Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are improved means to an unimproved end...

Henry Thoreau, Walden

The number of wellbeing articles advocating a ‘digital detox’ seems to be growing. For our health, we need put some space between ourselves and our many devices. We are being digitised by the same the labour-saving devices that keep us informed and connected.

We are anxious that the attention span of the ‘younger generation’ is diminishing and our relationships are less substantial. And, in those moments when we are alone with our smartphone, we wonder whether, perhaps, we are a little addicted to checking that screen. It is a persistent itch that must be scratched.

The scientific community, ever ready to seek the truth, has found, that ‘interacting with a mobile phone is associated with poorer performance on concurrently performed tasks because limited attentional resources must be shared between tasks’. What’s more, ‘the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity’. So, even if your phone is on the desk and switched to silent your cognitive performance is reduced. Your phone wants your attention, and you want it to have it.

Distraction in the office

If we expand our frame of reference to take in the view of a typical open plan office, how many other devices demand our attention. There is your phone, a tablet might be within easy reach, a laptop computer connected to two screens with multiple distractions open. You are sitting near someone else and you can see their screen. The proximity to your neighbour means you are attuned to any physical movement they make. They check their phone; instinctively, you check yours.

Recently, to block out unnecessary distraction, you have taken to wearing noise cancelling headphones as way to regain control of your wandering attention. You look up from your screen to take in the office, shifting your concentration to your music, and see that you are not alone in creating some space inside your head—your colleagues have headphones on as well. Our open plan offices (designed to foster interaction and collaboration) are a collection of isolated individuals ever so loosely connected through the thin filament of vision. You share a knowing smile with your cubicle buddy and try resist the nagging urge to check your phone.

In today’s office workplace there are a lot of competing demands for our attention but how much we can give is finite. There is no doubt the technology that we have at our fingertips contributes considerably to our productivity and performance. My interest here is not on whether digital technology is good or bad but rather to speculate on whether the competition for our attention undermines an important pathway to creativity.

Creativity… it’s complicated

Creativity is a complicated topic that in the business literature tends to be reduced to ‘how to’ listicles of the sort ‘301 ways to boost your creativity at work’. More recently, the rapid growth in the wellbeing industry has been accompanied by a focus on mindfulness. Mindfulness has a deep, rich and practical history, which often gets reduced to a something that is less authentic in the way it becomes applied in the workplace.

I am interested in the pathways we take to creativity. Here, I am looking at a pathway to creativity that works with our knowledge we already have but is also involves action (as opposed to reflection). It is creativity that comes from working with and through what is already available to us rather than imposing ourselves on the body of knowledge to create something new. I think of it as accessing creativity by deepening the known. It involves paying closer attention to ‘things’, tuning into similarities and differences, and interacting directly with those ‘things’.

Why is thinking about creativity important? There is not a day goes by on which it seems the workforce is not being urged to be more innovative and creative. My question is, how? How should ‘the workforce’ do this? In particular, to what extent does the way in which we now work, and the office environments in which many of us work, enable or undermine the opportunities for creativity and innovation?

My premise is the increased competition for our attention undermines a potentially useful pathway to workplace creativity. We are encouraged to take in more and more information in order to be creative. What if the path to creativity was to take in less, or to focus our attention on a few things. If this were the case, reclaiming our attention in the workplace may be important for recovering our creativity. Unlike the smartphone research, I have no direct evidence of this. I intend to use the thoughts of others to support my claim.

Henry Thoreau

The quote from Henry Thoreau that opened this essay is well known. Following this quote from Walden, Thoreau goes on to give examples such as:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate.

Having spent some quality time by his pond, Thoreau seems to have concluded that being alert and paying close attention to what is in front of us is important.

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?

There is value and knowledge to be gained from paying close attention to what is in front of you and your experience of it.

Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my imagination.

Limiting distraction and attending to the present freed imagination. There is a sense of the Buddhist traditions of mindfulness in Thoreau’s observations. Reclaiming attention can be a pathway to creativity.

Igor Stravinsky

I then stumbled across the following observation from the Russian pianist and conductor Igor Stravinsky.

As far as I’m concerned, I experience a kind of terror as I am about to go to work and before the infinite possibilities offered to me, I feel that everything is permitted. If everything is permitted, best and worst, if nothing offers any resistance every effort is inconceivable. I can’t base myself on anything and from then on every enterprise is in vain. … Nevertheless, I will not perish. I will conquer my terror and will take assurance from the notion that I have seven notes of the scale in its chromatic intervals, its strong and weak beats are within my reach, and that I hold in this solid and concrete elements which offer me as vast a field of experiment as this vague and vertiginous incident which has just frightened me. … What pulls me out of the anguish caused by unconditional freedom is that I always have the faculty of concentrating on the concrete things which are in question here and now.

Stravinsky gives us a view of the distraction that comes with too many possibilities. Our technologies can provide us with a mind-numbing number of ways to access knowledge. It opens the possibility that if we continue to gather information and evidence our decisions are unassailable. We seek perfection through the accumulation of evidence, which only serves to undermine confidence in our judgement.

Stravinsky’s solution is, like Thoreau, to focus on what is known. He works within the tradition of his knowledge and tools to find a pathway to creativity. Stravinsky is not adding more complexity to his problem, rather he is deliberately working with the possibilities of combining what he already knows in different ways. He appears to be deepening what he knows.

Martin Heidegger

The philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was partial to a stroll in the woods as a remedy to the contradictions of existence, talked about ‘attentiveness to things’.

Heidegger is hard work, even for professional philosophers. The clearest explanation I could find came from the good people at the School of Life. The essentials of Heidegger’s view seem to be:

We have forgotten to notice we’re alive.

The idea of existence is all a bit overwhelming and unnerving, so we live our lives in such a way that we don’t get confronted by the strangeness of it all. Heidegger’s view is that we need to take all the weirdness on board and accept that life is short. A brief stroll in the woods is good for this. You need to own that you won’t be here for long and that you’re insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I get a ‘life is short, enjoy it while you can’ feel from Heidegger.

We have forgotten that all Being is connected.

In pushing away the strangeness of our being we come to see and experience our lives through a narrow lens. For example, our work colours how we see the world and reduces the information we take in. For Heidegger, we need to pay more attention to the way in which we are connected to everything else. Trees, rocks, bugs, snakes, clouds, fences are all existing with us, and we should pay closer attention to how we are connected to our surroundings and the things in them.

We forget to be free and to live for ourselves.

Heidegger sees that we have been ‘thrown into the world’ surrounded by attitudes, prejudices and necessities that are not of our own making. We need to understand the context in which we are living and then get above it by living ‘authentically’ for ourselves. Unfortunately, we spend most of our time in the world we are thrown into. We listen to ‘The Chatter’ (das Gerede), which is all around us. The chatter that is expanded and amplified, for example, by social media. We spend our time impressing others rather than living for ourselves.

We treat others as objects.

We become selfish. Unintentionally, we treat others as objects or tools. We lose connection. For Heidegger, great art focuses our intention on and gives meaning to the things we miss as we are rushing about pleasing everybody else. The School of Life people put is like this:

Heidegger elaborated this idea in the course of a discussion of a painting by Van Gogh of a pair of peasant shoes. Normally, we don’t pay much attention to shoes, they are merely another bit of ‘equipment’ that we need to get by. But when they are presented to us on a canvas, we’re liable to notice them – as if for the first time – for their own sakes.

That’s awfully interesting, but so what?

Thoreau, Stravinsky and Heidegger all seem to be showing us that we need to reclaim our attention.

• For Thoreau, the knowledge you have is dependent on your ability to see by paying attention. The value you get from your knowledge is the quality of your experience.

• For Stravinsky, the possibilities we are presented with everyday are overwhelming, so accept that and focus on what you have got, what you understand, and work with that.

• For Heidegger, connect yourself to the world by being attentive to things, get above the chatter, and live authentically.

We are constantly being extolled to be creative and innovative in the workplace. We subscribe to the view that creativity and innovation comes from letting 1000 flowers bloom. In doing so, we deepen the distraction that already fills our workplaces and drains our attention.

We also purposefully create digital workplace cultures where Heidegger’s ‘chatter’ flourishes. Other people are useful tools in charting the progress of our careers and our progress is dependent on ‘fitting in’ and ‘managing up’ rather than being ourselves.

Start-ups have come to be emblematic of creativity. However, what draws our attention to this expression of creativity is often casually attired folks whose success is portrayed as breaking free all the normal rules. They have broken free from all the chatter of a normal workplace. I think this is a misnomer. As an aside, I find it interesting that entrepreneurs have a uniform—they look alike, they use the same language, they hold the same beliefs, and they seem to be closely watching each other’s ‘chatter’ in order to ensure they fit in with the entrepreneurial culture.

What if the path to creativity and innovation does not come from adding more but rather from taking away? Maybe, we should pay attention to less to get more creativity and innovation. What if in solving a problem we limited our scope and focus rather than adding more complexity? What if we stopped for a moment and payed closer attention to ‘things’?

Our attention is finite. Increasingly, it is being treated as a resource to be captured and commodified, both at work and beyond. How we focus and use our attention seems to be important to creativity and innovation.

There is no doubt that access to the information we have today is also an enormous stimulus to creativity but what else travels in the shadows of that activity? What are we losing or missing as we rush down the information super highway (as it was once termed)?

There is a path to creativity that involves closer attentiveness to things. It is a path that emphasises value through intimate connection and understanding. In today’s world, where we talk about attention as a ‘resource’ to be captured as part of the ‘attention economy’, it can be a difficult path to take. Rather than let 1000 flowers bloom maybe we should pay closer attention to just one flower and see what possibilities arise from there.

 The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Sources

Stothart, C., Mitchum, A., & Yehnert, C. (2015). The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41(4), 893-897. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000100

Adrian F. Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, Maarten W. Bos. Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2017; 2 (2): 140 DOI: 10.1086/691462

Thoreau, Henry, Walden, Koneman, Koln, 1996 (1854)

Stravinsky, Igor, Musical Poetics, Paris, La Flute de Pau, 1945, pp. 98-99

Th School of Life, The Great Philosophers 10: Martin Heidegger 

The School of Life (YouTube), Philosophy – Heidegger

The School of Life (YouTube), Heidegger in the Kitchen

 Heidgger, Martin, The Thing, 1971. 

Image: Arthur Edelman available on Unsplash