Dialogic Organization Development

5Generative Image

Sourcing Novelty

Gervase R. Bushe and Jacob Storch

The task is … not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.—Erwin Schrodinger

The implicit desire to generate novel expressions and insights that can lead to new courses of action is central to all Dialogic OD approaches; however, little attention is usually given to an underlying but important question, where does novelty come from? One could easily get the impression that good dialogue will itself lead to new ideas. This is far from the case. In this chapter we look at one avenue for novelty to emerge: generative images that provide a different conceptual and metaphoric landscape and thereby change our ...