Iterative, in the sense that cycles of inquiry, exploration and modeling will often be repeated over and over, edging closer and closer over time toward an imagined “finished state” which may never be completely reached (think software, where each new version improves upon the last).

Progressive, in the sense of a series with a definite pattern of advance; progression toward a goal. I see the creative journey as very similar to a voyage of discovery or mountain-climbing expedition. Certainly you begin with a goal, but it’s necessarily a fuzzy goal because you can’t guess in advance what you’re going to encounter on the way.

These kinds of journeys need to make frequent stops to assess the changing situation and adjust the goals based on what has been learned. I imagine a series of “base camps” where the goal is reassessed and the next stage sketched out.

Yes there’s definitely a component at the game level and a larger one which I have been calling the metagame: the metagame might be putting a man on the moon, which would require a lot of games, iteration and progress to get to.

The MGTaylor model is interesting but feels unnecessarily complex to me. Maybe it deserves further study.

I also wonder about this in the context of a team and what it means for an enterprise. A goal at each stage of work will be different – so in terms of your idea of knowledge games, do you mean the goal of the game, or the “end goal” of a string of games? (is that a knowledge olympics?)

A useful model for thinking this through is on the MGTaylor website…the seven stages of the creative process:

http://www.mgtaylor.com/mgtaylor/glasbead/7stagcrp.htm

In thinking about your concept of knowledge games the other day, I came up with a few different dimensions – tactical, emotional and conceptual – which I posted here:

http://shiftandshare.com/?p=124

I do think the purpose of fuzzy goals is to provide something to aim for when the conditions, as well as the goal, are not fully clear. In a complex world it’s rare that you can wait until you have all the details before acting. In military strategy they call it “the fog of war” — the uncertainties and unknowns that you are unaware of but will most definitely affect the outcome.

And yes, developing a shared understanding of the goal is part of achieving it. Not only that, but it often needs to happen while the group is already in motion. The nature of fuzzy goals is that they may require almost continual adjustment, based on a continually improving understanding of the situation.

I think it may have been Eisenhower who said “It’s important to have a plan, but it’s equally important to remember that nothing goes according to plan.”

Take a quick look at the visualization offered in the video included in that post to get a nice overview of the Cynefin Framework if aren’t already familiar with it. In my view, your points about the relevance of emotion, sensory, and progressive provide an interesting take on how to work, to do sense-making, within the Complex Domain of knowledge where patterns and non-linear relationships dominate thinking rather than explicit cause-effect relationships.

http://skilfulminds.com/2009/04/20/social-media-word-of-mouth-and-the-cynefin-framework/

I hear you on our Bald Ape Brains getting stifled by fear, but there’s also organizational fear going on here. I WANT the same thing to be true, that research would show that organizational fear stifles creativity, but my individual fear is that organizational fear makes the world go around. Even when the organization is a creative team.

I still believe that the best leaders do what they can to protect their teams from this flavor of fear, but it frequently still creates momentum.

I find the hardest part is knowing how to move a fuzzy object forward. How do you pick up and move something that is hard to get a precise grasp on?

Thanks for the comments! I’ll try to ellucidate a bit. In this context I am using knowledge work in exactly the sense you describe, where you’re embarking to some degree into the unknown. I guess you could substitute “creative work.” Examples might be the writing of a novel, or the design of a new piece of software, or the pursuit of something like artificial intelligence.

I like your analogy of the trip toward a far-away planet and agree. When you begin, you don’t know everything, and most importantly, you don’t know what you don’t know. In fact you may find that on your way to the far-away planet you may find something even more valuable that your initial target. An example from real life would be the Xerox Palo Alto research center, who set out to develop a document management system and ended up inventing the personal computer.

Which brings up another challenge of creative work: When you achieve your goal, or even something better than you anticipated, will you be able to recognize it?

The role of fear is an interesting one. The Manhattan project and the space race are good examples of creative projects that were partially driven by fear — primarily the fear of others getting there first. Much of scientific discovery is driven by similar fears. But do the fears contribute significantly to the creative result?

Fear can create a sense of urgency, it’s true. And fear can get you funding, when it’s shared by the powers that be. But there’s a pretty big chunk of brain research that says that fear tends to stifle creativity because it triggers the “flight-or-fight” response.

My gut says there’s a level of fear that’s appropriate and helpful — something we could call “fun fear” — such as the fear you might have when playing a game; the fear of missing a deadline for example, or the fear of letting your team-mates down.

Managing the emotion and setting deadlines are an art form that’s familiar to those who manage creative people. The deadlines need to be loose enough away to be realistic, frequent enough to keep the work on track, and tight enough to create a sense of urgency.