The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out...Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.
This quote has fascinated me for about a year now. I found it online and never knew who said it. Until today. This morning is was introduced to Dee Hock, the founder of Visa (yes, the credit card company) and his "chaordic" theory about organizations...the notion that healthy, adaptive systems will always exhibit a kind of dynamic tension between chaos and order. It fit in beautifully with the dynamic tension that he'd set up in Visa: encourage as much competition and initiative as possible throughout the organization -- "chaos" -- while building in mechanisms for cooperation -- "order."
There is a great article about him from Fast Company.
What does this have to do with our work as community artists and creative changemakers? A lot, potentially. There are many sectors, not just the corporate sector, who are looking at how to implement Hock's principles and practices into fundamental institutional change. The Fast Company article references Hock's work in the 90's with the Joyce Foundation (Chicago), currently a large funder of community arts.
So, in our field that is supposed to all be about change in a decentralized way, let's take these theories on and figure out what we can clear out in order to make some space for some magic to happen.
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