This riff is a partner to my one this week on humour and sarcasm. If you’ve read that one you’ll spot the connection.
I’ve noticed recently that workshop groups tend to find it much easier to talk about their shared pain than their shared hopes. I think this is almost certainly cultural.
Culture is reinforced by rituals and routines. In the UK, we almost ritualistically complain about weather and transport. Another is control systems.
Culture is also reinforced through control systems — and social media is one. It is no coincidence that social media algorithms long ago started prioritising negative stories over good — we love them.
There is a method of physical theatre training called via negativa, meaning the negative road. It is a method of teaching that doesn’t tell you how to be funny, but it tells you when you are not funny. The idea is that the teacher keeps telling you something is bad until you find something is good. Handled with sensitivity and care for the student it is a powerful teaching technique. It works because the student has to keep proposing ideas and in that process, discovers something that is uniquely theirs.
But it requires a lot of the student — they’ve got to have the motivation to keep coming up with something new.
I think we can see a negative culture as a collective via negativa.
Always finding the flaw, what’s going wrong. If an individual has the motivation to keep on showing up, they can overcome it, but that is a lot of effort.
An alternative, more generous and easier to deploy method is to be encouraging, and inviting people to give something a try.
Creative psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed that one the best ways to work on building a creative culture in an organisation is not to work on individual creativity, but rather on our culture of listening and encouraging.
We can seed this culture by shifting the rituals and routines — asking what went right before asking what went wrong. And by shifting the control system — shifting away from doom-scrolling towards practices that tune is into what is possible.
Then we might find that our culture tilts in the direction of what is possible, of what we want to build together, rather than what we don’t.