The Spiritual Dimension Of Innovation
The other day, I had a conversation with a fellow design thinker, Damien Nunes. Our networks overlapped on a lot of people and we were connected on LinkedIn but we’d never met. We decided to have coffee. I’m always up for a coffee to talk about my passion for design thinking, service design, change management, intervention design, speculative design. On a spiritual level, I also believe that any person you meet in your life can hold an important message for you. The meeting did not disappoint :)
We talked for about an hour and we spoke about how my life’s story came full circle with the concept of design thinking. I told him how I studied Science and Art and made it my life’s purpose to connect the two. We discussed how we each saw the whole idea of design thinking as a way to connect the artistic mind-, tool-, and skillset to the scientific approach to business problem-solving. We also talked about the fine art of visualization in design thinking workshops. And that is when we hit upon the message that was packaged for me in this meeting.
The art-science dichotomy
Due to my hybrid background in both art and science, the mental model of my workspace was the dichotomy of art and science. In my career, I have been working on the hypothesis that this is a false dichotomy, that art and science are not opposites but actually have a lot in common and can be merged together. Early on in my career, I was heavily influenced by the idea of the art-scientist as outlined in Artscience, creativity in the post-Google generation by David Edwards. In this book, Edwards describes people who can draw from both the art and the science world to solve problems. Later on, I recognized these same ideals in the concept of design thinking. My mental model looked like this:
The third axis
In our conversation, one of the topics was visualization. The basic idea most people have about visualization is that you can express an idea visually. This can be helpful for people to understand what you are talking about. To communicate. But visualization can be way more powerful when you don’t only use it to express ideas but to think. To me, drawing is a way of thinking. Visual thinking. When I start drawing, I get new ideas. I draw to think. So when we were talking about the art-science dichotomy, Damien Nunes challenged me to think about a third axis. He asked me if this model was not a spectrum of two opposites but three, what would the third axis be?
This question came from talking about visualization. If you represent your idea using a different drawing, does that lead to new insights? Is it a spectrum or a Venn-diagram, a linear flow or a circular? All these questions you need to ask yourself to visualize your thoughts can help you think differently about your ideas. This simple visualization exercise to go from two axes to three posed a crucial question for me. I have been working on the connection between art and science for the better part of two decades now. But these last few years I have been doubling down on my own spiritual development. Up until now, I did not see a strong link between this spiritual development and the art and science dichotomy. I had been thinking about it a little bit and I felt I could use some spiritual insights to help me in my work. But when Damien Nunes asked me this question, things fell into place. I did not have to think about this question on the third axis for one second. The third axis, to me, is the spiritual dimension:
The spiritual axis
The way I see it right now is that we can look at the world from three points of view:
- from a logical, rational, Cartesian, scientific point of view,
- from a visual, holistic, emotional, intuitive, artistic point of view,
- and from an energetic, systems-thinking, human-nature, fate point of view.
A couple of months ago, I delivered a talk on a design conference where I discovered a strong link between the design thinking approach and the spiritual way of seeing the world:
It’s probably because this is my focus but I see some articles popping up in my feed bubble that talk about the value of the spiritual in solving the bigger crises like climate change and smaller ones like business transformation we are facing right now:
Design and technology, the equivalents of art and science in my diagram, alone cannot solve the transformation challenges we are facing right now. It looks like we need to include a spiritual dimension to create the mental shifts required to change. This goes for all levels of change from individual to teams, to organizations, to nations, to the world.
How to change your mind
One of the books I am reading right now is How to change your mind by Michael Pollan. In this book, he discusses psychedelics as a shortcut to spiritual awakening. In a trip on psychedelics, it is apparently possible to temporarily dissolve one’s ego and establish a connection to all living things. For a large number of people who take psychedelics, the experience can be classified as a spiritual experience. They discover a truth about life that has a lasting effect on how they see life and how they continue to live it. Psychedelics can give a person instant access to an alternate state of consciousness. The state of consciousness that psychedelics give access to is similar to the state of consciousness that comes from decades of meditation and spiritual development. You see that all life is connected in a universal source. You experience that all life is connected through energy and can communicate that way. You start to see patterns that show that each individual life has a purpose. You start to detach from personal goals and start watching your life unfold. You start to see how the people you meet have messages for you on your learning journey. You start to see the artificial constructs of society and the effects they have.
Different states of consciousness
The interesting link of spiritual development and the creativity that manifests itself in art and is now flowing into the dominant scientific approach under the flag of design thinking comes from a diagram that was mentioned in the book. Pollan refers to a diagram in a paper by Carhart-Harris. In it, we can see a spectrum of possible cognitive states ranging from a coma to enlightenment. The two axes in his diagram are about entropy, a.k.a. know as complexity. On the one side is embracing complexity with enlightenment as the pinnacle. On the other is rejecting complexity with a coma on the apex. A little to the right of the middle is the “normal waking consciousness of healthy humans”, which is rigid thinking!
Divergent thinking and creativity are on the left side of the diagram, on the path towards more complexity. This feels totally in line with my experience of trying to make people and organizations more creative. Developing creativity means learning to embrace complexity. I also observe that creativity and the embrace of complexity that comes with that is not the default state of most people. I see this as the thing that design thinking workshops work on: showing people how to navigate complexity and become more creative. You also see what the rejection of complexity leads to if you go too far. Rigid thinking develops into OCD if you start taking the rules way too seriously. One step further and you are depressed.
Linking creativity to spiritual development
The thing that interests me in this diagram is the path towards more and more complexity. The step after creativity is magical thinking: seeing that there is more to life than matter and scientific logic, seeing that there are things we cannot explain with our scientific models and standard human logic. If you follow this path to the end, you end up in the state of enlightenment. This model strongly links creativity with spiritual awakening. If I turn this into my own diagram and link it to the levels of spiritual development that are described by classes in Mindvalley and that can be seen in movies like The Matrix, I come to this visualization:
Maybe the movie The Matrix is the easiest way to understand spiritual development and the creative consequences. The movie starts with Neo questioning his reality. He is already a creative computer hacker when he is still inside the Matrix. At some point, he is shown the real world by Morpheus. Once he makes the conscious choice to leave the Matrix, he starts training new skills that make him much more creative and able to solve problems at a much deeper level. But Neo doesn’t reach his full creative potential until he surrenders himself, until he lets go of all limiting ideas he has about himself and the creative potential of his world. Once he lets go, he becomes the most creative person in the world. He can now bend reality. This is the apex of creativity. The journey towards spiritual enlightenment and creativity are intertwined, maybe even the same.
In my diagram, I placed these levels of spiritual development (asleep, questioning, awareness, training, bend reality) next to the states of consciousness of Carhart-Harris. I see a link between the normal waking state of most humans and the transition from asleep to questioning. Starting to ask questions, either out of interest or because you are forced by changing circumstances that challenge your current mental models, is the first step towards both spiritual development and to becoming more creative.
The future of the third axis
At the NADC19 conference, I already learned that meditation can make you more creative, that the spiritual journey and the creative journey both have the same endpoint and are about the same topics. My favorite management book, The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, is also built on top of scientific, artistic and spiritual insights. I have not seen a lot of thinking on this third axis of change management and innovation. Maybe that is because I just started on this journey or maybe because it is still a largely undiscovered terrain. I see a clear link between spirituality and creativity and therefore a clear value in the transitions a lot of companies, people, societies are going through. My focus is shifting towards design-based change management projects. These projects are sometimes called digital transformation because digital opportunities are one of the biggest driving forces of change. But there are more forces at work and these are complex transitions. I believe we need all the skills, knowledge and tools from science, art and spiritual to make this work.
