INCREMENTAL INNOVATION

INCREMENTAL INNOVATION:
creative change in small steps. Part 1

by Stanley

Encounter Groups in the 60s were great fun, although quite naive and over excitable. Amid a heap of pillows, maybe for a whole weekend, a dozen or so of us would challenge ourselves to be spontaneous and ‘encounter’ each other with a determined disregard for convention and politeness. We were trying to be ‘who we really were’. It was the time of the Counterculture, the Beatles, LSD and the demand for greater social and sexual freedom of expression. At the time, it felt like a social revolution was underway and the Encounter Group was very much a part of the scene. The simple philosophy that motivated us was the idea that the road to personal freedom was to be ruthlessly honest and to be able to show one’s real feelings. Sometimes riotously noisy, always youthful, often healing, but idealistically over the top.

The great solution was simple and obvious: be true to your feelings and true to others. And it did seem to be so simple and obvious. Time and again one saw someone suddenly release a pent up emotion they had long suppressed through guilt or shame. These were moments of transformation. The effect in a group setting could be startling, convincing us we were on the right track.

Much of the wisdom gained at this time has now passed into psychological common-sense. We know that if a person is upset it is beneficial for them to express their feelings in an atmosphere of acceptance. And we also found it was not helpful to just talk about one’s feelings, one had to experience the feeling in present time. The encounter group was suited to this because it was provocative in a way that one couldn’t escape into mere discussion. The focus of interaction was about people’s reactions to one another – right then and there. You were in at the deep end to start with !

We were learning what worked and what didn’t. At the same time there were things that were puzzling. There were anomalies. For example, sometimes, the expression of feelings or emotion was completely non-productive. It seemed only to confirm the status quo. Nothing shifted and the person was no better off. But because, at that time, we were stuck with our theory we used all kinds of tricks to get people into their feelings: beating pillows, kicking, screaming, crying. People would return over and over to their old familiar emotions. We do that in real life too. Situations arise that trigger the same emotional reactions – easy to be fooled into thinking one is ‘working through it’.

Exceptions to what a theory predicts are always interesting. But it wasn’t till much later in my reading of Gendlin and Focusing that the answer became clear. What we didn’t know in those days was that there’s a difference between feelings or emotions that are discovered and those that are merely repeated. Sincerity is not the point, rather it is whether there is a discovery of feelings or whether the feelings are just being replayed.

There is no question that the discovery of a new feeling is an exciting step forward. It can be the release of hidden pent up emotion or something as light as a new way of looking at an old situation. The new perspective releases new possibilities. But when a life situation always triggers the same emotional response it is a mistake to think that expressing it again and again is of any value, no matter how sympathetic and understanding your interlocutor is.

Perhaps returning and replaying like this derives from the hope that, like the first discovery of it, it will yield a similar expansion of one’s being. Sometimes, of course, it does. The same scene revisited, the same story, can be a goldmine. Here we have to recognise that what looks like mere repetition can contain tiny elements of change. It’s never quite the same story. We return to the old scene again: some circumstance in childhood, some abusive situation, a stubborn difficulty in present time perhaps – a place we know so well, but on each return there is a small shift of attitude, something that had not come to mind before, a slightly new slant that makes revisiting worthwhile.

It is the element of incremental change that’s important. Not the subject, not the material, not the sincerity or earnestness, but the emergent element. Sometimes recognising this is not so easy because what is new can be so subtle. Especially difficult if the person has a very critical side – they might castigate themselves for going over the same ground again, thus missing the minute difference from the last visit. So although we should be wary of repetition, at the same time we must be careful not to use this idea to clobber ourselves. The answer is to be very respectful of small changes of viewpoint that can be so easily overlooked.

To grasp the process of incremental novelty is the foundation of psychological awareness. Without this there is no appreciation that the movements of the psyche have their own direction or that there is any movement at all.

All counselling and psychotherapy is predicated on a need to respond to a life circumstance in a new way. The big question is: how does novelty arise? Where can a new emotion, a new attitude to life, come from. Apparently not from anything we are familiar with. It is as though we spend our existence within the confines of our own special house wherein we are familiar with every stick of furniture, the mantle-piece nicknacks, the junk in the attic, the kitchen utensils, the contents of every nook and cranny, bookshelves, the bits and pieces in every cupboard – the story of our life summed up in the bric-a-brac of the home-life in which we have been encapsulated for so long.

All so true, but out of all our tried and tested responses to life, out of all that is so familiar, how does novelty arise. Where does real innovation come from? This is not just a psychological question. With the same astonishment we stand before the spectacle of the evolution of biological life itself in all its amazing variety of forms. It is as though there is something in the very nature of life itself that rewards creativity and innovation. We know that creativity is remarkably serendipitous and that it incrementally forms itself out of chaos and confusion. Suddenly, out of the unruly disorder and the murky muddle of the ordinary, something never before seen comes together and life steps into another realm.

In therapy and meditation, small, new changes of consciousness are what we should value. We know that new relational attitudes arise from a vague bodily sense. It is an incremental process and there is a good deal more to understand about it. Just how something original and new can arise from the detritus of all too familiar – this I’ll look at in my next blog.