The Myth of Best Practice

Excerpts from The Myth of Best Practice

A look at the creative process

by Robert Fritz (www.robertfritz.com)

The arts are unique in that the creative process is a foundation for everything you do.  Most other professions do not demand the same orientation.  In fact, most of us have learned that to succeed in life, we must follow, what in business these days is called “best practices.”

So-called “best practices” imply that there is a (certain) way things go (best), and that we must learn and then apply these methods.  Our job is to respond to situations we find ourselves in with the right approach that comes with a rulebook.  The opposite is also built into the formula.  Don’t follow “best practices” and you will have trouble.

Too often, the orientation of “best practices” or rules or regulations or convention is one of mindless adherence.   Those in search of “best practices” do not seek to understand how these practices were invented or developed.  If they did, they would find that every “best practice” began with a departure from the norm.  In other words, a “best practice” came from rethinking a previous “best practice.”  The new best practice was often a rejection of an earlier one.

Let’s be clear about what the creative process actually is; an approach to bring desired results into being. There is something we want to create that doesn’t yet exist, and we will take action to create that result.

A deeper look at the creative process concerns several factors that combine.  One obvious element is knowing the end result you want to create.  There is a wide range of what you need to know about your desired result before you begin from rather vague and general to very precise.  Sometimes it depends on the result itself.  A skyscraper requires a very specific vision, while a painting might not.  The result you want to create needs to be clear enough to organize your actions around it.

Once the vision is adequately clear, the next element is current reality.  What do we have in relationship to our vision?  We must observe reality freshly.  If we really look originally, without a concept about how things are, without a theory, without speculation, we might see something we haven’t seen before.  We might find that our assumptions are untrue.  We might find that they are true, but we transform assumptions into factual observations.

Knowing what we want and what we have sets up structural tension: the dynamic that exists between the desired state and the actual state.  There is nothing wrong with convention when it can do the job.  Usually it can’t.   We need something else. The mind is fertile and will generate new and better methods to achieve our goals when convention fails us.  Even if convention were an available process, it may not be the best, the most streamlined, the most economical, or the most effective.

Within the creative process, creativity has its place.  But its role is often small compared to the greater scope the creative process demands.  The usual psychological view about creativity is that people are creative by nature, but they are blocked.  If the blocks are removed, creativity will flourish.  To remove the blocks, people are encouraged to shed their inhibitions.  Free association is one of the most popular techniques in “freeing the mind” from inhibitions and blocks.  Brainstorming is one such technique in which participants try to spill out a fire hose of ideas, “non-judgmentally,” in order to free the mind from its blockages.

Creators focus the mind.  Freeing means opening indiscriminately.  Focusing means narrowing. Creativity, which is useful in developing new processes that can enable you to better reach your goal, comes from the mind’s fantastic power to move toward resolving structural tension in favor of the vision. Without knowing what result I want and where I am in relationship to that result, the ideas I generate will be random, unfocused, often unusable, and often impractical.   The processes we can generate from a focus of the desired state in relationship to the current are very doable, effective, and original.

Factors that have a larger place (in creativity) are things like discipline, momentum, consistent action over time, learning, capability, experience, stamina.   Often there are little moments of creativity in how a process might be invented in this or that situation.  Nice when it happens and is needed.  However, idea generation, in and of itself, is not the essence of the creative process.  Anyone can generate “creative” ideas endlessly.  The real question is how do we bring those ideas into reality.  The creative process is about creating the results, outcomes, and goals we want to create, not about generating ideas.