that need consideration. For example
privatizing public utilities was popular during the 1980s as a means of
making government smaller, more efficient, and bringing fiscal windfalls to
budgets, something seen as a win-win situation through returning to the true
values of capitalism.235
However privatization brought questions about
medium term consequences which at the time were conveniently solved
through contractual agreements, i.e., who has the responsibility for
reinvestment in and maintaining quality in infrastructure.236
The long term
consequences of public utilities under control of unanswerable private
corporations are just only beginning to emerge today.237
Corporations are
laying down consumer by-laws without the public having recourse to
natural justice. Some corporations are so big that they can afford to flaunt
the law and pay the penalties as a means of meeting their objectives.238
The
ethics of any situation and subsequent actions taken don’t necessarily yield
predictable results. Courses of action are usually decided according to the
prevailing values and emotions of the times.239
Today’s issues and problems have so many factors and variables to
consider, non-linear approaches are required. Making decisions according to
guidelines, e.g., societal rules, current philosophical trends, leadership
visions, or various scholarly writings, run us into difficulties. Cause and
effect is ambiguous and the guidelines we use most often are conflicting and
lead to confusion, which won’t easily provide satisfactory outcomes. The
way we approach solving problems through incremental solutions influence
other factors that we cannot easily foresee. These issues may actually be
59
beyond our cognitive limits, and thus impossible to truly understand our
predicament as we are dealing on scales that humanity has never had to deal
with before. We are in the position of being ‘a lab-rat trying to understand
the technicians in white coats working in the laboratory’.
Unlike any previous time in history we have become separated from the
environment. We are living in the illusion that we can control the
environment through our knowledge and technology which has generated a
sense of disconnection, as we don’t see ourselves belonging to the World
we live in. With the use and reliance on oil and gas for energy, we have
developed a socio-economic, cultural, financial, and politico-military
construct that we are psychically locked within.240
Yesterday’s generals were actually on the battlefield while today’s
generals may not even be in the country were military action is taking place.
UAV drone technology is also turning the 21st century warrior into a “9 to
5” executive, detached from the warzone, who reports to work conducts
missions, fires at live targets, and goes home for dinner with the family, not
feeling a thing. Economists are not walking around society; they are
examining computerized simulations in a comfortable office, while
politicians are translating these “guess-theories” into politically acceptable
and appeasing remedies. The mythical grandeur we have created about our
own species is blocking the view. Our beliefs in ‘who and what we are’
create one large dysfunctional heuristic that is no more than humanistic
chauvinism, a species overconfidence bias that has encouraged us to believe
that because all things in the past have been solved then all things in the
future will also be solved.
We are being told by the ‘spiritual’ and ‘management’ gurus that new
paradigms are required in managing our affairs and enterprises. There are
plenty of ‘acclaimed’ and ‘best selling’ positivist and instrumentalist advice
about ‘the seven ways’ or ‘ten points’ that lead to success and enlightenment
that have become the vanguard of our contemporary social dogma. It is
‘politically correct’, ‘responsible’, and a way of ‘doing something for the
environment’ to recycle paper, switch off the lights over lunch, or maintain
the air conditioning at a slightly higher temperature to cut down on
electricity consumption. But are using bio-fuels and hybrid cars
environmentally ethical? Have we really thought about how
environmentally ethical these measures really are?241
Is environmental
appeasement enough, or do we really need a sustainable retreat, especially
when we don’t really understand the Earth as an eco-system. For example,
renewable energy appears a valid and benign option, but what would be the
effect of a massive number of turbines on the vortices within the
atmosphere?242
The increase in the planting of bio-fuel crops is accused by
many of putting upward pressure of food prices.243
Solving complex
problems requires wisdom and ingenuity.
60
When serious paradigm shifting solutions come to the table like E.F.
Schumacher’s ideas of how to organize our economy and society in a more
sustainable way,244
it becomes a trendy talking point, something nice,
attracting curiosity, espoused, but rejected in action because it means real
change in our comfortable habits which the majority won’t accept. We are a
compliant society.
The majority of businesses are started because of financial need or
perceived economic opportunities,245
and ethics are not usually a major
consideration in these nascent ventures. The usual primary objectives of an
entrepreneur are to survive, grow, make a profit, and/or maintain or build a
lifestyle.246
Ethics and profits can be seen as conflicting objectives, just as
cost and profit, individual verses society interest, knowing when to be
diplomatic verses being honest, personal loyalty verses responsibility for
what is right, and considering the short verses the long term.
These paradoxes are usually seen as being mutually exclusive, where
there is a need to select one or the other, not necessarily dispositions that
can go together. Thus this is the old paradigm challenge for ethics. Ethics
appears to be about making choices, between these types of alternatives.
Sound ethical choices require emotional awareness and consciousness about
the swaying influence any set of emotions may exert over our decisions. We
may have a sense of ethics but little idea about how to apply them in
situations of marginality and ambiguity, especially where we lack
knowledge and experience. Good ethical choices are about synergizing
thoughts and coming up with ideas where the consequences of
implementation are understood. Ethics requires creativity and wisdom to
implement decisions.
A strong sense of ethical code is not enough in a society with complex
problems. Ethics are generally subservient to our objectives and applied to
what we do in the absence of wisdom, i.e., foreseeing the potential
consequences of any action. Therefore action may lead to unsatisfactory
results through naivety, design or, the influence of psychotic afflictions.247
We live in a society of ethically compromising behavior. Internet
companies are using tracking cookies to mine data from our computers
about our internet habits.248
Microsoft use sophisticated tracking cookies to
profile our personal computers for unlicensed software without the user
knowing under the guise of software updates. While many would argue that
this is an invasion of privacy, Microsoft would argue that they are
safeguarding their intellectual property.249
Some multinational retailers are
designing their house brand packaging in ways that their products resemble
premium brands.250
Banks are regularly criticized for following minimum
legal requirements and undertaking predatory lending practices rather than
providing ethical customer service. Microcredit is seen by many as a
powerful way of alienating poverty. However studies have found that many
61
women are not emancipated by the loan, but actually put into more debt as
they don’t control the repayments.251
Interest rates are not low which often
leads to repayment difficulties. Many stories exist about agents causing
great community disruption and families being worse off than before the
loan.252
There appears to be a fine ethical line that is very ambiguous and
easy to cross without the public actually knowing about it.
Ethics is a relative concept to many corporations. What policies and
benchmarks Tesco, Nike, Apple, and Google practice in one country may be
different from what these same organizations practice in another country.
These decisions may be taken incrementally without deep thought or
intentionally, showing where the firm’s values really are. These values and
resulting behavior inhibit a corporation’s ability to be ethical – the paradox
of being principled or pragmatic.
The author in a previous paper postulated that ethics are part of our true
self.253
Cognitive research on the effect of brain damage to the prefrontal
cortex on moral judgment seems to confirm this. Our sense of morality
originates from the same place that our empathy and other higher order
emotions are generated. Studies have shown that although those with a
damaged prefrontal cortex are able to have an abstract ‘utilitarian’ moral
sense, they find great difficulty applying these abstract notions to real life
situations.254
It is our true self that possesses innate qualities that manifest as
humility, integrity, responsibility, compassion and forgiveness.255
These
qualities exist under the layers of our emotions and desires constructing our
identity which we know as “I’ or “me”. The “I” and “me” persona is the
false self that performs the role as a macro-defense mechanism maintaining
our survival and suppressing the innate qualities of our true self. If we can
escape the influence of our emotions, we begin through our innate empathy
developing an understanding of our self, others, and the environment.256
And this is where we can see connections that we have never seen before.
We are connected as one system and see the interrelationships and
interdependencies around us. We have a connection to the collective
unconscious, which Jung posed as a collection of information, including
myths, stories, images, universal symbols that are understood across all
cultures.257
And within this collective unconscious many philosophers
postulate that universal principles are common across cultures and
consistent through time.258
Traditional societies have endured in all sorts of conditions and those
that have followed ecological ethics have survived,259
while those that chose
to ignore and flaunt these ethics disappeared, becoming extinct
civilizations.260
Failed civilizations throughout human history have shown
the consequences of what we collectively do eventually will come back and
overwhelm society.261
Everything interrelates, where changes influence
62
other parts of the eco-system in ways that are difficult to determine in
advance. Deforestation in Africa has enabled malaria carrying mosquitoes
to breed in open sun-drenched land, where some people survive because of
the make-up of their blood.262
It’s human behavior which tips the eco-
system into directions that carry grave consequences for society.
Ethics are bounded by society’s values, culture, history, at the society
level, and personal values, experience and upbringing at the personal level.
As we have seen with the banking crisis, externally imposed ethics through
laws and regulations cannot foresee the ambiguity of interpretation. There
are always ways and means to get around law and regulation and many
industries are good at this. Ethics must be internalized within us like the
Freudian metaphor of the superego, keeping the id and ego in check. This is
why we pay our taxes, don’t speed and stop at red lights when there are no
other cars or pedestrians around, and return lost property to owners without
the need of a reward. In fact recent research has shown that being
considerate for others can actually reduce stress levels and improve our
health.263
This requires being aware of the influence of our negative
emotions, where few people have the ability recognize this. There can be no
ethics without an awareness of our emotions.
Applying ethics relies on utilizing our creative intelligence and the
processes are exactly the same as solving any problem or developing a new
idea. Seen this way ethics are an application of creativity. Through the
various forms of imagination described earlier in the paper, one will take
numerous issues and regional interests to evolve vision of a potential
solution. Imagination will assist a person run through numerous scenarios
each with different and unique value judgments and dilemmas, with
questions not easy to answer.
Paradoxes or contradictions usually block the way to a new future.
However new and innovative solutions can be found within the most
complex paradoxes. For example, US industry considered cost and quality
to be at different ends of the spectrum. A product of low quality could be
produced at a lower cost than a product of a higher quality. Thus cost and
quality were considered mutually exclusive. You either produced a product
for a low cost or you produced a product for quality at a higher cost. The
philosophy of Total Quality Management (TQM) changed the paradigm
postulating that cost and quality were not mutually exclusive and actually a
firm can reduce cost and improve quality at the same time.264
As we saw
with the abundance of literature on Japanese management in the 1980s, this
new paradigm came as a revelation to US managers.265
The ability to see
complementary relationships in opposing tendencies allows escape from the
‘zero-sum’ approaches to paradoxical problems. The ability to benefit from
these paradoxes is the concern for change people have within the situation.
Every organization and industry will have a set disposition for change and
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stability, which will define how paradox and change is approached.266
Potential new futures that change the rules of the game always create
opportunities within the status quo.
Ethical thinking takes place within the metaphorical model of creative
intelligence outlined earlier in this paper. Within our prior knowledge are
ethical schemata which stores concepts of integrity, responsibility,
compassion, forgiveness, generosity, courage, justice, self discipline, and
humility. These universal principles without lower level emotional
interference become the values by which we think, make decisions, and
behave. Our imagination and particularly empathy gives us the ability to
apply these concepts to everyday life. Higher awareness enables us to
understand our emotions behind our thoughts. Strong and unchecked
emotions can very easily suppress our ethical values. The awareness of our
emotions brings wisdom to intuition.
It is our experience and resulting wisdom that enables us to apply ethics
to problems. The most difficult aspect of ethical thinking is navigation
through various paradoxes mentioned above. Thus wisdom in the case of
ethics is the ability to apply personal principles into action. This
competence develops over time as applying ethics requires experience,
particularly in dealing with constraints and potential consequences that are
difficult to foresee. For this reason ethical solutions are artful rather than
something reasoned as feeling through empathy and maneuvering through
imagination is how solutions are constructed.
Ethical behavior is not a soft option. Ethics are not about the pursuit of
harmony. Ethics require the courage to say “no” rather than making
promises just to please people only to renege on that promise sometime in
the future, leading to a loss of integrity. Pleasing people is not necessarily
ethical behavior as it may be based on a psychotic sense of fear or feelings
of low self efficacy. Truth requires a certain amount of diplomacy so that
people may accept what they are being told. Telling the truth can be used as
a way to sadistically hurt people by those with narcissistic tendencies. Too
much compassion can lead to depression. Knowing that something is
harmful like smoking and doing nothing about it may be a sign of poor self
discipline and anxiety. As a consequence ethical behavior may sometimes
mean taking unpopular actions in conflict with personal values such as
going to war, raising taxes, or putting principle before loyalty, etc. Thus a
final ingredient of ethical thinking is will.
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15. Hindrances to Creativity and Original Thinking
The way we perceive and think is influenced by so many types of cognitive
traps that channel and bias our conclusions. Some of these cognitive traps
include;
• Defense mechanisms are psychological strategies that the psych
develops to cope with emotions generated through our everyday life.267
Defense mechanisms preserve a person’s self image and view of the world
that helps protect our psych from anxiety, fear, and uncertainty. Normality
often contains neurotic traits which can be triggered by anxiety and
dominate one’s perception over a period of high emotion. In such situations,
defense mechanisms can over compensate and develop distortions and
misrepresentations.268
• Culture, particularly restrictive cultures, can be seen as a massive
defensive mechanism against change, uncertainty, and chaos. Culture is a
mechanism that creates certainty and familiarity that acts as a safety barrier
through norms, values, and beliefs it supports, channeling attention to a
limited set of goals and actions.269
• Cognitive biases are errors of judgment based on misconceptions of the
facts, memory errors, probability errors, motivational factors and/or social
influences that lead to irrational reasoning.
• Complacency is a characteristic that gradually sets into a person who
becomes very comfortable, bored, and tired of the mundane work he or she
is doing. Past success tends to bring high self confidence in people, where
they are satisfied with their personal success and wish to ‘rest on their
laurels.’ Leaders believe that they know everything there is to know about
their industry and cease to scan the environment for threats and
opportunities, becoming ‘blind.’ Sometimes this overconfidence brings
arrogance. Within this scenario motivation will slowly decline and new
ideas, self discipline, general focus, and concentration will wane.
• Groupthink is where groups come to a consensus without really
critically analyzing all the various issues involved, with an objective of
striving for unanimity, overriding the motivation to objectively appraise
alternative courses of action.270
• Motivational biases are a group of mechanisms that influence perception
and decision making based upon what a person wants to see when a person
has an interest in reaching certain conclusions or things go a certain way.
• “False urgency” where an organization is busy undertaking tasks for
things that are not important to the firm’s progress or survival.271
Often
people undertake ‘pseudowork’ to look good; following rules rather striving
to achieve goals.272
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• “Heuristics” are ‘short-cuts’, ‘rules of thumb’ decision rules or
templates that aid quick decision making and are embedded within our
belief system, sometimes reflective of our deep motivations and social
conditioning. They are intertwined with our knowledge structures and
become a factor of influence in assessments, judgments, and decisions we
make.
• Attribute substitution occurs when a person has to make a judgment (of
an attribute target) that is very complex. As a result of the complexity, the
mind substitutes a more easily calculated heuristic attribute to simplify
complexity.273
• Misconceptions are false, flawed or mistaken views, opinions or
attitudes and are likely to occur when knowledge about a specific area is
inadequate and supports only partial understanding. Therefore
generalizations are utilized to develop understanding of a situation or event.
• Fallacies are inconsistent arguments with weak premises that appear to
support a conclusion.
• Abstract inferences are abstractions or generalizations that simplify
concepts so the mind can cope with the concepts.
In the extreme these cognitive traps can lead to psychosis and neurotic
behavior. Existing psychotic conditions can also lead to the excessive use of
defense mechanisms.
However cognitive traps can also assist our thinking in making quick
categorizations of our perceptions to cut down on cognitive processing.
Inferences based upon flawed logic can also lead to great insights about
novel ideas leading to entrepreneurial opportunities. For example the
inference ‘buses are cheap and easy to catch’ may lead to a conclusion that
‘airlines should operate like bus companies’. This may have little actual
logic but may be insightful enough to form the basis of a new opportunity,
i.e., low cost airlines. Effectuation through inference is not a logical
process, and as we see in the example above it is not always logic that
produces useful insights.
Adults rarely test the boundaries of their realities and tend to stay within
the familiarity of the status quo. As children we had the ability to use
fantasy to escape reality and create new comfortable realities that we like to
dwell within, but we tend to lose this ability as we become adults. We tend
to utilize our imagination for destructive purposes like creating reasons
‘why something should not be done’ rather than ‘why not’ – building a sense
of risk aversion within us. People have a tendency to brood over issues for
long periods of time and become depressed over them.274
We are embedded within our culture which has a great influence on our
ability to think creatively. Cultures differ greatly in the pressures exerted for
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conformity and openness to new and novel ideas. We live within the
expectations of our society and can only openly imagine within the limits
that society imposes. In many societies this may be very limited, even post
industrial societies have become so rigid in the pressure for compliance to
regulation. The compliance society becomes very uncreative. In addition
peoples’ aspirations are changing. In past generations children aspired to be
firemen, airline pilots, and astronauts, but now they want to be reality TV
stars with little interest in originality, just being seen in places where there
are people. The role models of our time are people who can’t act, play an
instrument, sing, dance, do any sport, or have any intellectual talents.275
Our education systems are becoming rigid again after the forays into
experimental learning during the 1980s and 1990s. Brian Quinn coined the
term McDonaldization of the education system in describing how facilities
like libraries are designed and equipped to handle customers like a fast food
restaurant.276
Students are able to quickly obtain a repertoire of material
they require from a standardized curriculum, and find the answers all at the
end of the book. This has brought mass production and predictability into
education, where poor teaching is being blamed on declining academic
standards in Australian schools.277
Education is fast becoming a quantitative
experience where we are yet to know the costs on creativity and original
thinking.
Technology looks as though it is emancipating our lives. However
George Ritzer paints a much more sinister picture of technology and
postulates that it is the means of controlling and ‘putting people altogether’
in society.278
Although the internet and in particular social media has
opened up channels of communication between people, it is yet to be seen
what effects it has on creativity. Social networking, news, films,
pornography, games, and other information available on the internet has
become a major distraction.279
We communicate, but what is the quality of
what we are communicating? Instead of social media becoming the great
collective consciousness, it has become a collective garbage dump. People
meet physically but are predisposed with others, texting on their mobile
phones. Many are consumed with internet games developing ‘avatars’
creating relationships with others through their ‘cyber alter egos’. Action
video games were thought to assist in enhancing skills that many consider
important in contemporary society.280
However recent research disputes
this, claiming flaws in previous studies ascribing that playing video games
enhances cognitive development.281
Video game research is still in its
infancy with no clear cut results on the positive and negative effects of
playing such games.282
Maybe technology has done more than capitalism to
create Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man.283
The domains that we have been trained within, identify with, and
practice within most often lock us into bounded and channeled thinking. We
67
see things from the perspectives of our domain and become locked into the
old ‘game theory’ paradigm that converts to failure overtime.284
In science
and engineering journals this can be clearly seen in the structure of
academic journal formats and editorial control. Cliquey academics are
defensive against outsiders which keep disciplines restricted to certain
ideas, not readily open to accepting new ideas.285
If we look at various domains we see almost innovative stagnation.
Automobiles remain much the same today as they did twenty years ago
except for accessories, ancillaries, and styling. The long range airline
industry still uses the Boeing 747 as the major workhouse that was
developed during the 1960s. The traditional sources of power generation
coal, gas, and hydro are still the major contributors of power today, without
any clear cut new technologies on the horizon. New developments within
the pharmaceutical industry are restricted by the demands of regulation
requiring exhaustive trials and dossiers on any new product. Even the
mobile phone industry is advancing by style rather than breakthroughs in
technology of late. Most advances within the industries mentioned above
have come from outside, i.e., software, new composite materials, avionics
and electronics, etc. It appears we have been living on the breakthroughs of
the past, even though we have great advances in knowledge.286
Much of our
economic growth over the last 30 years has been through technology
replication. The creative insights of the past have become the rigidities of
today.
Most new development work is undertaken within tightly budgeted
product development processes that leave little room for speculative
development. In addition, many product enhancements seem to be
undertaken for the sake of making enhancements for consumer problems
that don’t readily exist, like new browsers, viewers and applications, etc.
Most creativity comes from dissenting people who are willing to work with
frustration and unpredictability.
16. Conclusion
Howard Gardner’s study of Freud and his contemporaries in his book
Creative Minds pointed to the importance of prior knowledge, high
curiosity, and intellectual strength based upon selective forms of
intelligence rather than specific thinking styles, i.e., Freud intrapersonal,
Einstein spatial and mathematical, Picasso spatial and visual, Stravinsky
musical, Eliot language, and Graham kinesthetic intelligence.
Csikszentmihalyi emphasized the field, domain, peers, and whether new
ideas gained social acceptance about what is original. Thus all original
thinking is bound to our knowledge, culture, and society of which we
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cannot escape, thus putting a limit on how far any original thinking can
move away from what is accepted as the current reality. Breakthroughs like
Copernicus’s pronouncement that the Earth and planets rotated around the
Sun287
rather than the Sun and planets rotating around the Earth required
peer and society acceptance to become the new reality. Charles Darwin’s
theory of natural selection, although not actually discussing the evolution of
man, was seen for a number of years as a theological challenge to the very
notion that man was a divine species as Christian doctrine proclaimed. Thus
Darwin was seen by some in the establishment as a threat to the power of
the church rather than advancing our understanding of how species evolved.
To escape the influence of the field and domain, one must have the ability
to withdraw from it, to escape the influence of current themes of
knowledge. This means ignoring the influence of others and putting in the
effort to think of original ideas. This takes a great energy and discipline
which is truly not appreciated. Peter Drucker’s sources of innovation in his
seminal book Innovation and Entrepreneurship published in 1984 is
certainly influenced by Schumpeter’s sources of innovative opportunity
published in 1934.288
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s 2005 work
Blue Ocean Strategy may have taken some inspiration from Michael
Porter’s ideas on segmentation and competitive advantage back in 1985.289
One is anchored to the ideas of the domain where creativity can only
manifest through extension in most cases.
Many people promoted to the position of professor at a university
engage in activities with very heavy time commitments such as travel,
appearances, meetings, conferences, preparing tedious semesterial reports,
and other obligations leaving very little time for thinking. Due to pressure to
meet key performance index (KPI), many professors tend to engage in
superficial research that may be very situational and provide little real
contribution to the domain. The top echelons of the academic hierarchy
become an anti-intellectual environment.290
Complacency exists where
positions become rewards for work previously done. In contrast both Freud
and Einstein were both isolated during their creative periods, something not
many people are willing to do.
In learning, humankind has performed very poorly as a species. We
have not learned the lessons of war, continually repeating our destructive
nature. Even the lessons from Vietnam were not learned with the invasion
of Iraq some 40 years later.291
The disgust of the holocaust of World War
Two has not prevented similar mass extermination of people in Africa,
Asia, Central Asia, and the Balkans over the last 70 years. The shock of the
2004 tsunami didn’t last long as most coastal early warning equipment in
South-east Asia is not in working condition today and people keep building
by the coast just waiting for another disaster to happen. The contrast
69
between Haiti and the Dominican Republic shows that ‘human’ intervention
has great impact upon the environment.292
In education, emphasis should be put on creative thinking rather than an
orientation towards general intelligence as represented by Bloom’s
taxonomy. This was happening in higher education institutions in post
industrial societies, but there is now an emphasis on the quantitative due to
the rapid increase in the international education market. But higher
education within the developing world is still to a large degree based on
repetitive learning rather than creativity based curricula. The skills required
for original thinking are not being disseminated. General arts and science
degrees that provided grounding across a number of arts and science
disciplines were once popular but have been disappearing in favor of
domain specialization based degrees. A return to these general degrees will
introduce people to a wide array of disciplines that may encourage
interdisciplinary thinking.
Creativity and original thinking are most likely to occur where the
environment metaphorically collides, where paradoxes co-exist, where
incongruities develop, where new technology is more efficient than older
technology, and where better ways of doing things can be discovered. New
technologies collide with an industry bringing new possibilities as we have
seen with the advent of mobile phones that are making landline networks
almost extinct, the internet, debit cards replacing cash transactions, and new
medical technologies enabling local clinics to perform a much wider range
of medical procedures, etc. The domains of biotechnology, medicine,
agriculture, nano-electronics, communications, computing, and imaging are
some of the areas where there are likely to be breakthroughs due to merging
disciplines. Those people who are able to look at things from multiple
disciplines and perspectives, and synthesize their knowledge in developing
responses to problems are the ones that will be most likely to achieve
breakthroughs. So the age of the individual inventor may decline in favor of
highly skilled trans-disciplinary teams. However, it almost goes without
saying that there will always be a place for individuals who are able to see
things that others can’t see like the recent discovery of a new planet by
Chris Holmes and Lee Threapleton.293
In this world of convergence where products and industries are merging
with each other, trans-disciplinary knowledge and skills are required. Being
a domain specific engineer will not be good enough. In order to be creative
the engineer must have knowledge across a number of disciplines that can
be synergized into some meaningful expressions in the form of new
inventions and product applications. This synergization may come from an
insight into some issues facing society to be solved, as shown in figure 8.
Trans-disciplinary approaches increase the scope of knowledge, where new
knowledge can evolve from a greater base, and although creativity may be
70
an individual phenomenon, innovation is more likely a collaborative
emergence under the trans-disciplinary paradigm.
Any opportunity, invention, or innovation is bound to the past, present,
and the field. To the past because any idea is bound to previous ideas and
inventions. To the present because the idea or invention must solve today’s
problems, human needs, or aspirations. New ideas or products must fit into
society’s institutions, industry supply chains, and trade channels. The
tolerance of our society puts limits upon the possible, and anything beyond
these tolerance levels will be doomed to failure. The difference between
Jules Verne’s fantasy of man landing on the moon and the Apollo 11 moon
landing is not vision, but available knowledge and technology, and a sense
of national will and endeavor to achieve the goal.
Our Current knowledge
Trans-Disciplinary
Synergy of Knowledge
“Issues facing society to be solved”
Other disciplines of
knowledge
Microbiology
Biology
Chemistry
Agriculture
Biochemistry
Physics
Engineering
“Deep
Insight”
Application or
Invention
Insight Expressed
New forms of
Expression
Figure 8. Trans-disciplinary knowledge in the green biotechnology field and the
expression of new knowledge as a new invention or product application.
Most breakthroughs today are being made by moving into new domains.
And it is not necessarily a requirement to be an expert within all technical
aspects of a new domain to succeed. It may be sufficient to share some
common skills like marketing to be able to leverage entry. Thus an in-depth
knowledge of aircraft and the airline industry wasn’t as critical to success as
knowledge of a working business model for the birth of Virgin or Air Asia.
Industries will continue to be disrupted by young ‘upstarts’ like Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak who developed and launched the Apple computer in
1976 outpacing the giant IBM in the new emerging personal computer
market. Time and time again, seeing opportunities and knowing how to
promote an idea enables many entrepreneurs to enter new domains and
quickly dominate them, while existing industry leaders are unaware of the
opportunity and/or complacent.
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One of the emerging themes of the early part of this century has been the
emulation and mimicking of nature.294
Scientists are leaning towards the
concepts of nature as inspiration in developing new materials like self-
repairing polymers, photosynthesis in the production of energy, non-
Newtonian fluids for engineering applications, and artificial intelligence.
Darwin’s concepts of natural selection and evolution are now finding a
place within contemporary management theory.295
In the real world, life
must await the right conditions and moment before it can exist as what it is
meant to be. For example, plants adapt their structure and internal processes
to available space, nutrients, changes in climate, and seasons. Our world is
biological rather than mechanical.
Many philosophical ideas are not really original but are presented in
new and powerful ways that render them persuasive ideas at the time. On
the marketing front, Blue Ocean Strategy may be one such manifestation
where the authors and promoters showed the relevance of the ideas to
today’s society. Thomas Edison is generally believed by many to be the
inventor of the electric light bulb. Edison spent an enormous amount of his
time promoting himself and his ideas. As we have seen from biographies of
the great inventor/entrepreneurs of the 19th century, self promotion was a
major factor in gaining recognition.296
Science and rationality enables us to move foward, but it’s our
imagination and ethical standpoint that decides where that place will be.
Our destination changes not because our fundamental ethics change but the
way in how we apply them and imagine what could be. As Charles Darwin
found with his coral reef, mass attracts innovation and is the development of
large population centers where people congregate, contemplate, incubate,
and disseminate new ideas where creativity will grow.
The emergence of mega-cities with extremely high population density
increases the flow of useful ideas because of the concentration of people,
talent, communications, capital, latent entrepreneurial opportunity, and
trading relations.297
However all these conditions will not produce
innovation unless creativity is allowed to flourish. Creativity and original
thinking is most likely to occur in diverse and dynamic environments where
differences are celebrated rather than suppressed.
It is innovation and creative ingenuity that will be required to solve the
problems of this millennium. In paraphrasing what Howard Frederick said
about the paradigm of sustainable entrepreneurship as if the earth mattered;
it was an entrepreneur who caused the crisis (Henry Ford) and it will be an
entrepreneur (perhaps the one who commercializes hydrogen cars) who
may help fix the crisis,298
emphasizes that the solutions to our problems will
come from creativity and innovation.
We cannot assume all areas within countries are growing as statistics
would indicate. Parts of Africa, Asia, the Dominican Republic, and rural
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Australia are declining in prosperity, mainly at the expense of urbanization
where easy solutions are not available. In each case we lack prior
knowledge and experience to make wise decisions. What happens in one
part of the world will affect the rest of the world as we are seeing in the
Arab Spring, Afghanistan, and Iraq. We will see the globalization of the
world’s problems more and more in the future. Emigration will be more
pronounced putting stress upon many countries. Single decisions within the
business arena can shape destinies as well. The decision of IBM to use an
‘off the shelf’ operating system for their personal computer enabled Bill
Gates to envision a near monopoly on PC operating systems around the
world for more than 30 years.
Some of the urgent solutions required include;
• Finding new economic models that can provide stability and
employment once again to developed and post industrial economies,
• Redefine the structure of the banking system so it is controlled and
fulfills its monetary and social role in society,
• Find suitable ways to create energy and sustainable economic activities
that conserve resources for future generations,
• Reconcile and solve water, ozone layer, food, and agriculture issues,
• Learn how to redistribute the World’s wealth where there is growth in
some places, redistributed sources of growth in other regions to solve issues
like poverty and over population,
• Solve the problems of declining utilities infrastructure in mega-cities,
• Find a new base to the currency system and a way to return to country
monetary flexibility that mega-currencies (Euro) inhibited, and
• Solve migration and security problems.
Solutions must be co-created with the environment in mind. Most of our
problems have been created by our intervention within the environment. It
is the nature of the environment paradox that must be solved, i.e., the very
nature of competition itself is the basic force that prevents companies
surviving. The highly successful strategies of today might be the losers of
tomorrow as successful strategies will be brought down by competitors.299
Solutions require entrainment where things tend to become synchronized in
unison, where compatibility develops.300
For example for brands to be
successful, products must be entrained with consumers’ sets of positive
emotions to be successful.301
Co-evolution is based on the premise that we
cannot control the environment and the environment changes without our
intervention anyway. That is why each time the world faces a financial
crisis, there are different underlying causes and new solutions have to be
learned each time.302
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We don’t evolve through planning and foresight, but rather through ad
hoc decisions that accumulate. Evolutionary change occurs more out of
changing conditions rather than planning. For example, slavery ended not so
much out of a desire for equity and fairness of man but because coal and
steam power became more efficient than owning groups of slaves. It was
not the free market mechanism that developed US industry; it was state
capitalism and the opportunity of US industry to fill the void of world
markets after most of Europe was devastated after the Second World War.
The US had the advantage of economies of scale for many years, until rivals
like Japan could reemerge.303
Understanding is a static, knowing is what provides wisdom, where
cognitive connections develop intuition levels so that new realities can be
envisioned. One must contemplate that for every action there are
consequences. Even Peters and Waterman couldn’t provide us with the
correct formula for action that would lead to success. In fact there are many
successful businesses like restaurants that we don’t know what the factors
of success really are.
Most of us can’t see impending disasters coming just like a fish that
can’t see the water they are swimming within. To be able to see requires
willingness to let go of the assumption we have all the solutions to
everything, the fear of not knowing, our delusion of control, a realization
that our institutions are failing us, our reliance on false models, the dumping
of our beliefs in efficiency of markets, acceptance of the decline of
economic growth due to diminishing returns, and letting go of our past
habits and fascinations, e.g., home ownership. The logic of many disciplines
are changing. For example, world economic evolution is creating new
winners and new losers where the concepts of specialization cannot be
applied as in previous decades. Assumptions about labor and capital need to
change to reflect new realities where the factors of production and means of
capital accumulation are continually shifting. Development must be
distinguished from growth. There are no absolute solutions, as solutions
need to be refined, tested and refined again before they might be effective,
which is contrary to the quick fixes society expects.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Wells, H.G. (1946), The Mind at the End of its Tether. New York: Didier, 34.
2. See “The Creativity Crisis,” July 10th 2010, from Newsweek, The Daily
Beast,http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html
3. Heinberg, R., (2011), The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic
Order. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2.
74
4. Ritzer, G. (1993), The McDonaldization of Society: An investigation into the
changing character of contemporary social life, Thousand Oaks, CA, Pine Forge
press.
5. Nemeth, C., J., (1995), Dissent as Driving Cognition, Attitudes, and
Judgments, Social Cognition, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 273-291.
6. See Marcuse, H. (1991), One-Dimensional Man: studies in ideology of
advanced industrial society, London, Routledge, and McGilchrist, I., (2010), The
Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,
London, Yale University Press.
7. Ehrenreich, B., (2009), Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining
America, New York, Picador.
8. Michalko, M. (2011), ‘Why experts create few new ideas, Psychology Today,
October 26th, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/creative-
thinkering/201110/why-experts-create-few-new-ideas
9. Lovelock, J. (2005), Gaia: Medicine for an ailing planet, London, Gaia
Books, P. 15.
10. Sachs, J., (2005), The End of poverty: How we can make it happen in our
lifetime, London, Penguin, pp. 2-3.
11. Most models only utilize a couple of variables to examine cause and effect.
For example Weber’s models were concerned with power, Lakoff’s models were
concerned with the social generation of truth, and Porter’s models with external
structural forces, where on the other hand Mintzberg ignores the role of structural
constraints upon management. These models correlated with certain actions or
behaviors in retrospect, but could not predict accurately in future scenarios.
12. Richard Florida of Carnegie Mellon University believes that creativity in
organizations and society depends upon the outcomes of technology, talent, and
tolerance. Each is necessary but insufficient on its own. Florida sees an economic
geography canvass of creativity where the above conditions differ from place to
place. See Florida, R. (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class: And how its
transforming work, leisure, and community of everyday life, New York, Basic
books.
13. Connelly, C. (2012), Time keepers to introduce leap second June 30 to keep
in synch with mother earth, HeraldSun.com, January 6th,
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/technology/time-keepers-to-introduce-leap-second-
june-30-to-keep-in-sync-with-mother-earth/story-fn7celvh-1226238221924
14. Poor resource management in Australia has resulted in higher salinity levels
where land is now very unproductive. Larger land areas in Australia are needed to
get the same yields as other parts of the world. As a consequence Australian
agriculture needs higher input levels of fertilizers and fuel, where production costs
are higher. Uncompetitive industries include the citrus industry, where orange juice
is cheaper from Brazil, the frozen vegetable industry, where imports are cheaper
from China, and the eucalyptus industry, where imports are cheaper from other parts
of the world. Much of Australia’s land is now low marginal pastoral land. Jared
Diamond suggests that Australia’s import culture set the country’s destiny for failure
as sheep farming was not really suitable on the continent and questions why
kangaroo wasn’t developed as an industry. Australia faces a declining ability to
support its population with food and water, with more desalination plants needed in
75
the future. See: Diamond, J. (2006), Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
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analytical, interpretive, contemplative, inductive, intuitive, deductive, creative, and
elaborative thinking styles. Relying upon one’s instincts or gut feelings (intuition)
can be more progressive than relying on grounded logic and rational reasoning.
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governed by intertwined social, economic, regulatory, and technological factors.
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influenced by what is surrounding the object. So in this example the two grey circles
appear to be different sizes because of their respective relative positions to the
circles of different sizes. This also gives context as all meanings are contextual,
which can lead to different outlooks, i.e., a big fish in a small ocean and a small fish
in a large ocean will need to adopt different survival habits based on their relative
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42. “In its first 18 months, the MVP’s five main objectives were to: (i) Provide
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111. Darwin began keeping notes on the phenomena of evolution on his early
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125. Quirin, M., Kazen, M., & Kuhl, J., (2009), “When Nonsense Sounds Happy
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130. Many people mistake their aspirations for opportunity. For example people
put their money and effort into a boutique, restaurant, or spa for the wrong reasons
because they like fashion, shopping, food and cooking, or aromatherapy and
massage, only to close down a few months later because there was no real
opportunity.
131. However a future orientation in imagination may be the actual position that
a science fiction writer may cherish.
132. Domicile outlook can be defined as the beliefs, attitudes and views one
develops from the position they live and social status. The concept brings together
factors like social status, income, location, state of employment and immigrant
status. Together these factors contribute to a person’s basic beliefs, attitudes and
outlook towards opportunity and their potential to exploit it.
133. Zimbardo, 7; Boyd, J. (2009), The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of
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135. This is an area that will probably be given much more attention in the near
future, particularly in the discipline of entrepreneurship.
136. Lykken, D. T. (2005), “Mental Energy,” Intelligence 33(4): 321-335;
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137. Emotional energy could be a primal defense against danger. For example
something strange has been seen or heard in the distance and the mind has an
opportunity to consider the response to the potential sign of danger. There is a
normal reflexive response to freeze and then consider what to do next. The response
will be emotional rather than reasoned, as emotions are much quicker to generate
than thoughts and reasoning.
138. For a superb account of how our cognitive, emotional and physical systems
function see chapter 5 of Michael A. Jawer, and Marc S. Micozzi, (2009), The
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139. There are many definitions and descriptions of the concept of Qi. Qi is a
concept describing our life-process, our bodily flow of energy that sustains our life.
According to the principals of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Qi circulates
83
around our body where metaphorically it could be viewed as a biological plasma
that maintains our general functioning and health. However like emotional and
mental energy Qi cannot be detected through any form of scientific instrumentation.
140. A mood is a long lasting emotional state that is less intense that the
emotions they are based on. Unlike emotions, moods are not necessarily triggered by
crisis events. A mood will usually have a positive or negative feeling orientation,
such as a good or bad mood.
141. Rather than look at a situation and run through a series of potential options
to find the optimum action, we tend to judge everyday things based on our emotions.
142. Psychotic disorders are actually emotional disorders that arise through
situational and social conflict dealing with issues of anxiety, low self esteem,
feelings of hopelessness, resentment or persecution, etc.
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146. The traditional measure of intelligence was the IQ test to predict school
performance and vocational potential.
147. This can be seen in tests which measured more than a single variable like
the Scholastic Aptitude test (SAT), which gives a verbal and mathematic score.
Another test, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children gives 11 subtest scores of
which 6 are concerned with verbal abilities and 5 with non-verbal abilities.
148. Gardner, H. (2003), “Multiple Intelligence after Twenty Years,” paper
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149. Gardner, H. (2004), op. cit., 60-61.
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154. Whiten, A., & Byrne, R. (1997), Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions
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156. Kirton, M. J. (1994), “Five Years On,” Preface to the second edition, in
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158. For example many notable thinkers and entrepreneurs that dropped out of
school or were self taught include Abraham Lincoln, Amadeo Peter Giannini,
Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Jackson, Barry Diller, Ben Kaufman, Benjamin Franklin,
Carl Linder, Charles Culpeper, Christopher Columbus, Coco Chanel, Colonel
Harlen Sanders, Dave Thomas, David Geffen, Dave Karp, David Ogilvy, DeWitt
Wallace, Frederick Laker, Frederick hennery Royce, George Eastman, Ingar
Kamprad, Isaac Merrit Singer, Jay Van Andel, Jerry yang, John D. Rockefeller,
Joyce C. hall, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Ray Kroc, Richard Branson, Shawn
Fanning, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Edison, and Walt Disney.
159. Gardner, H. (2004), Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligence
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160. Alloway, T. P. (2009), “Working Memory, but not IQ, Predicts Subsequent
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163. Tacit knowledge is generally acquired on one’s own, usually unspoken and
implicit, procedural in natural, not readily articulated and directly related to practical
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164. Cropley, A. J. (1994), “Creative Intelligence: A Concept of True
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166. Rowe, A. J. (2004), op. cit.
167. Rowe, A. J. (2004), ibid., 3.
168. Khandwalla, P. N. (2004), op. cit., 213.
169. Singer, W. (2009), ibid., 326.
170. An example of how assembly coding enables the identification of novel
objects through flexible recombination can be understood by seeing how a small
child may identify a cow for the first time, if they have no previous experience or
understanding of what a cow is. The child upon seeing the cow at the zoo identifies
the cow (a novel object) as a large version of the dog, he or she has at home. It is
only after the parents explain that a cow is a different animal to a dog, that the child
can refine his or her identification of the cow as a separate animal to a dog. Reading
is another activity that shows how the brain can understand the recombination of
letters making up different words, sentences and paragraphs into unique meaning.
171. Singer, W. (2009), “The Brain, a Complex Self-Organizing System,”
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172. Singer, W. (2009), ibid., 325.
173. Many creative enhancement tools exist which include Brainstorming,
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analysis, Synectics, and thinking frames, etc.
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182. Different schools of thought have tried to answer questions like “why do
some people see opportunities and other people don’t?’ These have included
personality traits, propensity to take risk, entrepreneurial intentions, behavioural and
cognitive approaches.
183. Hunter, M. (2012), op. cit., 322-325.
184. Creative sensitivity is the empathetic relationship between ourselves and
the environment and our ability to perceive and understand complex situations we
observe and are involved in. High creative sensitivity implies that we are observant
and aware of the things around us and feel comfortable with the complexity within
the environment. To find out what aspect your sensitivity exists, think about what
issues your find repulsive, irritating and distressful.
185. For example, a person may be spiritually sensitive and as a consequence
become devoted to a particular religion or philosophy. One will have changing
levels of commitment to their spirituality as life progresses and certain events
happen.
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191. Mitchell et al. (2000) define a number of scripts that influence individual’s
reasoning. Those relevant to opportunity include arrangement scripts that are
knowledge structures about the specific arrangements that that support performance
and expert level mastery within an organization, willingness scripts that are
knowledge structures that underlie commitment to new venture creation, and ability
scripts that contain knowledge about a person’s skills, competencies, norms, and
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with the diversity of strategic decisions based on their cognitive orientations or what
was to be called mental maps by peter Senge almost a decade later. The author
describes the dominant logic as a person’s worldview which manifests into a
person’s underlying assumptions, beliefs, values, and desires. The dominant logic
also carries a person’s likes, dislikes interests and aspirations, thus influencing
cognitive attention, focus and concentration. The dominant logic evolves out of a
person’s experiences, knowledge, and long term emotional orientations, forming a
major part of identity. Therefore dominant logic governs what a person perceives,
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embedded, linking the person to the outside environment, and operates sub-
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235. This was championed by the then US President Ronald Reagan and then
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a solution to economic inefficiencies at
the time, although it was based on the philosophies of neo-liberalism coined as
“Reaganism” and “Thatcherism”.
89
236. One case of point is the sell-off of the British Railway system into smaller
packages which made planning, coordination, and safety very difficult.
237. The global banking crisis of 2008 which started in US mortgage defaults
can be partly attributed to a deregulated market that cannot correct itself due to the
absence of checks and balances.
238. For example Microsoft faced a number of antitrust lawsuits pursuant to the
Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 over a number of issues relating to the abuse of
monopoly power on Intel chip based personal computers, operating system and web
browser sales in the late 1990s. Although it lost many of these cases, Microsoft was
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239. The big government of the 1950’s was partly the result of the Second
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and charging hybrid electric cars still require electricity that is on the whole
produced through traditional energy generation means like coal that produce
greenhouse gases anyway
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255. These qualities that Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel postulate are
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(2008), Moral Intelligence: Enhancing Business Performance & Leadership
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256. Empathy probably plays a major role in our ethical morality through the
ability to feel what others feel and thereby experience the emotions of compassion
and humility. Research has shown that a neglected upbringing of a child may retard
growth of the cortical and sub-cortical areas of the brain important for connection to
others, our empathy. Perry, B. D., & Pollard, D. (1997), “Altered Brain
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257. This could be a metaphoric collective unconscious which is the sum of all
our social learning and genetic inheritance within our prior knowledge.
258. Anthropologist Donald Brown postulates that all cultures and societies have
common universals which include the ability to distinguish between right and
wrong. Kinnier et al. analyzed the tenants of moral codes across religions and came
up with a common list, and Peterson et al. identified six universal values common
across all cultures, wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and
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260. Diamond, J. (2006), op. cit.
261. This concept is well embedded in eastern philosophy and culture. Hindu,
Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh philosophies deeply behold the concept of karma. Although
the meaning of Karma differs between the philosophies, it describes the law of
causation. This is basically where one would experience the consequences of what
one does at some future time in this or after life. Karma thus returns the
consequences of what one does – a force of responsibility. Karma relates to both
91
good and bad deeds. The concept of Karma is embedded within many South-east
Asian societies. For example the Malay culture that has Hindu roots but practices
contemporary Islam has a deep belief within society that what one does towards
others will eventually come back to them. Therefore this belief is one of the ultimate
guiding morals for Malay society. See Asrul Zamani (2002), The Malay Ideals.
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263. See a report on research undertaken by Dr. David Lewis at the University
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other-could-improve-your-health/
264. See Crosby, P. (1984), Quality is Free: Quality without Tears. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
265. However the solution is often very complex because conditions may be
different, which prevented the successful adoption of Japanese automobile
manufacturing techniques in America.
266. Gharajedaghi, J. (2006), Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and
Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture, 2nd edition.
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267. Larsen, R. J. (2000), “Toward a Science of Mood Regulation,”
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278. Ritzer, G. (1993), The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into
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279. The internet may have cut down our reading time and distracted us but now
we have a much greater ability to connect with others much quicker than previously
in so many ways. This may enable us to combine hunches much quicker than
previously and take advantage of the synergy of more than one person thinking
about something. The internet also enables us to stumble across new pieces of
information we previous were unaware of.
280. Green, S. C., Pouget, A., & Bavelier, D. (2010), “Improved Probabilistic
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283. Marcuse, H. (1991), op. cit.
284. Firms can also change the way the game is played within their competitive
fields. Alfred Sloan’s divisionalization assisted the way corporate America grew.
Taiichi Ohno, the chief engineer at Toyota developed lean manufacturing system
which enabled the changing of a machine dye in 3 minutes compared to 3 days in
the US, changing the way automobiles were manufactured. When a firm is unwilling
to follow the changes in game rules, it runs the risk of becoming irrelevant. Fletcher
Jones wanted to restrict production to Australia of his suits and have employees own
the company when his competitors were all producing in China. Fletcher Jones went
bankrupt.
285. However as a counter trend, more people are publishing than ever before.
There is an exponential jump in the number of people publishing new ideas, a
massive jump in the number of journals, and many more new business ideas and
theories. While the author was at university during the 1970s there were a limited
number of familiar business and management journals. The acceptance of work into
a journal is so much easier now than before (some of this is checkbook academia),
however so much of these works never get read by those who are opinion leaders.
286. Harford, T. (2011), Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.
London: Little Brown, 94.
287. Interesting is that Aristarchus seventeen centuries earlier described the solar
system where the Sun was at rest and the planets revolved around it in circular
orbits.
288. See Drucker, P.F. (1984), Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and
Principals. New York: Harper; and Schumpeter, J. (1934), Capitalism, Socialism,
and Democracy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
289. Chan Kim, W., and Mauborgne, R. (2005), Blue Ocean Strategy: How to
Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant. Boston:
Harvard Business School Press, and Porter, M. E. (1985), Competitive Advantage:
93
Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. New York: Free Press, see Chapter
7.
290. See Clayton, M. (2003), “Deep Thinkers Missing in Action,” Christian
Science Monitor, January, 21st, http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0121/p17s02-
lehl.html, Michael Markow, “Anti-intellectualism in Schools and Universities,”
http://www.viewshound.com/politics/2011/6/25/anti-intellectualism-in-schools-and-
universities
291. However this is my value judgment as attitudes and values change over
time history may look very differently upon the Iraq saga.
292. Diamond, J. (2006), op. cit., 339.
293. See U.K. Amateur astronomers find new planet, UPI.Com,
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2012/01/20/UK-amateur-astronomers-find-new-
planet/UPI-78541327104776/
294. Benyus, J. M. (2002), Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New
York: HarperPerennial.
295. Hardford, T. (2011), op. cit.
296. Schweikart, L., & Doti, L. P. (2010), American Entrepreneur: Fascinating
Stories of the People who Defined Business in the United States. New York:
AMACOM.
297. Homer-Dixon, T. (2000), The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the
Problems of the Future? New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 26.
298. Frederick H. H., & Kuratko, D. F. (2010), Entrepreneurship: Theory,
Process, Practice, 2nd Asia-Pacific Edition. Melbourne: Cengage Learning, 3.
299. Beinhocker, E. D. (2006), The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity,
and the Radical Remaking of Economics. New York: Random House, 230-1.
300. In the 17th century the Dutch physicist Christian Huygens discovered that
his pendulum clocks were all ticking in unison within his laboratory. Knowing that
clocks could not be precise, Huygens hypothesized that the clocks were
synchronized through minute vibrations travelling throughout the building. This
phenomenon can be seen through planetary systems, electronics, the human body,
and even menstrual tensions within families.
301. Hill, D. (2010), Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success,
2nd edition. London: KoganPage, 49-50.
302. Norberg, J. (2009), Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with
Home Ownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis. Washington: Cato
Institute.
303. King, S. D. (2010), Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western
Prosperity. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, see chapter 2.