Articles from Integral Leadership Review

Transdisciplinary Reflections: The Sound of Surprise

2013-01-07 16:01:12 Alfonso Montuori

On Order, Disorder, Creativity, and Trust

Alfonso Montuori

Alfonso
Montuori
History is not something back there, something we browse through occasionally for
purposes of erudition and arcane knowledge of bygone eras: history is in our flesh
and bonesand in our minds. Darwins great revolution was to show us that we are
our history (Bocchi & Ceruti, 2002). The great revolution of complexity and chaos
shows us that history is not determined, that it is the contingent co-creation of
individuals and their environments. It also shows us that every little thing matters a
lot more than we thought
At least since the Greeks (Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle), human beings have
had a fascination with order. But order also implies its opposite, namely disorder.
When the Greeks came to worship order, they also banished disorder: logos and
dike (justice) replaced chaos and hubris (transgression of the order and the
arrogance that made one do so). Order and disorder became separate and
disjointed in a relationship of either/or (Morin, 2008; Toulmin, 1992). Order was
eternal and transcendent, and disorder and chaos were terrestrial impurities in a
failed embodiment of the divine word. For the Greeks, order was not something we
humans created, but a reflection of the true and the good and the real.
Categories sprang up to describe this eternal order and before long these
categories became the order itself. In the beginning was the Word. They were true,
not made by humans and therefore not subject to the vagaries of human
imperfection. Order and disorder found their counterparts in necessity and chance.
Categories described the law-like, necessary order of things. All else was random,
disorder, chance (Ceruti, 2008).
It took a while for the Greek worship of reason to become institutionalized. The
Greek avant-garde did not start filtering through into the daily lives of common folks
until the Renaissance, when the Greeks were rediscovered. The fetish for order

now the rational order that emerged in the 17th century, with Descartes and Newton
replaced the somewhat more chaotic order of the Church with its focus on faith
rather than reason.
The new rational slant on order was accompanied by the gradual dethronement of
the Church and God to make way for the humanist Man. This enthronement of Man
was liberating in one sense, because it led to a deep appreciation for the powers
and potentials of the individual. It eventually led to democratic ideals. But it was also
problematic: Great Men needed Great Followers to make their Great Ideas into
Reality. Democracy has, like Socialism and Communism, paid lip service to the
power of the people, but somehow the reigns of power seemed to end up in the
hands of those who knew best for us. And the Great Man became the foundation
of our understanding of the Great Hero of leadership and the Lone Genius of
creativity.
Lets look at what happened in music. 1800 marks the beginning of the end for
improvisation in music in the West. Today we think of improvisation as something
jazz musicians do, one of the non-Western aspects of jazz. But the West also has
a great history of improvisation. In his lifetime J.S. Bach was appreciated as a
superb improviser, not as a composer. Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven all great
improvisers. And it wasnt just the great composers who were improvisers. Before
1800 (a rough cut-off date) musical pieces consisted of loosely outlined chord
progressions and melodies with which the musicians took improvisational liberties
not unlike those of jazz musicians today. Embellishments, cadenzas, you name it:
Western musicians interpreted by improvising throughout their performances. And
that meant adding a lot of material that was not written down, composing on the
spot. Today classical musicians can interpret a piece as long as they dont change
or add any notes to the score. This means they can play (a little) with tempo,
dynamics, color, but never mess around with the actual score. After 1800, with the
Beethoven revolution, musicians existed solely in function of the composition,
which was now finally fully written out (Goehr, 1992). This score had to be
performed perfectly in accordance with the composers intentions. The disordered
musical hubris of performing musicians making up stuff as they went along had to
make way for the composers genius that, around that time, found expression in the
work. The work was the word, written down in musical notation. The composer
became God, or at least God-like. After all, he was the Creator.
Interestingly enough, there were several historical events at that time which
paralleled this development. The first was the emergence of copyright, ownership of
music, with financial implications and musical implications (pay me and dont mess
with my music). And a little later, after the symphony orchestra emerged with its
hierarchical structure of composer, director, soloist, first violinist, section leaders,
etc., we had the development of the bureaucracy, the organizational command and
control hierarchy that was to blossom with the Industrial Revolution and is now
proudly ensconced in our corporate offices (Attali, 1985).
Order became the word, and the word became order. Whatever was not necessary
(determined by the composer) was chance, random, chaos. The composer knew,

musicians didnt. God was dying and being replaced by the god-like Genius of the
composer and, paradoxically, the industrial magnate. Gone were the chaotic
expressions of individual musicians adding their frills to the great work. Soon even
the cadenzas, or the soloists brief moments of improvisation, were written out. No
Surprises became a motto in classical music as it did in industry. Musicians were
the first subjects of time and motion studies, 100 years before Frederick Taylor
introduced them to organizations as the cornerstone of scientific management.
Henry Ford was to make the God-like pronouncement that they can have any color
they like as long as its black: they were, of course, the great unwashedthe Little
Men, not to speak of the Little Women, which every Great Man needs to be Great.
The great Bauhaus architects were furious when the workers who moved into their
perfectly designed worker-buildings filled them with knick-knacks that spoiled the
purity of the Spartan design.
In the postmodern age we came to realize that the old order was and is breaking
down furiously. Deconstructionists deconstructed categories such as woman, self
and progress. Michel Foucault starts his book The Order of Things, by describing
his amusement at reading a Borges short story that mentions a categorization of
animals in a Chinese Encyclopedia. Animals are divided into a) belonging to the
Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous g) stray
dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn
with a fine camelhair brush and so on(Foucault, 2001). This classification
appears so alien to him it forces him to look at the way we order our world, and the
historical interplay of power and knowledge from which it emerges.
The dyad order/disorder becomes the triad order/disorder/organization: the question
arises, whos doing the organizing, and who establishes the dominant order. Who
benefits? Usually its the people in power who maintain the rules of the game, the
categories in which were asked to play. They have an investment in them. But they
are not necessarily the people who created the categories. In the case of music, its
the musicians who, willy-nilly, developed a certain style, whether bebop or
bluegrass, and then mixed it all up again to get Hip-Hop Jazz or Western Swing. In
order to make sense of this evolutionary process, definitions of what something is
have to make room for examples of what something is like. There is a shift from
attempting to pinpoint the essence of something (like the endless debates about
what is and is not jazz, for instance) to describing its relationships in space and
time: from transcendental categories to traditions and experiences.
Sometimes musicians and artists develop a proprietary interest in categories in
their Order, in their definition of what something is. But theyre also the ones who
blow up the old orders and create new ones. They wont take just anybodys orders.
And thats a whole different kind of power a power the people who are supposedly
in power sorely envy. Its a power to create, rather than a power over others. Its also
a different kind of order, one that is in a continuous, generative and destructive
dance with disorder.
Musicians and other artists tend to relish what some of the corporate leaders,
and even the deconstructionists, do not: the relationship between order and disorder

is not either/or, it is both/and (Morin, 2008). Disorder is not, as the Greeks

supposed, something to be avoided at all costs. Disorder generates order that
generates disorder and so on in a recursive or mutually interactive process. Youve
got to break down those categories to come up with something new. And that also
means breaking down the order created by those who benefit from the categories
that define and organize the order.
So now we can see, following Edgar Morin, how the triad order/disorder/organization
becomes the tetragram order/disorder/organization/interaction. Order and disorder
interact as we organize our experience and our world. The pair order/disorder, when
coupled with interaction/organization, becomes dynamic rather than static. It is
interactive, dialogical, and therefore alive, an open system in space and time rather
than a closed system capturing an eternal form, allegedly the way things have to
be. Knowledge becomes an open system and therefore never complete, filled with
uncertainty, ignorance and wonder always lurking around and inside us. It
follows that telling other people what they must do to comply with our perfect
knowledge (do as I say, dont do as I do) might be sensibly replaced by questions,
generative dialogue, and example.
The simplicity of perfect order is gone. The historical and contingent nature of
categories is exposed. The creative organization of thought and action is seen as
playing a vital constructive role. And disorder appears in a new light, forever
connected to, and interacting with, order; but this inextricable, unavoidable
connection becomes a blessing and a curse.
Just as musical organization prefigured the organization of industry in the last
century, it is doing so again at the end of this one. Gone are the days of all or none,
my way or no way. The homogeneous worlds of absolute progress, of manifest
destinies for all are gone. In so many old sci-fi scenarios and movies everyone
would wear antiseptic white, have little vitamin pills for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,
and everyone behaved according to scientifically approved codes until the usual
monster/mutant/weirdo came along to disrupt the order. Now white bread
homogeneity and forced unity are replaced by heterogeneity and difference.
As disorder raises its beautiful and terrifying head, encroaching ever more into our
lives, we find a longing for simple order returns: family values, back to nature, the
Dumb and Dumber male hero as cheerful adolescent moron From Heroes to
Anti-Heroes to Lobotomized Heroes. Fundamentalisms of all stripes manifest in
religion, government, and other aspects of out lives. Fundamentalists cannot bear
the thought of collective improvisation and long for everyone to read from the same
book, and interpret it all in exactly the same way. Why should we trouble ourselves
with Pee Wee Hermeneutics?
The US Army uses the acronym VUCA to describe the present global situation.
Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. What to do in such an environment?
Without the need for much marketing, simple answers easily present themselves as
the answer to all our problems. There is the single-minded faith in free markets,
lowering taxes, getting rid of illegal immigrants, the abject rejection of corporations
we can all think of simplistic (uni-dimensional, reductive, decontextualized) answers

that do not reflect the interconnected complexity of our world. We dont have THE
answer because the answer, if there is one, is a process, a collaborative creation
occurring in an ever-changing emergent network of relationships and patterns.
The conjunction of order/disorder/interaction/organization demands more of us than
this longing for a receding shore of unity or the invasive surgery of a single answer.
Perhaps when we all had the musical score right in front of us, life was much
easier. We all knew the parts we had to play, and worshiped the Great Composer.
But we also resented the hell out of Him. Now that what postmodernists call the
great metanarratives, the great plots of our novels written by the great Biblical,
Scientific, Marxist, Capitalist, Romantic novelists (choose your God), are crumbling,
there is a call for little narrativesshort stories, if you like, written by the people, for
the people (Lyotard, 1984; Montuori, 2011a). As the American futurist and
philosopher James Ogilvy proposes, theres a shift from thinking in terms of All or
Nothing to thinking of Some (Ogilvy, 2002). Many musicians and other artists have
been thinking and doing just that for quite a while now.
And the way we do it is different. In music, serious composers like John Cage are
allowing musicians some of the freedom that jazz musicians have enjoyed for a
while. Gone is the work. Now we see that jazz music takes the composition not as
a necessity to be performed as the composer wished; the song provides a context
and a tradition for the musicians to work in, a framework to alter, modify, explore.
The song provides not an external order of necessity, with random events to be
avoided at all costs, but constraints and possibilities (Borgo, 2006; Ceruti, 1994). In
jazz, and the arts in general, order always carries the seeds of disorder, and viceversa (Arnheim, 1971). The random is courted, used as a source of new order
through interactions among musicians, and between musicians and the song. At the
interstices of order and disorder, law-like and random, as the embodiment of lived
complexity, we find improvisation (Montuori, 2003).
The pioneering creativity research of Frank Barron found that one of the
characteristics of creativity is an attraction to disorder and complexity. Creativity
means living in a constant dynamic chain of disorder, attempts at organization
through interaction, creation of order, and then the introduction of a new disorder,
breaking down the old order, interacting, re-organizing, and so on (Barron, 1995;
Barron, Montuori, & Barron, 1997). Every new order is only temporary; every new
song or painting is just a step along the way, only to be followed by more And this
process changes how we think about the categories of thought themselves. Order
is a creation. Order is both real and unreal. Every organization and every interaction
takes on a quality of as if, one embodiment of myriad constraints and possibilities.
But that does not make everything simply a play of images, of personas, a theater of
the absurd, as some of the postmodernists would have us believe. It is also a world
with consequences that affect the lives of people and ecosystems, a world with bum
notes and bounced checks. And therein lies the complexity of it all, a call to both
lighten up, open up, and dig in.
Each experience in relationship becomes an opportunity to improvise together and
create our own order/disorder/organization/interaction. Those who attempt to

impose their scores from on high, who try to force us to live in their novels, and
abide by their categories, are playing a losing game. The forces of chaos are
creeping up on them. They can either embrace them and let go, or vainly reject
them. But unless they invite us nicely to join them in their stories for a while, and we
really want to play with them, we will have to just say no.
We also see that as the big narratives crumble, little narratives are not necessarily
friendly little narratives: The loss of the Soviet metanarrative has led to much death
and destruction in the former Soviet Union, not to speak of the former Yugoslavia.
People begin to long for a new metanarrative to restore unity, security, and certainty
Law and Order. Fundamentalism in all its permutations is also that search for
foundations, for Absolute Order. Ethnic cleansing, whether in the former Yugoslavia
or Arizona, is a way to maintain the pristine homogeneous madness of that Order,
free of differences (Bocchi & Ceruti, 1997). At a very basic level, Order provides
predictability, security. Disorder suggests chaos and confusion, and fear. If we
believe the universe, or at least our little corner of it, is lawfully ordered, we will fear
the Lawmaker, and be Good. In an Order worshiping system, any trace of difference
or disagreement scares the bejesus out of people. Paradoxically, these systems
cannot handle difference. They repress it, and then it eventually all explodes. We
see this from families to nation-states. Either way its fear: fear of Disorder, or fearbased security with Order. But from this new perspective, its up to us to create
trust, to create what Riane Eisler calls partnership (Eisler, 1987). Trust is not a
thing, its a process, and it has to be created and maintained.
If we create fear, those who want to divide and rule us will rejoice, because we will
be fighting each other. Creating trust may seem like a small step, in this problemridden world. But we need to create trust to trust our creating. We need to feel
secure enough to allow ourselves to become insecure, feel safe enough to take
risks. This is the paradoxical nature of creativity and change (Montuori, 2011b).
In the old view big effects required big causes, a world-organization to change the
world, all or nothing, Utopia or Oblivion. In the new view of the butterflies of chaos
theory and complexity a small cause can have big effects: we just have to recognize
we dont have any control over it If we create trust, we may are not setting out to
rule over anything or anyone. We are creating the generative environment that
allows for the emergence of truth (in a variation on Heideggers theme of aletheia) as
well as novelty through mutual unconcealment or unveiling. The beauty of being in
relationship resides not just in the security of the accustomed, the comfort of the
habitual, the assurance of tradition, but also in the unexpected, the emergent, the
changing, in the sound of surprise.
References
Arnheim, Rudolf. (1971). Entropy and art; an essay on disorder and order.
Berkeley,: University of California Press.
Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The political economy of music. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Barron, F. (1995). No rootless flower: towards an ecology of creativity. Cresskill, NJ:

Hampton Press.
Barron, F., Montuori, A., & Barron, A. (Eds.). (1997). Creators on creating.
Awakening and cultivating the imaginative mind. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.
Bocchi, G., & Ceruti, M. (1997). Solidarity or barbarism: A Europe of diversity
against ethnic cleansing. New York: Peter Lang.
Bocchi, G., & Ceruti, M. (2002). The narrative universe. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton
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Borgo, D. (2006). Sync or swarm: Improvising music in a complex age. London:
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Goehr, L. (1992). The imaginary museum of musical works. New York: Oxford
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Montuori, A. (2003). The complexity of improvisation and the improvisation of
complexity. Social science, art, and creativity. Human Relations, 56(2), 237-255.
Montuori, A. (2011a). Beyond postnormal times: The future of creativity and the
creativity of the future. Futures: The Journal of Policy, Planning and Future Studies,
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encyclopedia of creativity (Vol. 2, pp. 414-421). San Diego: Academic Press.
Morin, E. (2008). On complexity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
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About the Author
Alfonso Montuori, PhD, is Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies,
where he designed and teaches in the Transformative Leadership M.A. and the
Transformative Studies Ph.D. He was Distinguished Professor in the School of Fine
Arts at Miami University, in Oxford Ohio and in 1985-1986 he taught at the Central
South University in Hunan, China. An active musician and producer, in a former life
Alfonso worked in London England as a professional musician. He is the author of
several books and numerous articles on creativity and innovation, the future,
complexity theory, and leadership. Alfonso is also a consultant in the areas of
creativity, innovation and leadership development whose clients have included
NetApp, Training Vision (Singapore), Omintel-Olivetti (Italy) and Procter and Gamble.
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