The Creative Edge

By David G. Patterson

When I was asked to speak at the Annual Conference of the European Bahá’í Business Forum this September the following question came to mind: Why would a business man be interested in having a conversation with a faith community? In fact, why would a business man who has made a career in the adjoining fields of derivatives, hedge funds and private equity – the very fields often most associated with piranha-like behaviour – why would that business man be interested in a conversation with people who come from a faith community?

And my answer goes like this. We are in a special age – an age where every attempt to define and control is getting challenged. Every institution is being seen as transitory. No organization or individual is free from the forces roiling our world. It is in the midst of such challenges to our suppositions – it is in the face of such challenges that we discover our ability to ask foundational questions. And any faith community that is worth its salt is about asking foundational questions.

When I was a young boy I lived in a village of 1000 people in rural Ontario, Canada. We lived in a large house on a large lot beside one of the town’s eight churches. Surrounding the lot were huge maple trees that would turn scarlet in the fall and lose their leaves. One of my wonderful childhood memories is “helping” Father rake the leaves. And when we were not raking we were burying ourselves in piles of leaves. I can still smell the pungent air of those leaf piles. One of the things that would happen occasionally would be a gust of wind would come from the North West and would turn our piles of leaves into little funnel swirls. If we stepped into or were caught in one of those swirls of leaves we would find ourselves disoriented. We lost our coordinates. We took delight in becoming dizzy – just for a moment, all there was was “swirl”.

We are living in an age when we, that is, all the peoples of the world, are caught up in one of those eddies of leaves. But it is exactly in those times when we lose our coordinates that the most delight is possible, that the most creativity is possible, that it is possible to raise foundational questions that challenge the tedious, the business as usual attitudes, the bureaucratic.

I was talking to one of my new partners the other day who joined our firm from a major bank. He said the bank had a policy manual that dictated the fact that men’s ties must be tied so that they just come to the belt and that if your job rating wasn’t a level 12 or higher then you were not allowed to wear cuff-links. Now I in no way mean to mock the authors of such procedures because we know they were just doing their best when they wrote them. But there are times when you hear something like that that you think, “There is an institution that is really in need of a gust of wind from the North West!”

Well the excitement of our age is that every institution is caught up in the eddy. Some respond by hanging onto the trees but that won’t help. The eddy has become a whirl-wind and the trees are going too.

Many writers have tried to say when this age started. Some claim it was with the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. Some others say it was when the first pictures came back from space of the Earthrise – the Blue Planet.

I had dinner a few weeks ago with astronaut, Dr. Roberta Bondar, who was the first neurologist in space. She made two reflections which struck me. First she said when you get in space you realize that earth is “just a planet”. That is a perspective that was totally impossible for my grandfather or your grandmother to have. Do you see what a disorienting perspective that is for our institutions? – Self importance certainly evaporates! The second thing Roberta said was that when you are out in space “something can come at you from any direction”. On earth we feel there are likely directions – the left, the right, the front. In space there are no special directions so you have to train yourself to be ready for something coming from any direction. If you don’t, you won’t survive. This is the kind of world our institutions are caught up in. They won’t survive if they don’t adjust to the new multi-dimensional world.

I think that the “blue planet” image is a pretty good nominee for the beginning of this new age but I believe there is perhaps an even better marker that is somewhat earlier. In January 1933, there was a meeting between Einstein, Hubble and LeMaitre. Einstein, you may remember, had worked out new equations describing the universe but he had found they didn’t quite work so he had inserted a fudge factor to make them work which he called the “cosmological constant”. A Russian scientist named Friedman wrote to Einstein pointing out that if you left out the fudge factor Einstein’s equations suggested the universe is expanding. LeMaitre, who was a Catholic priest and physicist, saw that such equations implied the universe had a “beginning”. But it wasn’t until Hubble showed Einstein his research that Einstein capitulated. Hubble found that when you look through a telescope the light from more distant galaxies is “red-shifted” and the further away the galaxy the more red-shifted is its light. “Red-shift” just describes the Doppler Effect in light. When you stand by a highway the Doppler Effect makes approaching trucks sound higher pitched and receding trucks have a falling pitch. In astronomy, the receding objects move to the red end of the spectrum.

So for the first time at that meeting in January 1933 science saw that the universe is expanding and that led inevitably to the understanding that the universe had a beginning in a firestorm. The world of form, the world of time could be traced back to a moment where there was no “before”. Our world of form was born and we could say nothing logical about the time before the point where the world was 10^32 K degrees. The so called, Planck’s Wall. Now I am not a scientist and I am confident someone somewhere can improve on my science but I am also clear we are in an age where it is dawning on us that our world of form is married to the world of the formless. Now I choose not to make that a religious statement but I understand when people are awestruck in the midst of the mystery of life.

What is dawning on our age is that the creative edge Einstein, LeMaitre and Hubble ran into is not just an edge 13.8 billion years ago but that edge permeates space and time. Space is constantly being created between the galaxies. We are creating our own coordinates at every moment with every thought we choose to put energy into.

Now this new understanding of a world permeated with creativity – where every person, every organization, has the capacity to hook into the creativity that permeates the universe has profound implications for the organizations in which we work. In my presentation at the September event I will share with you some of the experiments our own organization - Northwater Capital Management Inc. has done in exploring these implications.

In that talk I will share with you some more of the philosophical roots of our thinking in systems thinking, in Deming’s ideas about quality control, and many others. I will also talk about real world issues such as performance reviews, compensation, holding business meetings, and designing office space. We are excited about some of our organizational inventions but our invitation to each of you will not be to join us in designing your organization like ours. It will be to join us in the excitement of living at the creative edge.

June 26, 2007

David Patterson is the Founder, Chair and CEO of Northwater Capital Management Inc. in Toronto, Canada. Northwater Capital is a $10 billion investment management firm. He will speak at the EBBF Annual Conference at 9:30 on Friday, September 28, 2007.