From Passionate Process to Poetic and Playful Puzzle – Part II

Full Title: From Passionate Process to Poetic and Playful Puzzle – Part II: The Art of Reviving and Writing "The Reorg Rag" ™

by Mark Gorkin, LICSW

The latest imaginative arena-adventure involved writing a dark yet witty and wicked lyric about being caught in the web of workplace change in today's uncertain and unstable climate – from reorganizations and downsizings to regime transfers and mergers. The immediate trigger was working with several organizations in varying stages of reorganization and disorganization. "The Reorg Rag" is a product of transforming a passionate process into a poetic and playful puzzle. Let me continue to outline the social-psychological musings, interactions and working associations of a mind in creative heat, one skewering both convention and dysfunction, while also looking to construct unusual or unexpected yet pointed analogies and meaningful connections.

Here are "Part II Pieces and Processes":

2. Take Time for the Pain and the Brain. Sometimes a creative chef needs to turn a lemon into lemonade. My speaking and training work slows during the holiday season; in addition, I needed to slow down in anticipation of some surgery. The solution: head for my Cleveland Cocoon and be with my girlfriend for a month. (Of course, I regretted not being able to help shovel all that "lake effect" snow.) Writing, especially of the thoughtful, clear, concise, compelling and cutting edgy variety usually requires some creative "space-time." Facing fewer day-to-day demands and distractions facilitate mental musings and meanderings. (It better have this generative effect; alas, nagging [insert parental or religious preference here] guilt and youthful underachievement means always having to justify your existence.) For example, when things are quiet, maybe even a bit boring, consider diving into your imagination or reflecting on what may be percolating (uneasily or dreamily) in your subconscious to overcome a sense of inertia and to design a surprising focus or novel project.

3. Go Back to the Future. While writing my three-part essay on "The Stress Doc's 'Top Ten Commandments' for Transforming Reorganizational Crisis," I associated to an earlier lyric, "The Reorg Rag" ™, also written during a tumultuous time – the early to mid-'90s recession. I could hardly remember the lines. Over the years, while occasionally thinking about the song – the original was recorded in a studio with a colleague who wrote the accompanying music – I had not recited the lyrics in well over a decade. Hmmm...was a 21st century upgrade possible? Was I ready to get into "Shrink Rap" ™ mode? In addition to the challenge of mental metamorphosis – shifting my writer's mindset and design structure from prose to poetry – I couldn't seem to locate my cassette recording or find an electronic copy of the original lyric. Tension was building. Was I prepared to confront the "Intimate FOE: Fear of Exposure"?

4. Thrive on "Thrustration" and Come Alive with Conflict. A phrase coined by psychiatrist Richard Rabkin, thrustration basically involves being torn between direct action and thrustration as you haven't quite figured out the pieces of the puzzle or, in this instance, feeling ambivalent about jumping into a puzzle-building process. However, there's mind expanding opportunity in perplexing danger. The agitated state of frustration fires up different sides of your brain, especially the non-logical and visual, spontaneous and holistic right hemisphere. For John Dewey, 19th century pragmatic philosopher and "Father of Public Education," thrustration and conflict are on the same mind-challenging evolutionary tree: "Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity. It instigates to invention and sets us at noting and contriving. Conflict is the sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity."

Or, for a more down to earth perspective, especially of inner discord, consider this Stress Doc radio essay intro penned years ago called "PCMS": "Do you have periods when you're irritable and sullen – you just want to be left alone. Your mind seems trapped in a brain tunnel – underground urges race back and forth. And then, you're struck by unpredictable "hot flashes." It may not be the time of your life, or the time of the month. It may be what I call PCMS: the Pre-Creative Mental Syndrome – and it's not for women only!" ;-) And an advantage of the latter passage is that it not only captures the productively disruptive power of "thrustration" (the quick answer or fix doesn't cut it) but it also touches on the process of "incubation."

5. Encourage both Short-Term Incubation and Long-Term Hibernation. a. Incubation. What's often needed to transform the tension of thrustration into new perspective generation is allowing for incubation. Stop trying to solve the problem through logic and willpower. Let go or break away if you want to achieve a breakthrough – go for a walk, work in your garden, sleep on a problem, etc. And repeat the ebb and flow as necessary. Provide the "space-time" for ideas and images to percolate up from your subconscious or to seek out other information that helps find, design and/or connect critical puzzle pieces. When successful, incubation is a short-term process that inspires an "Aha" realization. As I like to say: "Take an "incubation vacation to hatch a new perspective!"

b. Hibernation. In contrast, Steven Johnson, in his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, (Riverhead Group/Penguin Books, 2010), says that major idea generation often subscribes to a long-term time frame, what he calls the "Slow Hunch." In a decades-long problem solving framework an unresolved issue mostly resides at the margins of awareness. However, when sufficiently stirred from slumber, this vague yet vexing notion, in ghost-like fashion, may make a Halloween appearance or two, partake briefly in the activities of your core consciousness, and then return to the shadows of your mind. This hibernation and peek-a-boo process may go on for years. But "then one day, those vague intuitions (about an original solution) that have been lingering in the shadows...are transformed into something more substantial: sometimes jolted out of some newly discovered trove of information, or by another hunch lingering in another mind, or by an internal association that finally completes the thought" (WGICF). Johnson provides a process metaphor more biological than psychological or spiritual: "Sustaining the slow hunch is less a matter of perspiration than cultivation. You give the hunch enough nourishment to keep it growing, and plant it in fertile soil, where its roots can make new connections. And then you give it time to bloom." By definition, such a process involves more than a "flash." For me, the extended hibernation, shorter incubation and new (sudden) bloom all help illuminate the oft-quoted definition of creativity penned by Nobel Prize-winning physicist and chemist, Albert Szent Gyorgyi: Seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.

Not surprisingly, I was intrigued by this "Slow Hunch" perspective as the original, relevant yet outdated "Reorg Rag" verse had been lying fallow. Or perhaps more accurately, a template had been in dynamic hibernation for over a decade-and-a-half, just waiting for the right moment – the confluence of head and heart, gut and soul along with past, present and future experience and perspective – to emerge from the shadows of the creative closet. And the combination of recent turbulent reorg workshops, my subsequent essays on "Transforming Reorganizational Crisis," free associating to the old "Rag" and the challenge of updating the original became a tempest, breaking open the cerebral closet and creating a climate for mental meandering and the perfect poetic storm.

6. Shift the Cognitive Structure, Substance and Style: A Prose to Poetry Process. This hibernating hunch allows current work to draw on ideas from the intuitions or unfinished projects at the margins, helping facilitate new problem solving connections. As Johnson observes, "It is not so much thinking out of the box, as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes. The movement from box to box forces the mind to approach intellectual roadblocks from new angles, or to borrow tools from one discipline to solve problems in another...Evolutionary biologists have a word for this kind of borrowing – exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function." Consider this example: eons ago, the primary role of bird feathers' was temperature regulation. However, some evolutionary periods later, birds made an adaptive "leap." Those feathers morphed into a structural component of flight, controlling the airflow over the wing, allowing early birds to glide.

Johnson also provides a human example of this movement among different conceptual frames and functions to solve a seemingly disparate problem – Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1440. Trained as a goldsmith and interested in words, "an important part of Guttenberg's genius, then, lay not in conceiving an entirely new technology from scratch, but instead from borrowing a mature technology from an entirely different field, (the screw press in Rhineland wine-making culture), and putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem...He concocted new uses for an old technology. He took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an engine for mass communication."

Let's return to the making of "The Reorg Rag." After absorbing ideas and emotions from workshop participants, writing the "Reorganization Crisis" essays, and then recalling the opening line of the original "Rag" lyric, I shifted my writer's mindset and design structure from the prose box to the poetry ones. For me, this alteration is a mental metamorphosis, one loosely analogous to "exaptation." While relying on the same basic wellspring of ideas and emotions, I am processing and transforming the information (workshops and interventions both present and past) through different frames and filters (cognitive boxes):

a) sounds and images b) rhythms and rhymesc) contrast and (seeming) contradiction d) metaphors and analogies e) ironies and punchlines f) personal experience and pop culture references/context

And the framed and filtered hue and cry, and laughter, is intensified by a concentrated lyrical structure and content. To enhance and exaggerate the above cognitive categories, try subscribing to (and expanding upon) a Shakespearean admonition: Brevity (and clarity) is the soul (and heart) of wit (and wisdom)! For example, as will be demonstrated below, each line of "The Reorg Rag" has no more than thirteen syllables, around six in each phrase. Remember my mantra...verse is terse. The challenge is manifold: rapidly establishing a pulsating rhythm and persuasive visuals (worth many many words) while also setting up deserving targets and then skewering with quick punchlines. And effective poetry, like good art in general, is open to myriad interpretations.

Mark Gorkin, MSW, LICSW, "The Stress Doc" , a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, is a one-of-a-kind "Motivational Humorist & Team Communication Catalyst." The "Doc" is an acclaimed keynote and kickoff speaker known for his interactive, inspiring and FUN speaking and workshop programs. The "Stress Doc" is also a team building and organizational development consultant for a variety of govt. agencies, corporations and non-profits. And he is AOL's "Online Psychohumorist" ™. A former Stress and Conflict Consultant for the US Postal Service, the Stress Doc is the author of Practice Safe Stress and of The Four Faces of Anger. See his award-winning, USA Today Online "HotSite" -- www.stressdoc.com -- called a "workplace resource" by National Public Radio (NPR). For more info on the Doc's "Practice Safe Stress" programs or to receive his free e-newsletter, email stressdoc@aol.com or call 01-875-2567.