Imagine, we have Creative Intelligence!
Why we need to tap back into our Creative capacities to truly live and not just survive.
It's all about perspective
On one Christmas, our parents gifted us, my twin and I, each a radio-remote-controlled cars. Back in the 1970s, that was so cool. Within 2-3 days, being the boys we were, we got curious and decided to take them apart, as controlling them around the house was fun, but got boring fast, and IKYK what I mean.
My twin took his apart and put it back together, and his worked again the way it was meant. Mine, on the other hand, had a few parts left out, and when I decided to move the car forward, it went in reverse, and when I wanted to turn it right, it went left and vice versa. So the movements were reversed and to my surprise it did still work, whilst staring at the left over part laying there.
I remember thinking, well, this is weird, but then was it? If you remote control this car and want to move forward, you typically stand behind it, and you push the small joystick button forward to have it move forward and back when you want to reverse left and right accordingly. But if you stand in front of the car, the reversed remote functions would make sense, right? Can you imagine it, or am I the only weirdo here?
So, once I switched where I stood, it all made sense. When I wanted to have the car come to me, I pressed down towards me, and up away from me for it to reverse, and you get the gist. In a world where there are standards, we have come to accept that screens need to be rectangular and wide, cars need to have 4 wheels, airplanes need to look like buses with wings, the news need to be negative, the politicians need to be sleazy, education is the way universities curriculum it, and the many norms we have come to accept. We have been (standardized) normalized.
When Innovation is for its own sake
Along this path, one norm is that Innovation its bout innovation. I believed that innovation and creativity should not focus on creating product s and services, that lead to dependency but rather, help us humans do life better. If every remote for a radio-controlled car also had a button to help define where you stand and then adjusted the joystick control directions, that would have been cool and more fun to play with as a toy. It also made us stay true to how we think and view the world. Innovation has mostly been busy with innovating only to have us adjust to it, rather than it adjusting to us.
In its core, innovation is intelligent, but it can be used for its own sake, and that’s when I believe it’s deceptive when it’s tech-, sales-, or product-centered, with the goal for more profit. I have so far observed, that much of innovation came from intelligent creativity to help solve a problem, and help us to then moving on to innovate to wow you, seduce you, and, in due time, to a certain degree hook and enslave you and believe that paying for it over and over again is for you good.
The past 200 years, with all the innovations humanity has ushered in, have we not become more hooked and enslaved than we have ever been? And it does not seem to slow down; every innovation promises us something that will be of so much value to us, and we embrace it, whilst not realizing how we become enslaved to it.
A simple example was the messaging tech we got with mobile phones, called SMS. It would help us send messages, and providers in the early days charged you for sending a message, so you had a package of how many a month. The more mobiles became digitized, and as everything in that field had become digital, they kept charging for something that should not cost any extra. By then, they were using the same networks for calls and messaging and internet. No wonder messaging apps got ushered in by sending messages via the internet instead of paying for SMS packages.
There are many other examples I could share, as what we have lost is the important and essential aspect of creativity, which is to truly help humans but instead its focus is the gain of shareholders, and CEO’s having to deliver better numbers by the year. Sadly the economic culture of our nations, and of business is a reward based, so the more you make the more you are somehow celebrated.
Rediscovering Creative Intelligence
Creative intelligence has to do with where we stand and the perspectives we have. Currently, AI is being praised as the thing we need in helping soon with everything. Its narrative is sold to us by its makers and, of course, their investors. Undoubtedly, it is a great technology, but at what point does the scale tip and we serve it instead of it serving us?
We do not live in a world anymore where we have human-centered creativity, but rather in a sales-centered creativity, and we humans are the servants to the products and services to a certain degree. They want us to be dependent on them by marketing their features that are to give us a competitive edge over the others. Every product, be it a car, tech, store, social media, app, channel, or service pitched, is supposedly better than the others, so buy, subscribe, upgrade, and hire us, as we will help you be the best.
I always wondered why we buy or build homes generally for life or for a long time but don’t manufacture clothes, tech, furniture, transportation, and so on for multiple decades. As mentioned earlier, as long as creativity and innovation are sales-centric, humanity will not flourish!
Human flourishing can only be achieved when human-centered creativity and innovation are pursued and championed. We need a return to this focus, and we need everyone to be on board.
Play, Discover, Practice, Master, Serve
Going back to most of our childhoods, we were innocent, curious, playful, and lived with a sense of wonder. That should be the childhood most of us should have gotten. We were picky; we wanted certain things, and we were passionate about a few things and had fits to get them. At some point we started to compromise and give away more and more of our rights and our lives to be connected or to get access to the free services, thinking we won. But did we really win, or did we just get dependent? They flourished at our cost, the cost of hours invested, privacy & attention given away.
Most children just go for things; they don’t think twice. They see something and try, right? If they want something, they ask; they hear something, and they imitate it. They repeat them as it gives them joy until they begin to stretch them and play, and in due time they master it. They eventually become great at the discovery they never stopped pursuing, along the way nurtured by creative ways and perspectives that help innovate. It was because they were in discovery mode, curious and hungry for filling their hearts and minds with purpose and wonder, leading to a better life, that we can call it flourishing. Philosophy, art, music, dance, engineering, science, farming, building, and organizing all started in most of those who do these, as play, joy, and a pursuit for more discovery.
Remember how we experienced things? Then we nurtured our creative capacity, we sought to discover, we played, we tried and applied. Depending on the result, we kept looking or we put it aside into our creative tool box for a later use.
Sadly society, in most cultures and beliefs, seeks to fit us in well and generally teach us the easy method that conformity is best for all. They highlight that it will empower us to arrive at a life of comfort and belonging. Very often most of us in due time come to the realization that our deep hunger for more discovery was forced into a corner and that repetition and doing the same is easier and healthier and even more profitable. Our emotional muscle memory, gets numbed and dumbed down to just do the same and the circle of repetition, only results in status quo, the standard, and the everyone’s normal and its more evident in our consumerism today. Be it capitalism, socialism, communism, academics, religion, culture, generations, they all to a certain degree seek to shape us after their own image.
Can we agree that true human flourishing depends on human-centered creativity and innovation and not product, profit, and sales centricity? Also that the Economics of life are the more than the economics we know as buying and selling, demand and Supply?
What can we do to return to being human-centered? We need to revisit our own creative intelligence by restoring our domains of authority. Meaning, you and I have a choice and have more power than we are told we do. We are created in the image of Creative God, whose creativity is Human Centered, his products and services are Centered around a life lived with Purpose, servitude and relationship. That is the basis to why we to should human Centered. Jesus did say: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”.1
I chose not to use AI to write this. Is it perfect? No. Is it genuine? Yes. And is it me? 100%. You and I can and should be intentional and critical to discerning what we should support and what we should challenge. By not engaging at times, we are being proactive, and at other times by engaging we are proactive. I am also a fan EI, Eternal Intelligence aka God, from Whom all knowledge, understanding and wisdom flows. 2
What we certainly need is clarity, commitment, and keeping the dialogue on how we can return to human-centered creativity and a life lived and not just survived.
If you would like to learn more about Creative Intelligence, check out my course on maven.
footnotes
1 The Gospel of John 10:10
2 Proverbs 2:6
