Enabling Creative Response to Extraordinary Crises

The challenges to strategic thinking of the 'first 21st century war' have come to a stage at which further developments are frustrated by an 'intelligence vacuum' and there are new calls for 'creativity'. At the same time criticism of bombing, such as in Afghanistan, is met with arguments of the type: 'what would you do instead'? This kind of pattern is evident in other situations, whether the Middle East, global warming, overfishing, etc. Metaphorically such challenges are the unclimbed mountains of contemporary western civilization -- perhaps to be understood otherwise in cultures with a different respect for mountains.

The purpose of this note is to reflect on how a more creative response might be enabled in such situations -- and to what matters attention can usefully be given in ensuring its emergence.

Enabling Creative Response to Extraordinary Crises
Reframing
Designing a catalyst
Requisite variety of qualities
Self-organizing process
Entraining wider participation
Strategic implications
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In scoping out a creative response, it is useful to identify various traps which are liable to ensure that the response is neither creative nor effective. These need to be factored into the design. They might include taking care to avoid:

overdefining the nature of the response; overdefinition would necessarily inhibit creativity and tend to result in merely confirming the unproductive understanding of those defining the process
defining the response as a product or process that can be implemented through appropriate directives; this precludes the possibility of non-directive and 'contextual' responses
producing a resolution as an end-product may ensure that the response shares the fate of many international resolutions and initiatives -- as would be the case with the formulation of a new international treaty or law
being drawn into standard well-explored patterns in response to crises, such as though associated with research institutes, diplomatic activity, eminent mediators and intermediaries, and secret deals through secretive networks -- especially when these have all had considerable past opportunity to demonstrate the relevance of their approach
being drawn into the particular argumentation of particular schools of thought, whether academic disciplines, political ideologies, or spiritual belief systems, notably when they are represented through mainstream hierarchies or 'old boy' networks
patterns of denial, whether on the part of those involved in the response or with respect to matters under consideration
patterns of delay or displacement that inhibit convergence or the emergence of new perspectives
exercises in cooptation by parties with vested interests or hidden agendas

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Enabling Creative Response to Extraordinary Crises