Creating Room for Creativity

Physics and mathematics are useful tools for understanding the universe, but it’s a fair critique that I am unlikely, in my daily affairs, to have need for calculating out hypergeometric functions by hand, or to apply the theory of paraparticles to some practical application.  However, I’ve long advocated that these sometimes abstract fields can have significant power in expanding our ways of thinking about the world at large, beyond the specific confines of a given theory or equation.  Quantum physics can provide insights into the interplay between individuals and societies.  Rocket design can inspire revision techniques.  In Destruction and Creation, Boyd does the same thing, applying theorems and principles from mathematics, thermodynamics, and quantum physics to gain insight into how the human mind interacts with ideas.

Destruction and Creation is sometimes a dense essay, but it is well written and clear if you have some patience with it (it is also part of a larger series of essays, which I have not read).  Boyd was a fighter pilot and air war theorist, but his philosophical inclinations and polymath tendencies are on display in his essay, which stands as an independent piece of thought on the nature of ideas, quite aside from the larger context of military theories of winning and losing of which it is ostensibly a part.  For reference, the abstract he includes with the series of essays states:

“‘Patterns of Conflict’ represents a compendium of ideas and actions for winning and losing in a highly competitive world. ‘Organic Design for Command and Control’ surfaces the implicit arrangements that permit cooperation in complex, competitive, fast moving situations. ‘The Strategic Game of ? and ?’ emphasizes the mental twists and turns we undertake to surface appropriate schemes or designs for realizing our aims or purposes. ‘Destruction and Creation’ lays out in abstract but graphic fashion the ways by which we evolve mental concepts to comprehend and cope with our environment. ‘Revelation’ makes visible the metaphorical message that flows from this ‘Discourse.’”

-Patterns of Conflict Abstract, John Boyd

Most of us will have a natural inclination to mistitle the essay as Creation and Destruction, but the order of the words which Boyd chose is significant, for in his notion of dialectic, the creation of new ideas requires destruction.  In fact, that is the central premise.  Boyd makes three key assertions based on three polymathic connections: like Godel proved internal consistency cannot be proven without external reference, external input is required for the development of new ideas; like the second law of thermodynamics requires an overall progression from more to less differentiable states to achieve a local reduction in entropy, chaos, the inexplicable, that which breaks the existing apparatus of notions, must arise in order for new, more orderly ideas to be formed; like the uncertainty principle, the closer the thinker is to the matter under consideration, the less definitively the system can be determined.

We wrote a post about the process of innovation and invention, and I thought along those lines as I read Destruction and Creation, for it comes to a similar conclusion, albeit from different arguments.  Boyd’s key observation is that creation only occurs when there is some disruption from the status quo which necessitates the effort – that is, some kind of destruction.  Not a violent, physical destruction – I posit that disruption may be the more appropriate term, but Disruption and Ideation is a lot less poetic and compelling a title than Destruction and Creation.  Apparently, he supplied an example (which is described in detail here: How John Boyd’s Model of Creation and Destruction Can Help You See The World More Accurately – John M Jennings), which revolves around categorization and how our brains are wont to compartmentalize, which can be limiting on our imaginations and our ability to think in new ways about familiar matters.  It forms a fine demonstration of the role of destruction – doing away, by whatever mechanism, with those old, limiting categories – in creating the space and mental flexibility in which new ideas can be synthesized.

Perhaps this does not seem all that revolutionary a notion – it is not so dissimilar from the old adage about outside the box thinking – and, indeed, it wasn’t until I sat with it for a couple days that I realized the scope of implication and the understated insight of this reordering of the ordinary understanding of creation and destruction in terms of ideas.  Like when CS Lewis says that the acorn came from the mighty oak as surely as the mighty oak arises from the acorn, Boyd’s inversion, putting destruction (or, again, disruption) as the necessary prerequisite to creation is a prompt to reframe the way we look at reality, but in this case, at an even more practical level, for the insight that destruction is a key, perhaps an inextricable, prompt to creation can be applied directly to each of our attempts to innovate and imagine, whether that is developing a new solution to a technical problem, restructuring an organization so it is more effective in achieving its goals, or writing a new story.  When we are willing to disrupt the status quo, we create space for something new.