Generative resistance is about acknowledging doubt, friction, anomalies and critique, not as noise to be avoided, but levers to question the given and enhance imagination in everyday work.
Tips for good practices
- External peer resist: Invite outside experts to a presentation of an idea or a problem you are working on and make them note challenges and contradictory evidence, or seemingly illogical reasoning. All participants collectively brainstorm how the challenges could be overcome, and furthermore, how conflicting ideas can be synthesized.
- Internal peer resist: Establish rituals and processes for internal challenge and criticism, e.g. by arranging repeated informal give-and-takes on work in progress or by playing the role of the devil’s advocate.
- Practice of prolonged conversations: The practice of being in an investigative and explorative mode of thinking, handling large amounts of data and conflicting demands, without prematurely reaching for concepts or conclusions.
- Maintain tradition but question authority by knowing previous work but being sensitive to its bias, going back to primary inputs (data, client demands) and go through presumable facts and assumptions step by step.
- Ask ‘what if…? and ‘how ..?’ Repeat.
Disablers
Accepting previous work as final and given without judging it for oneself, attributing non-failure to authority, not tolerating ambiguity and jumping to conclusions; only going for low risk solutions.
Readings for inspiration
Altshuller, G. S. (1984) Creativity as an Exact Science. Gordon and Breach Publishers, Luxembourg.
Locke, K., Golden-Biddle, K. & Feldman, M. (2008) “Making Doubt Generative: Rethinking the role of doubt in the research process”. Organization Science, 19(6): 907 – 918.
de Bono, E. (1990) Lateral Thinking. Penguin, London