This morning I’m thinking about the natural birth movement, and some of the things natural birth pioneer Dr. Robert Bradley (yeah, a man) had to say about labor pains — that if you don’t resist the pain and try to eliminate it, but allow it to happen and work with it, labor time decreases and the perception of the pain shifts to a perception of hard work. And anesthetization, which necessitates contraction-inducing medicines such as Pitocin, prolong labor and decrease the body’s autonomy and ultimately increase the physical and psychological pain-level, necessitating more anesthesia, producing more numbing which necessitates more artificial induction, and so on, in a vicious circle. Bradley also mentions that ignorance or misconceptions about labor contribute to perceived need for anesthesia. The fear of the unknown makes women can cause women to tense up against the contractions, or they might rush the labor, or follow what they believe is “proper technique” and make themselves hyperventilate like we see on TV.

Comparing all this to ideation, the metaphorical possibilities seem pretty vast.

I’m playing with the idea of presenting about this pain-affirming approach to creativity as a sort of “natural birth for ideation” movement.

We should stop trying to hard to manage pain out of creative ideation. We should stop relying so much on ideation techniques designed to artificially induce ideas from groups. And we should instead concentrate on ways to help teams go deeper into problems, which means to maximize their problematic nature, make them as wicked as they truly are.