The Myth of Best Practice
by Robert Fritz
 
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 way things go, 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. Do the right things and you'll be okay. The opposite is also built into the formula. Don't follow "best practices" and you will have trouble.

And, of course, this canon is what we learned in school. In most educational systems, learning is about being trained to mimic the right response. The circumstances are the driving force, and we must learn to recognize them and apply what today we might call "best practices."

Certainly it is useful to learn what has worked for others. But, 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.

Mindlessness is always the enemy. Mindfulness is always the ally in reaching new insights, new methods, new possibilities.

And here's where the creative process is particularly powerful. First, let's be clear about what the creative process actually is. At its most basic level, the creative process 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 only requirement is that 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? Here is one place where we need to throw out the rulebook. We must observe reality freshly. This becomes key. If we really look originally, without a bias (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. And here is where the great power of imagination, creativity, innovation, and ingenuity comes into play. Often, we cannot reach our goals through conventional methods alone. There is nothing wrong with convention when it can do the job. Usually it can't do the job. We need something else. So much for "best practices." 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.

Structural tension is the key to creativity. Now, we must not confuse the creative process with creativity. Within the creative process, creativity has its place. But its role is often small compared to the greater scope the creative process demands. Great confusion has been engendered through those who glorify "creativity" and lead "creativity trainings." Mostly, those who write and lecture on creativity are not from the arts but from psychology. 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.

In the arts, this process would slow down most professional creators. Rather than freeing the mind, as the creativity people profess, 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. But the processes we can generate from a focus of the desired state in relationship to the current state often contain an economy of means. These processes are also very doable, effective, and original.

In the arts, creativity and inspiration have their place, but, mostly, a very small place. Factors that have a larger place are things like discipline, momentum, consistent action over time, learning, capability, experience, stamina. The artist will have good days and bad days. But, the work goes on. 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.

Most things in life can be the subject matter of the creative process. But most of us were not trained to live in the creative process so we are left with reacting or responding to circumstances, problem solving, crisis management, situational thinking, and a search for "best practices" in our hope that there is a right way to act. What we can learn from the arts is that there is no right way to paint a painting, write a play, compose music, write a poem, or make a film. Yes, there are principles that enable the artist to master his or her art. But in the end, these principles are internalized, and often, then, able to be broken or used as the needs of the particular creative process require. The same is true of creating your life. Rather than look for "best practices" that might permit you to respond to circumstances better, the creative process enables you to go beyond the prevailing circumstances to create those things that matter most to you. And that is the best practice of all.

© Robert Fritz 2008