Building Creative Capacity Building in University Graduates: What we can learn from boids and voids

Rather than begin with a preamble about the need for creative capacity in our graduates, I am going to presume that participants in this conference will have already canvassed that issue and/or have ample opportunities to do so in these few days. I want to move straight to the issue of how to construct learning environments that optimise opportunities for university students (and, indeed, their teachers) to work as members of dynamic creative teams.

My stress on the importance of working as part of a team follows Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s insistence that it is the community, not the individual that we need to focus on when investigate how creativity gets fostered

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999). Implications of a systems perspective for the study of creativity. In R. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 313-335.

Norman Jackson is a researcher who has taken Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas further, adapting them to specific field of educational practice such as ‘history teaching’, drawing attention to all the complexity of the social and cultural environments in which such teaching takes place

Jackson, N. (2006) Making Sense of Creativity in Higher Education, in N. Jackson, M. Oliver, M. Shaw, J. Wisdom (Eds) Developing creativity in higher education: An imaginative curriculum. London: Routledge, pp197-230.

Management consultant Thomas Stewart

Stewart, T. (1996) The Great Conundrum: You vs. the team, Fortune, 134, Nov, 165-166.

To understand the sort of environments that make not just for group work or team-based work but for dynamic high flying teams, we cannot simply rely on the motivational power of teachers or organisational leaders, or merely hope that individual genius will emerge of its own volition. We should bear in mind John Howkins’ insistence that creative productivity requires both the separateness of individual talent and the togetherness of team collaboration, all working as seamlessly as possible within and across processes of production and distribution

Howkins, J (2002) The Creative Economy: How people make money from ideas. London: Penguin.

Given that the challenge of setting up a learning environment that fosters such a complex mix of relational dynamics is not a simple matter of ensuring that people feel good about themselves, I suggest that there are two areas of research that can be usefully bought together to provide principles on which to build learning environment for ‘high flying’ creatives.

The first is research that synthesises computer animation and biological behaviour to understand how ‘birds of a feather flock together’. We know that ‘flocking together’ allows birds (boids are the computer animated variety) to fly higher and exhibit greater scheduling and routing capabilities than each bird can do alone. The means by which this extra capacity is achieved can tell us a lot about how we might do better in a team environment than we can alone.

The second is the sociological research that inquires into how good ideas get picked up and moved about in organizations, that is, how a novel idea, produced in one specialist cluster, can be transported across ‘holes’ (voids) in the organization to and integrated with the work of different, even unrelated, clusters of specialists.

Insights from these two different domains of research – one focusing on the ‘micro’ dynamics of a team of a few people, and the other focusing on the macro dynamics of working across teams, can be combined to make a good learning environment for creative high flying.

I will deal firstly with research on the flocking of bird objects - ‘boids’.

Computer modeling expert, Richard Seel’s (2006) inquiry into the emergence of new patterns of behaviour and forms of engagement in organisations serves as a convenient starting point for investigating the value of computer modelling-meets-biology research for ‘growing’ dynamic creative teams

Seel, R. (2006) Emergence in Organisations - http://www.new-paradigm.co.uk/emergence-2.htm

Seel concedes, as other researchers of human social behaviour do,

See for example Stanislav D. Dobrev (2005) Career Mobility and Job Flocking, Social Science Research, 34, 800-820.

flockmates. In doing so, we can learn the simple rules of interaction that allow for very complex forms of group engagement.

Computer simulations of bird objects (boids) tell us about the behavioural principles that allow flocks or swarms to perform with more capacity (e.g. flying higher and faster and avoiding obstacles more easily) than the capacity of any one flock member allows

See Craig Reynolds (1987). Flocks, herds, and schools: A distributed behavioral model. Computer Graphics, 21(4), 25-34. and also (nd). Boids: Background and update. Retrieved 27 April, 2007, from http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

A related and important aspect of nature’s team behaviour is that it does not come about as a reaction to ‘control and command’ from outside

Thompson K. (2006). Enhance team performanceby consistent individual behaviour. Retrieved 27 April, 2007, from http://www.bioteams.com/2006/03/22/enhance_team_performance.html

Appropriate ‘flocking’ behaviour is generated within ‘local neighbourhoods’ of ‘flockmates’ through the provision of timely information and the self-management of:

These deceptively simple capacities are three dimensional in terms of behaviour, in that they are simultaneously focused on member/member, member/external and member/colony orientation

Thompson, K. (2006). Enhance team performanceby consistent individual behaviour . Retrieved 27 April, 2007, from http://www.bioteams.com/2006/03/22/enhance_team_performance.html op cit, p.3

The rules for maintaining an optimal ecological assemblage of flockmates can tell us a lot about ‘high flying’ learning environments. Each flockmate is aligned with and responsive to those flockmates in their immediate vicinity, as well as being appropriately separate from those same flockmates. This may come as something of a surprise to those who understand ‘mass collaboration’ as necessarily obliterating or subsuming individual space. In fact, it is best done by respecting and maintaining space.

What can be learned from this is that, while creative teams need to be attuned to the needs and interests of their ‘flockmates’ in the common project, team-based student ‘self-management’ functions optimally when it does not interfere with or obstruct others. In Seel’s terms, “too much connectivity…can inhibit

emergence… [in that]…diversity is excluded and groupthink is a very likely outcome”

Seel, R. (2006) Emergence in Organisations - http://www.new-paradigm.co.uk/emergence-2.htm p.3

While ‘boid’ research works against our commonly accepted notions of ‘strong leadership’, it also reminds us that ‘anything goes’ is not a practical alternative for building a creativity-enhancing learning environment. The space of optimal ecological assemblage is not a space of anarchy – it works precisely against destructively unpredictable conduct on the part of individual flockmates. The necessary ‘randomness’ is always systematic, scanning for and reporting information of potential value – it is patterned, not chaotic.

Some embryonic work has already been to apply these principles derived from non-human biological ‘teams’ to human teams at work within organisations. According to management expert, Ken Thompson, the principle of “systemic randomness”

Thompson, K. (2006). Enhance team performance by consistent individual behaviour . Retrieved 27 April, 2007, from http://www.bioteams.com/2006/03/22/enhance_team_performance.html op cit, p.3

Thompson acknowledges elsewhere

Thompson, K. (2006) Mass Collaboration and Virtual Crowds, http://www.bioteams.com accessed 18 April 2007.

The internet has made it possible to harness such “swarm intelligence” more powerfully than any technology we have yet seen. Swarming mass collaborations on the internet are shaking up orthodox business operations through enhancing their members’ capacity for:

Swarming mass collaborations can teach us more about setting up and sustaining ‘high flying’ formal learning environments. While there has been much interest and investment in ICTs for learning, we

have made scant headway in understanding what sorts of collaborations are now possible, and whether and how they might be systematically fostered in formal education. In Seel’s terminology, we have much more to learn about how ecological settings and pedagogical approaches can be “tuned” to predispose young people to creative thinking and doing.

Seel, R. (2006) Emergence in Organisations - http://www.new-paradigm.co.uk/emergence-2.htm op cit, p.3

Biological research

See Anderson, C. (1998). The Organisation of Foraging in Insect Societies. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sheffield, and also Anderson, C., & Franks, N. R. (2004). Teamwork in ants, robots and humans. Advances in the Study of Behavior, 33(1-48).

This allows more nuanced understandings of collaborative activity than simply speaking of ‘teamwork’ as though it were a ‘one-size-fits-all’ set of activities, behaviours or events. It also directs us to think about matters of size and scale. Is there an optimum number of individuals that could be expected to work concurrently (ie, do different things at the same time) while maintaining cohesion and alignment? What sort of structure would enable a self-managing ‘local neighbourhood’ to form and be sustained through its capacity to maintain sufficient separateness and sufficient connectedness across time and space?

As I conceded earlier in this paper, the move from bio-ecology to human interactivity is not a simply matter of taking what avian or any other species do and applying it to human behaviour. While this fact does not negate the value of learning from natural systems, it reminds us that we need to know more about optimising learning environments than we can learn from ‘boids’, if we are to set up principles for organising learning environments within business organisations, as well as within and outside universities.

The social scientific research of both Stanslav Dobrev and Ronald Burt is helpful here. Stanislav Dobrev is helpful because his empirical research into career mobility carefully builds a bridge between the spatial proximity of birds, and the socio-demographic behaviour of networks of people pursuing similar careers

Dobrev, S. (2005) Career Mobility and Job Flocking, Social Science Research, 34, 800-820.

Put simply, individuals do not have to be connected through inter-personal ties to ‘flock together’. They can and do connect as ‘birds of a feather’ do. Nevertheless he also cautions against using ecological models without placing them alongside other theorising of complex social processes. So we can’t simply presume that we will fly higher if we attach ourselves to a high flying crowd or profession.

Ronald Burt’s research

Burt, R. (2004) Structural Holes and Good Ideas, The American Journal of Sociology, 110 (2), 349-399.

In putting forward his views about ‘void’ brokerage as a creative act, Burt acknowledges the fact that most organisations have structures of clusters in which people’s behaviour, opinion and information tend to be relatively homogenous. He explains that the fact that people tend to focus on activities inside their own cluster creates “holes” in the information flow between groups – what he calls “structural holes”

Ibid, p.353.

There are, according to Burt, four levels of ‘translation’ or brokerage through which a person or persons can create value as information arbiter(s). They are, in ascending order:

What these levels of arbitrage draw attention to is not just the importance of the brokering function to value-adding creativity, but also the significance that attaches to building and expanding “boundary-spanning relationships”

Ibid, p.358.

When applied to formal educational environments, Burt’s framework implies that operating as ‘neighbourhoods of flockmates’ is only part of the picture of a creativity-enhancing learning environment. At a meta-level, some person or persons are needed who can span the “structural holes” that exist across different domains. This demands that some person or persons have the desire, indeed the expectation, “to continue to propose ideas” that originate in one place and get taken up in another.

Ibid, p.390.

But is this actually happening? In the organisations that Burt studied, the more likely scenario was that leaders and managers were having most of their discussions with a small number of very close colleagues, and very few with those outside their narrow field of operations. This means that the potential value of good ideas in most organisations is lost; the distribution of ideas is shut down by “an inertia model of social convenience”

Ibid, p.390.

So too in universities, ideas do not usually flow freely across disciplinary clusters. Rather, they stop at the door of a faculty or department, as lecturers retreat to monastic offices and teachers go it alone in their one-to-thirty tutorials. If good ideas are going to be valued in formal educational environments, we need to shake up the monasticism and singularity of teaching and educational leadership.

When we put together the lessons about learning environments that are implicit in the biological ‘boid’ research and the organisational ‘void’ research described above, we can derive a set of paradoxical principles for dynamic team building. In summary, they underline the importance of learning environments in which apparently contrary imperatives exist for evoking optimal creative outcomes, imperatives that co-exist despite their apparent incommensurability. They bring together the following:

The above principles are aligned in many important respects with recent theorising of learning as a connection-forming or network-creating process. In looking to ‘boids’ and ‘voids’ to provide a conceptual framework for rethinking the dynamics of a creativity-enhancing learning environment, we pay less attention to the sources of information and more attention to processes through which knowledge and information are transferred and translated within and across social groups. In a world in which the capacity to memorise pre-determined content is much less important than the capacity to generate knowledge through co-creation, this is a key shift. It has us focused on developing connections, not defending the citadel.

Connectivist theorising moves us on from behaviourist, cognitive or constructivist notions of learning to focus squarely on the ecologies within which learning networks are structured. As learning designer George Siemens sees it

Siemens, G (2005) Connectivism: Learning as a Network Creation, ASTD’s Source for e-Learning, http://wwwlearningcircuitsorg/2005/nov2005/siemenshtm accessed 30 Jan 2008

Information and communication technologies have a very important role to play in enabling the development of these personal learning networks. As Siemens puts it:

The five paradoxical principles outlined above are highly compatible with this conceptualisation of learning as informal, connection-based, and ICT-enhanced networking. They make it possible to imagine a new structure for the learning environment, instead of being anxious about what happens once we begin to make the overdue transition away from regulation and rigidity. The five principles privilege the ability to navigate within and across knowledge domains, and are less concerned with the ability to memorise facts or present information. At a micro level, they allow us to be explicit about the dynamics involved in building and sustaining collaborative and agile teams, while at a macro level, they allow us to pay more attention to brokering ideas, understanding that this is a much more crucial institutional and social dynamic than we have acknowledged to date.