• Creating

ASSASSINS: Dissonance

By Todd Henry

This week we’re beginning a three-part blog series on the “assassins” of the creative process.  (This series is loosely based on a section of the talk Create Or Die: Thriving in the Create-On-Demand World.)

There are essentially three assassins within organizational and personal creating. They are often the result of the “grinding” and the inconsistency between the hyper-management of the creative process and the natural way in which we naturally live and create.

Today we’re going to discuss dissonance. Dissonance is when the “why” and the “what” don’t add up. In music, a dissonant chord is one that doesn’t…quite…resolve… and we’re left waiting for the resolution. A certain amount of dissonance is healthy for the creative process, because it’s in these gaps between what is and what could be that art takes form.

But there is also an unhealthy kind of dissonance. It’s what happens when the “why” and the “what” aren’t adding up within our organizational or personal systems. When what we say doesn’t match what we see, it creates tension that zaps our creative energy. We’re wasting mental cycles trying to reconcile environmental incongruity.

Our minds are wired to solve problems and find patterns. All good creating, in fact, is the result of taking disparate and loosely connected ideas and bringing order to them. It is the resolution of dissonance.  As a result of this pattern-making characteristic of our minds, when there is a lot of inconsistent data in our world, our minds want desperately to reconcile the loose ends and create harmony. This is a significant drain on our creative process. Energy cycles that could be used toward solving organizational problems or innovating are instead wasted – often subconsciously – on trying to make things add up.
This can play out in our organizational or personal lives. Our ambition should be to stamp out dissonance whenever and wherever we can. Where should we look for it? Let me give a few examples:

http://www.accidentalcreative.com/images/movies/AvaRunning.flv

When our stated systems or goals don’t line up with our day-to-day experience. This is a video of my kids running around outside of one of our favorite restaurants. They love to have races, but the races drive my oldest son crazy. He is a rule follower, and (as any of you with a two-year-old know) our daughter makes the rules. The problem is that she will run around, and he will follow her, then she will suddenly take a left-turn, stop and shout “I win.” The rules simply aren’t clear, and as a result he is wasting a lot of energy running around trying to win with the deck is stacked against him.

Many of us are just like my son. It’s difficult to know how to “win” if we don’t understand the rules of the game and where the finish line is. This means that we spend a lot of time trying to reconcile why the “why”, or what we say we’re about, doesn’t line up with the “what”, or what we do from day to day. Do your day-to-day actions line up with your priorities?

Unnecessary complexity. Another way in which dissonance can creep into our lives is when we make things more complicated than they need to be. I keep this sign on my office door to remind me to strive for simplicity in everything I do. Each new system we create is a potential source for dissonance because it introduces complexity. Some level of complexity is always necessary, but we must be perpetually striving for simplicity in what we do. We should try to shoot for the most simple, elegant solution. Remember that systems exist to serve the end result, not themselves. Are your systems (personal, organizational) too complex?

The Black Box. A third source of dissonance is what we’ll call the “black box.” It’s when we feel at the mercy of someone or something but there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to their decisions. I call the vacuum in which all of these confusing decisions are made the organizational “black box” because it contains all of the hidden decision making criteria that affect us, but that we really have limited interaction with. As a result, we eventually withhold or withdraw because we simply don’t see any kind of cause and effect. (This is why transparency and clarity are so critical for leaders of the creative process. It’s important that we be able to trust that decisions are in alignment with our overall organizational purpose.)

Again, realize that there is good dissonance and bad dissonance, but our minds try to resolve either just the same. The better we get at stamping out the misalignments and bringing clarity to our daily activity the more “creative energy” we’ll have to solve the problems at hand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

• Chasing "The Thing"
• "Them" and The Tyranny of Chasing Cool
• Sean Platt: Creating, Selling & Innovating
• Ask the Readers: Communicating Respect