Adam Grant, in his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World writes about the necessity of anchoring new ideas in familiar things.
To generate creative ideas, it’s important to start from an unusual place. But to explain those ideas, they have to be connected to something familiar. That’s why so many startups are introducing themselves as the ‘Uber for X’.
It’s why when writers pitch a movie to a producer or studio they often cast it as “this movie-that-you-know meets this other-movie-you-know.” It’s a new movie, so you have to convince a potential audience why they should pay attention. A star you already know. A comic book franchise with familiar characters. A new take on a well-worn story or genre. New is good, but it has to be anchored with something familiar.
Over years of pitching ideas, I’ve developed a version of this that I call the One New Thing Rule. People love the idea of something new, they really do. Two something news they really can’t do.
A new thing can be seductive, but to consider it requires an adjustment in what you already know. People will make the leap if, as Grant observes, you give them something familiar to contextualize it with. But then stop. Trying to get someone to make a second leap is difficult. In fact, it usually untethers the first new idea from its moorings and you’ve lost the case you might already have won.
Grant’s view of originality is strongly colored by his profession as a business administrator. It is antithetical to the more far-reaching concepts of originality in the arts.
If you connect your idea to the virus that preceded it, it will be infected as well. The deepest forms of creation break from the past and create new worlds that break from old diseases. Naturally, such events are rare in history. The sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard described them as singularities. Singularities cannot be connected to known concepts because they have no equivalent. They are unique and not exchangeable and thus have a radical edge that defies continuities.
Singularities challenge the businessman’s world that strives for exchange, productivity, and universals, a world cleansed of all ambiguities that fits within the administrator’s culture of calculation.
The greatest art, that art that is most creative and original, is unique, uncertain, unpredictable, incalculable, unpresentable, untranslatable, and unproductive. Just about everything a business administrator would abhor. Singularities challenge with radical otherness the modern world that strives toward globalization and a neutralized sameness.
Great art is a force of defiance. In the eyes of the market it is often monstrous, violent, amorphous, anomalous, and irrational. It can’t be connected to a known idea and thus subjected to the administrator’s soap box merchandizing. As Baudrillard says, this defiance becomes terroristic, “the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a system of generalized exchange” — a system that all too often serves power and exploitation. And yet the singularity does not challenge the system by violence, but rather by constituting an alternate world. And even if that alternate world is most often exterminated, its concepts remain as an unsurmountable obstacle for the system.
For Baudrillard, singularities are the antidote to the business administrator’s inauthentic, market-oriented culture of simulation, political economy, globalization, monoculture, and the fraud of media semiosis. So the most deeply creative artists are closer to a terrorist than a business administrator like Grant. And yet the arts world these days is full of the pseudo-artistic, market-oriented visions spawned by the little neoliberal Napoleons of business administration.
William: Thanks for the thoughtful reply. No question that brilliance and originality often (usually?) comes from outside conventional thinking. This is the premise of the disruptive innovation argument, and there’s an industry built around the idea. Incrementalism rarely dazzles. Great art is original.
But that’s an entirely different point from the one I was trying to make. You’re talking about the generative process of birthing astonishing ideas. The making of the art. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about after that, how you get currency for those ideas to get support for them. If everyone thinks things work a certain way and you come along and say here’s a completely idea, they need some way to relate to it compared to what they know. They need to know why it should matter to them.
It’s context and everything comes wrapped in it, no matter who you are. Even you.I don’t think we’re disagreeing on the important points here; and I suspect I am as impatient with small-think incrementalism as you are, and it’s made deadening when art is hostage to “market-oriented visions spawned by the little neoliberal Napoleons of business administration.” I happen to think that art always needs to lead. Sadly, it often doesn’t.