What's Really Special about the Most Creative Stories

There is a myth that is consistently taught and retaught in our schools and reinforced in our rituals, instruction, and assessment. With such grave implications, it hinders our ability to change something significant, extend the reach of our leadership, and the expansiveness of our creativity; the myth’s resilience is quite astounding. It sounds like this: The most creative insights, inventions, and discoveries are solo endeavors, reserved for privileged challengers and habitual line-steppers. For those who feel like they can step over lines without threat. For those who feel like they can challenge without harm. It’s retold as one person alone in a room for hours and then they magically create something new. It sounds like the destiny for a few rather than the fate of many.

It also sounds like the same story.

While there is an individual role in creativity, more often than not, the insight and impulse wither quickly without the infrastructure of the people.

Individuals may have insight. But people are creativity infrastructure.

Newly freed Black Americans long had the impulse for their own liberation and freedom. Rebellions were common. Literacy was freedom. But it was the infrastructure of the collective–coordination, cooperation, and collaboration that spread the message of emancipation. To depend on the planter to carry the message of freedom was to live and die enslaved.

Liberation was not the business of the minority of Americans at the time, just the opposite. It did not need the megaphone of planter class. It would never have it. The business owners needed enslaved labor to support their lifestyles. But the majority of Americans were busy, at something more creative—dismantling the entire system of the Southern slave economy without violence.

DuBois reminds how non-violent withdrawal constricted the violence of slavery :

It must be borne in mind that nine-tenths of the four million Black slaves could neither read nor write, and that the overwhelming majority of them were isolated on country plantations. Any mass movement under such circumstances must materialize slowly and painfully. What the Negro did was to wait, look and listen and try to see where his interest lay. There was no use in seeking refuge in an army which was not an army of freedom; and there was no sense in revolting against armed masters who were conquering the world. As soon, however, as it became clear that the Union armies would not or could not return fugitive slaves, and that the masters with all their fume and fury were uncertain of victory, the slave entered upon a general strike against slavery by the same methods that he had used during the period of the fugitive slave. He ran away to the first place of safety and offered his services to the Federal Army. So that in this way it was really true that he served his former master and served the emancipating army; and it was also true that this withdrawal and bestowal of his labor decided the war. - Black Reconstruction, WEB DuBois.

The liberation of the people needed the people. It was the myceliated masses breathing together, heaving together, laboring together until the conditions were ripe for creation. This is the work of a new story.

These are leadership lessons that we can all learn from. The real work of leading is learning to use your body—what you see, hear, say—to coordinate, connect, and collect other bodies and learn coherent movement together. Leaders stay ready so that they do not have to get ready. Leaders also make sure that the people get ready too. They move together.

This is creativity because it requires assessing the present and creating something new that is just for that moment. Not something for yesterday. The dead past is unchanged and the fertile future is yet to come. Creativity is the living response for now.

So as we acknowledge the liberation of the people, our job is to stay connected, look, listen, and move together. The labor of creation will do the rest. What a special story!

Stay connected. Stay maladjusted.
Caroline

It never fails that a teacher or leader in a learning session says something like, “The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do.” Everyone nods in agreement, as though recognition alone is enough. But structural literacy—the ability to see systems and understand their impact on people—is both necessary and insufficient for equity-centered leaders. Once we see the system and name the harm it causes, we must do more than acknowledge it: we have to build a better response. Different results require different systems.

So we need infrastructure and learning that can scale, helping us create and design better responses. We need to connect creativity to building whole systems, not propping up broken ones. That is one reason we are building Gladys. But we know that creativity is not a solo act. We want to build with leaders, principals, and teachers.

If you want to learn more about the pilot, what we are building, or if you are ready to sign up, register and I will follow up with you directly. Of course, if you have any questions, DM me directly. Let’s build this together!

Join Team Gladys

I’m keeping this newsletter shorter because we’re taking a brief break. We’re using this time to write about our process of building Gladys, prepare for the pilot, and spend time with family. Look out for the Juneteenth piece on Friday

We also want to capture and codify everything we’ve learned this year as we get ready for the next edition of The Praxodox and The Untrained Model.

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