5.1 Elements of creative collaboration
5.1.3 Meanings and communication
Meanings are subjective interpretations of individuals. Even under monolithic cultural circumstances people tend to have conflicting views on different topics, which results in competing narratives explaining and describing events and happenings around them. The notion of a meaning is important in two ways. First, when acknowledging a worldview according to which individuals make subjective interpretations and learn about their social environment, it follows that all discussions and behaviours derive from a combination of cultural and subjective knowledge. This has clear consequences for the adopted research strategy, in the sense that individual interpretations become an important research object.
Secondly, meanings are important to take into account when trying to understand creativity and co-creation. Creativity is actually a form of interpretation or sense-making in itself (e.g. Drazin, et al. 1999). For example, Runco (2007) has suggested an interpretative view of creativity, in which he defines creativity as the ability to construct original interpretations of experiences, that is, to create new knowledge in the construction of an understanding. When the interpretations are both original and effective, i.e.
they have a personal or social impact, the construction process is a creative one, according to Runco (p. 91–2).
Weick (1979) has described how humans enact their surroundings, which means that they react and construct meanings from their environment while
in interaction with others. The process of sense-making in which people make sense of the different situations and events they encounter is in effect retrospective and iterative (Weick, 1979). According to Weick, (1995), the process of sense-making is actually not about finding the right explanation in terms of its objective accuracy as much as it is about finding a good and plausible narrative to hold the elements of the story together in order to guide action and engage others to contribute to sense-making (Weick, 1995, p. 58).
Following the notion of sense-making, it is the process of constructing novel frames of reference and developing and testing them in practice that yields novelty in the sense of creativity. In this way, creativity can be seen as an interpretative process of trying to make sense of different situations and coming up with novel ways to reframe a situation (without the need to see a situation in a new light, there would be no need for creativity, and the old, habitual ways of behaving would work).
In this dissertation, meaning making processes are considered to happen in the process of symbolic exchange, i.e. in communication between actors and (within actors). Communication patterns, as well as the meaning making that takes place in that process and is entangled within it, are emergent (cf. Salem, 2009). Since ideas cannot be sent as such (only messages into which ideas are encoded can be sent), the process in itself is highly complex and subject to multiple different factors influencing the interpretation of the ideas, such as the prior knowledge of the receiver, world views, the frames of reference, contextual factors, historical relationships between the communicators, interests, etc. (Leeuwis & Aarts, 2011). According to this view on communication, meanings are actively constructed between people in complex and contextual settings, thus communication may lead to increasing comprehension but also conflicts and contradictions (ibid., p. 25). Facilitating the communicative processes between people can therefore be important in creative collaboration.
Articles III and IV identify several communicative processes important for creative collaboration. According to them, communication can be understood as playing several roles in the creative process.
First of all, both empirical articles (III and IV) highlight the importance of dialogue, which means that a discussion between participants is most productive when it has the characteristics of reflexivity and criticality; when there is no need to refrain from criticality, as is commonly thought, probably due to widespread ideation guidelines, such as brainstorming. The point here is that ideas are in conflict, not people, and from the conflicts of ideas emerge new ones. Therefore, communication that fosters the criticality and reflexivity of both their own and other’s ideas was found to be important.
Secondly, it was observed that the knowledge people shared had a dual role:
on the one hand, it was the information and expertise that people could bring to the situation that allowed them to contribute to the common pool of knowledge through their experiences and background knowledge. On the other hand, it was the ability to build knowledge, i.e. to integrate and build
novel constructions of what has been said that was of importance. This finding suggests two important but different group roles and ways of communicating:
informants or content-experts who communicate their ideas as clearly as possible and, secondly, creativity experts, who have possibly no content-related information but who are skilful in connecting different pieces of information together to form new ideas and suggest novel frames of references for the reinterpretation of existing knowledge. For the latter group the ability to unambiguously communicate one’s idea is perhaps not as important as the ability to ask questions and make critical remarks and use nonverbal techniques. Of course, there is no reason why the same person cannot occupy both roles in a group.
Thirdly, it was found that communication was related to the negotiation of power structures. This was evident when the participants slipped away from content-related argumentation and knowledge building activities and instead focused on using persuasive or even coercive language for arguing on the behalf of their ideas. Even though power relations were not the focus of the studies reported here, it was an important finding and it should not be dismissed that communication is not only about communicating ideas or constructing understanding, but that it also entails a persuasive level, suggesting different power relations that may be at play, for example, by preferring certain ways of thinking and talking about matters.
The fourth notion related to the role of communication is that of a mediator or diplomat. It was found that certain persons could play an important role as mediators between others, and especially so in conflicting situations. It was evident that such persons helped group members to understand each other.
They filled the gap caused by the differences in the world views, background knowledge, or in other matters that could not have been resolved by those involved alone. This finding leads to the notion of the importance of diplomatic communication skills that help to avoid conflicts between people.
This is especially important because there a risk that people fear bringing dissenting voices into the conversation (“ideas in conflict”), when on the contrary that is exactly what they should do. 8
x Summary: creativity was defined first from an interpretive perspective as the (interpretative) process of trying to make sense of different situations and come up with novel ways to reframe a situation. When this definition is placed in a social context, it is about communication and the novel frames that make a discussion creative. In this way, a creative social situation becomes a negotiation of novelty, how things can be seen in novel, surprising, and appropriate ways together – to use the classical defining attributes of creativity. Communication itself has the potential to
8 In relation with the importance of studying “group roles” in creative collaboration, see Hanchett Hanson (2015).
lead to both consensus and conflicts. Both are perhaps needed in a creative process, but the facilitation of the communication proved to be essential, since some communication processes are more fruitful than others in certain situations. Furthermore, important group roles regarding communication were found, such as the usefulness of having a substance expert, an integrator and a diplomat in a group.