Creativity or spontaneity

Henry Farrell has an interesting post on Brian Eno and democratic governance

It puts me in mind of what I think of as The Great Brian Eno Observation, from an interview whose source I have long since lost. It goes something like this:

If you put a bunch of talented musicians in a room and tell them to improvise, you might think at first that you'll get great, astonishing acts of creativity. But that's not what happens. In reality, each one will noodle around a bit until they start doing one thing that they like, and then they will continue to do that one thing. If they decide to change, they will not move to idea after idea in bursts of creativity: it will again be noodling  around (this noodling is unlikely to sound good, by the way) until they again find one thing that they like. If you want something new, organic, creative, you must give those musicians rules and structure, but that structure should have some room for creativity to come out.

If you've been in a band of high talent but marginal cohesiveness, you will recognize that every "jam" looks this way: we're all trying to find a pattern and will very rarely let that pattern go without a fight. But this also tends to be true, in my experience, with any creative endeavor: "do something creative" will never produce good results, because the universe of possibilities with even modest talent is, if not actually endless, then beyond the capacity of a single person to exhaust. But give virtually any rule or restriction and you have a focal point: instead of "do something creative", "draw a cat", or even better, "draw something that makes me think of a cat but does not include a cat in it", then you'll be cooking. In this direction lies parallel thinking or surrealist party games like Exquisite Corpse. Add new conditions or restrictions over time and people can make the wildest initial combinations work.

There are some business implications for this (agendas are good! it gives people a frame to work with or against) and some political implications, too (liberal and conservative! move iteratively and only add one thing at a time, but be open to people making the weirdest combinations of ideas work for them), but in any case it requires someone outside the process who can impose the conditions and make sure they are leaving room for spontaneous creation.