Winter Reflections on Collaboration, Design Thinking & Creation Stories
Recently, I was invited to a friends house for a winter evening round the fire and each of the guests were asked to bring a story. For my story I chose La Loba by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
In this story the main character, wolf woman, specialises in the gathering of bones. She scours the dry river beds and foots of the mountains for the bones of desert animals and when she has all the bones she needs, she gathers them together and places them in the right order, creating the structure of an animal. Then she begins to sing over the bones until new flesh is formed and when her song has done it’s magical job, the skeletal creature rises up and runs out into the wilderness. Then through the interaction with the world outside, maybe the touch of moonlight or the water in the river, the animal transforms and becomes a wild woman running through the desert.
Why do I love this creation story so much? I think because it reminds me of the magic of creative process, the gathering together to make a structure, creating the barebones of something new in order that it can be made flesh in the world and live, and that through interaction with the world create new form and new life. It reminds me of the natural recycling process of creation and the magic of gathering together, reforming and making new.
While the story is probably more about soul retrieval, resurrecting new parts of the psyche and the deep connection we have with a wild self which is intrinsically connected to the natural world, for me this story resonates around a connection to creativity and the power we have to deconstruct and reconstruct, formulate new ideas and processes and send new idea out to play in the world and become ‘fleshed out’ through interaction with others.
At the moment I’m in the process of building new project ideas and constructing the basis of how I’d like to work in the world with others. In some ways I feel like I am embodying the woman in this story, spending winter days in my small cave of an office in the process of gathering as I research and develop ideas and try to understand the context within which I will work.
I’m using Design thinking tools to help me structure my process and journey, they help me to lay out the bones, not on the floor, for me my construction happens on the wall, I map out my skeletal structures, it’s part of my visual nature and my training as an artist and designer.
I enjoy this phase of visioning and constructing, organising the way I like things to be. it feels satisfying to build good grounding structures, to create a solid architectural framework on which to hang the more fleshy and wild elements of the creative process. Those which only come into being once the structure gathers up it’s boney limbs and begins to walk first, and then run, out in the real world, taste the fresh air and knock up against the flesh of the world meeting reality and forming itself in response.
These outside elements, beyond the studio wall are the wild parts, the parts which cannot be controlled so much. That’s not to say processes and supporting structures should be abandoned, more that, when collaboration happens, magic happens, the unpredictable happens, ideas meet with the reality of the world and have to transform to accommodate it. Ideas meet with other ideas and become something entirely new.
This stage can’t be controlled but it can be supported, first by the skeletal architecture, which allows it to walk forward and meet the world and then by facilitation and shared creative processes which support the process of testing, collaboration, interaction and growth in the world.
Ideas, creation, shared vision and collaboration are in many ways analogous to processes of natural growth and development, what is required is a fine balance of structure and freedom, process and play, the bones and the flesh. Whether a work of art, a project, a business or a relationship, all of these ultimately creative activities, if done well, require us to navigate between the form and the formless, the skeleton and the flesh, the vision and the somewhat more chaotic reality of execution.
At the same time I marvel at the power we have to create, to create art, relationship, ideas, business, anything really. We are constructors and weavers of stories and ideas which we flesh out and bring to life. We can’t help but to construct and shape our world playfully through this balance between the form and the formless, Even the ideas themselves hold within them some kind of architecture often un observed, which we then carry out into being and consciously or unconsciously make real.
This is, to me, the ultimate creative edge. To understand that we are born creators, we can’t not do it, it’s the sea we swim in and the air we breathe together. So what happens when we notice our innate capacity to create and begin doing it on purpose? Like the wolf woman consciously gathering the bones and understanding that once they have been given life they will run free. It’s a kind of paradoxical tale which tells of creative agency and also lack of control.
It’s an interesting and ultimately human path all we tread.
While I’m happily working away in the construction phase of my own project for now, I look forward to seeing what happens when the skeleton is finally gathered together and it picks itself up and runs out into the world ready to play out in the elements with others and develop the flesh needed to become fully alive.
