A New Lightning Rod

This is one of the chapters from my book, Truth, Will & Relevance. Read the rest via the Table of Contents in the sidebar or buy your copy from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.

In terms of understanding motivation and the creative process, the stage we’re at now seems a lot like people’s knowledge of electricity in the mid-18th century.

We have plenty of excellent research but no “lightning rod” to capture and conduct our imaginations — no easy way to accurately intuit how motivation and creativity work. We’re just starting to truly capture and conduct it. Most of our common intuitions still struggle via older models, and there’s no focal concept as to what creativity is, exactly.

Many people and organizations have a very good knack for motivation and creativity, but they seem to have acquired it by luck and dogged persistence through trial and error rather than explicit understanding. We talk about it a lot, sharing many good observations, platitudes, and techniques, but it still eludes a really precise explanation.

Similarly, consider that before Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite experiment, “electricians” had developed a lot of tricks for generating sparks, storing charges in jars, and conducting mild shocks through groups of people holding hands, but there was little agreement as to what electricity was and how to proceed with further investigations.¹

As lightning tore through buildings and struck people dead, its seemingly bizarre leaps and turns were explained as the will of God. Ironically, people tried to ward off storms by ringing church bells — which didn’t work for reasons we know well. A lot of bell-ringers died, and even after Franklin’s findings were publicized bells were still being made bearing engravings that memorialized their misguided and often deadly purpose.²

This seems to be where we’re at with human nature. Our ideas and practices work sometimes; other times they don’t — and I’m not sure things work out because of our attempts to manage motivation and creativity or despite those attempts. I don’t mean to diminish the merits of some very creative organizations and admirable initiatives, but looking at humanity with a wider lens, it looks like we’re missing something essential.

Think about some of the questions we’ve been dealing with in the 21st century: What do we do about suicide bombers? What do we do about corporate corruption? What do we do about poverty? What do we do about market irrationality that has recently come very close to undermining the whole global economy? How do we negotiate fair agreements on climate change and trade? What do we do about abuses of intellectual property law? How can we help developing countries without counterproductively being perceived as trying to meddle with and exploit them? How do we resolve moral and ethical dilemmas in science?

Many of our responses to those questions look to me a lot like ringing church bells in a lightning storm. They often have results that are precisely opposed to what we want, but we keep doing it anyway for lack of any viable alternatives, perpetuating our false intuitions with intellectually lazy determination to do something dammit!

If someone commits violence against us we commit right back — which begets more violence in return. We fight corporate corruption and volatile markets by making more rules; more rules make people less morally responsible and they become even more determined and adept at exploiting more sophisticated rules. We hand out money to the poor and it often further diminishes their ability and will to support themselves. We try to persuade others to adopt our practices and beliefs and it makes them even more steadfast in theirs — and vice versa.³

Somewhere in all of this we must be missing some essential insight that will seem obvious to people a century or two from now. Where can we look for ideas to guide us a little more effectively? What’s our lightning rod for creativity and motivation?

This is one of the chapters from my book, Truth, Will & Relevance. Read the rest via the Table of Contents in the sidebar or buy your copy from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.

1On scientific paradigms, using Franklin’s work as an example, see Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (1962): p. 14 – 15.

2The contextual information is from Philip Dray’s Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America (2005)

3My concerns are corroborated by the recent wave of popular books about irrationality, especially associated with behavioural economics: Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge (2008), Robert Shiller and George Akerlof’s Animal Spirits (2009), Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational (2008), and Sway by Ori and Rom Brafman (2008).