5 Ways To Cultivate An Emergent Mindset
How to adapt and thrive as a creative in the digital world.
As creatives we all want the same things: To be known. To make an impact. To connect with people who care about and support our work. Succeeding in this has always required imagination, curiosity, discipline and grit.
But as contemporary creatives we’re faced with a further challenge: To create, share, and promote our work in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. To succeed in this we must cultivate an entirely new mindset.
Why?
Because the context for our work now spans two worlds: A physical one, where time and place and sensory details create one kind of context for meaning and work; and a digital one, where connection, communication, and innovation happens in the digital now: Where the past is flat— archived and searchable—and everything is happening and available this minute, anywhere.
What this means is that there is no check list, no playbook, no perfect toolset for building an audience or crafting a platform for your ideas, no matter how much you want that to be the case. There are no tactics that will always be relevant. No tried and true network you’ll always need to engage in. No keywords, or content, or editorial calendar that will always reach your audience’s hearts and minds.
In other words, to produce work and build an audience in the digital context is a dynamic choreography, and to succeed depends on the degree to which your mindset is emergent: Adaptable, responsive, and always in the process of becoming something new.
Following are a few insights and ideas about how to cultivate an emergent mindset that I’ve gathered through the process of studying, creating, and consulting in this ever-changing landscape. They are the synthesis of many conversations I’ve had with innovators and entrepreneurs, artists, and designers (a few excerpts of those conversations are shared here in quotes); from the countless books and articles I’ve read; and from my own experience connecting and engaging in this space.
If you want to create a platform, build an audience, or get your work noticed in the digital landscape, this is a place to begin.
1. Stay in motion
The school, for the fish, exists only at “run time,” in action and reaction with the other fish. Similarly:
Your work’s meaning and impact happens through interaction—in the moment, with the medium, and with the people who are engaging it.
The school exists because each individual fish is acutely attune to the others, and responsive to the unpredictable nature of their environment. The school does not maintain its shape or formation. It is constantly being made and remade in response to the complex and changing environment. This is the closest metaphor I can think of to describe what I mean when I say that as a contemporary creative you must cultivate an “emergent mindset.”
Emergence is about complex systems and patterns arising from a multiplicity of relatively small and simple interactions. Your ability to think systemically about your work, and understand the patterns of interaction around it will be vital to your success. Because your work exists in context. And increasingly your work is context.
“We are surrounded by interactive systems that frame our thoughts and guide our thinking. Randomness and order, uncertainty and assuredness.” — Randy Smith
2. Make real connections
Connection is vital to our survival. We are instinctually driven to form emotional bonds with other like-minded humans, and our urge to communicate—through every means available—stems from this primal drive to connect.
Too often when people tell me they want an audience, they describe it in one-sided terms. As if, after checking off the boxes on an imaginary audience building list, they’ll simply have an audience ready and waiting. As if audience isn’t about connection at all.
But building an audience is about creating real connections with real people.
And though it may be screamingly obvious, I’m always astounded by the fact that it bears repeating, again and again: All the ways that you build connections in the physical world apply in the digital world.
For people to connect to your work, it must matter to them. And to find out what matters, you must do exactly what you do with your best friend over coffee, or passing a stranger in the park, or networking at a conference:
Say hello. @mention people whose work you admire. Respond to people who comment on your work. Ask questions. Invite participation. Be curious. Be sincere. Share other people’s work and sing their praises. Be transparent. Talk about your process. Dare to reveal some of the vulnerable, unpolished, risky bits. Lean in closely. Listen hard.
The artist’s mission is to communicate beauty and also to help people connect with that beauty —and through doing so they connect with themselves. People don’t buy into your platform. They buy into the difference that you make. —Bernadette Jiwa
3. Be a novice
To create work that engages people requires understanding what matters to them—and also when, and where, and why.
What shapes their point of view? What networks do they connect in? What devices do they use?
The only consistent thing about the answers to these questions is that they will change. What’s relevant today won’t be tomorrow. What feels saturated and tired now, will be reinvented. What you think is impossible, won’t be before you know it.
Make a habit of testing whatever’s new—to get a feeling for its relevance in the context of your work.
People give me all kinds of reasons for not wanting to do this: They don’t have time. They don’t “do social media.” They’re concerned about privacy. They’ve never used a platform or tool before.
What it really comes down to for most people is that they are uncomfortable with trying new things. Being a novice is something that most of us would prefer to avoid. By the time we hit adulthood we’d like to think we can count on certain things to be consistently true—but creating in the context of Moore’s law means all such bets are off.
To be a creative today means engaging in a perpetual flirtation with the new.
Emerging tools, media, and cultural trends will always create a new context and opportunity for your work. Get used to that feeling.
The minute you hear about a new social network, or app, or workflow management tool, sign up or get on the wait list. Have you tried Hi? Do you have Beats? What about 8Tracks? Is Evernote a part of your workflow? The Hemingway app? Scrivner? Quora? You’ll likely deem a few of these useful and others not at all. One or two might prove vital to your creative process, or to sharing your work, or making real connections.
4. Find the voice of the medium
The media we use are extensions of our minds, hands, and hearts. They inform the work we create; and in turn what we produce will define the media landscape of our future; round and round. For this reason it’s vital for you to explore every medium available to you for creation—not just the one’s you’re familiar with.
You don’t know how to code? Start here. You’ve never written for the web? Do it. You think only pros can shoot amazing video footage? Maybe not. One of the glorious benefits of being alive today is that there’s a how-to guide for just about anything you’re curious about. Skillshare is pretty rad. So is Lynda.
Start with the medium that terrifies you the most. (I spent two semesters in graduate school wrestling with actionscript. It was brutal. And I made some incredible attempts at interactive storytelling that pushed me as a writer and creative.)
As you work with a new medium, you’ll find that it has it’s own valuable and specific voice, and it’s own resistances and limitations.
Not everything is best achieved through code or pixels. Print media and polaroid film might have shifted in the centrality and singularity of their importance, but they are still valuable in their specific uses. Its for this reason I believe every artist should learn a little about the poetry of code—and every programmer should explore the chaos of sumi ink.
The closer you are to doing the work yourself, the closer you will be to receiving signals from the medium. — Jonathan Harris
5. Create some filters + a point of view
Creativity thrives in the hyper-connected environment of the Internet where everything is searchable, accessible, and immediate. At the same time, it’s easier than ever to spend all your time skating across the surface of content produced by others, and to lose perspective on your own point of view.
Be disciplined about setting parameters for how you do research online. You can find anything and everything here, and doing so can easily pull you off course. The worst thing that can happen is getting so caught up in your research you stop believing in your own work.
Over and over I’ve heard creatives say some version of: “Well, clearly that’s already been done, so now I can’t.” Even about work they deeply believe in. Even about ideas they’ve been developing for years.
And it’s true. If you look far enough you will discover that no idea is unique. What you’re making has likely been made in some form by someone else; and the idea you’re excited about has already been shared by someone more qualified or smarter than you.
This is not a reason to give up. In fact it’s the opposite.
Your work is unique and valuable because of the generative values you bring to creating, sharing and promoting it in the digital space. Authenticity is derived not from the uniqueness of your idea, but from the personal iterative process of creating meaning that takes place between you and your audience when you show up and share. Your ideas might not be unique, but the meaning made through conversation, collaboration, and interplay, is.
Block off some time every day to close out your browser tabs and show up without distraction and do the creative work you’ve set out to do.
Cultivate your own mechanisms for synthesis and reflection by taking time every week to go beneath the surface of your own thoughts: Review your bookmarks, re-read notebook entries, and summarize the ideas you want to develop further. This is like doing creative sit-ups. You can pin a hundred photos of gorgeous abs, but until you start doing crunches, you won’t get your own.
It’s easy to get lost in the social web. To build an identity, you have to be specific—intentional is a good word. I had to learn to develop an agenda. —Chris Gullibeau
Expect to fail, because failing is a given when trying something new. Expect to collaborate with the medium, and with your audience. Expect that the outcome will change. Expect that the context will continue to shift. You’re creating in a wild, incredible time.
