I love this quote from Miles Davies talking about jazz improvisation that Keith Sawyer uses in his post about how creativity is all about what you do afterwards:
'It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.'
Keith describes how improvisation means acting without knowing where it will lead, relinquishing control over what your own contribution means but trusting that it will be interpreted later:
'In improvisation, you don’t know what an action means until later. The group creates meaning, by responding and building on that action. This happens all the time in improv theater, and it’s what gives it such creative power. I call it retroactive interpretation. In improv, actors intentionally speak lines of dialogue that are ambiguous, utterances that can be interpreted in multiple ways. Actors do this on purpose–not because they’re lazy thinkers, or they’re just trying to fill up time. Improvising these ambiguous actions takes a lot of creativity. It’s not easy to say something that opens up possibilities for the scene, and doesn’t close down possible futures, but something that also provides enough specifics to drive a scene forward, to give other actors something to work with. Actors know that the improvised dialogue that follows their action will soon provide a meaning to what they did.'
He makes the point that letting go like this is far from what most of us do in real life. You have to change your approach to conversation in order to make improv work:
'The conversation creates, not the individual speakers. The conversation takes on a life of its own. Meaning emerges from the collective, sequential, unfolding utterances of each speaker.'
The group creates, not the individual. The kind of team dynamics that allow for this kind of group creativity are rare, particularly in buttoned-down, accountability-fuelled corporate environments. But how lovely and how beneficial to have the freedom to create in this way.
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