4 Responses to “The Nature Of Genius”

1. Jackie Foskett Says:
   November 28th, 2009 at 1:51 pm

   So, are your hands nice and clean and soft now?
   Thanks for your insights, Keith! !

2. marianne Says:
   November 29th, 2009 at 3:23 am

   This is exactly what provocative therapy does! Taking things out of context, exagerating to the extreme, making jokes, all within rapport, and you can get away with some serieus business! Flexibility teaches our clients also how fun and creative they too can be in their own lives, with their own problems. Most problems have become a problem, because we have become rigid with them and don’t know anymore how to be flexible, creative, out of the box! A therapist who shows in his or her behavior flexibility, already shows the solution…..

3. DL Says:
   November 30th, 2009 at 3:47 pm

   I do agree with the takeaway point that the more options you have the better off you are. The thing I’m not too sure about is the connection between the law of requisite variety and the kind of variety displayed by someone who is “thinking outside the box”.

   For a start, without reading more deeply into it, the law sounds like a tautology – when the situation demands flexibility, you have to be flexible, except presumably when you need to be consistent and stick to your principles.

   More fundamentally, the cybernetic principle seems to be all about control, whereas the kind of playful, exploratory learning displayed by a seven year old involves giving up a bit of control, and indeed in complex human situations like bringing up a child are characterised by a tension between being in control and letting things emerge.

   My understanding of the law of requisite variety, based on half an hour reading Wikipedia, is that it’s a metaphor drawn from automated machinery and applied to wider biological and human situations, and that having requisite variety means that whatever the world throws at a machine or a person, the machine or person has to be able to respond in a matching but opposite way in order to stay on course – in a car, if you’re going a fraction too far to the right you have to be able to steer a little bit to the left, if you’re going too fast you have to hit the brakes, etc. A car without a working, responsive accelerator, brake, or steering wheel lacks the requisite variety to be able to get from A to B safely. But it’s a narrow definition of control to say that it’s being able to cancel out whatever change occurs – it applies to machines, but by itself it doesn’t seem to apply to complex human situations.

   Even when the law of requisite variety brings some insight into human skills, it doesn’t seem to mean the same thing as thinking outside the box. Skilful drivers can be said to display more variety in their behaviour than less skilful drivers, but that doesn’t mean that they steer randomly between lanes and have a creative disregard for traffic laws, it means that they have appropriate and finely tuned responses to a wider range of situations that can occur on the road, so they’re able to stay in control when the weather turns bad, when the car ahead swerves unexpectedly, when their children are arguing in the back seat, when these things happen in combination, etc, etc.

   Maybe driving is a bad analogy, because being playful, surprising, and provocative is almost always the wrong thing on the road, whereas it is appropriate if you’re trying to get yourself out of a rut, or if you’re seven years old.

   But even to take an analogy from a more creative domain – all other things being equal in a film, the actor who has the widest emotional range will compel audience attention and drive the plot forward. Good acting is surprising, not because the emotion put across is extreme or random, but because it’s appropriate, precisely expressed, and not at all obvious or predictable when you’re not as finely tuned emotionally as the actor is.

   As part of their preparation, the actor may have performed exercises where they were shouting and jumping up and down, giving up control and letting randomness, whimsy, and unconscious instincts take over. Those kinds of exercises are an injection of a kind of variety in order to expand the actor’s range and force them to discard cliched responses, but what you see on the screen is distilled down into a different kind of variety – it’s a variety of exquisite distinctions rather than a variety of chaos.

4. Keith Says:
   December 8th, 2009 at 5:23 pm

   DL,
   Good points–well thought out. Rather than go through what you said point-by-point, I’ll say this…

   1) In my experience (and in my opinion) watching students and therapists work, lack of flexibility is a greater problem than lack of consistency. It’s not always the case, of course. One of my goals for this post was to get people thinking and leaning more to the flexible side.

   2) Naturally, knowing when to be flexible as well as what to do differently (rather than random, flexible behavior) is key. It’s also too big of a subject for me to cover here and now.

   Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. I find them valuable.