The Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada is an explosively creative event. Indeed, the second sentence of the Burning Man mission statement is ...”Our intention is to generate society that connects each individual to his or her creative powers.”
Somehow Burning Man works, both as a temporary society and as an experimental culture that invites creativity. Burning Man is pretty extreme, but abstracting the ingredients of the Burning Man culture might show some hints to empowering creativity.
Here are those ingredients...
1) The normal cues are missing - Every environment, the supermarket, a friend’s home, the office boardroom have cues that we pick up and they impact our behavior. On your first visit to Burning Man’s playa, the flat open desert upon which rest hundreds of art installations, the environment is completely, well…other. There are no reference points to connect you to ‘normal’ behaviors. The desert surface is dead white and cracked for miles in every direction. Nothing grows. The landscape is decorated with 260 oversized art sculptures and hundreds of moving art cars, a giant fish, a scorpion, a Texas saloon, a pirate ship, all driving slowly around the desert bedecked in neon lights, pumping music and transporting people from one piece of art to the next.
2) The elimination of status - Everyone is in costume, Vikings, pole dancers, cowboys in white suits, Indians and flappers all join you wandering around the playa. Costumes are a great equalizer. Everybody is there to play, to participate. The status cues that come with a Rolex, a Prada suit or a Louis Vuitton bag are all missing. The fact that Burning Man doesn’t allow money also adds to the sense of equality. People give things away, but nobody sells anything or advertises. Our man saw no publicity and not one speck of currency for the four days he was there.
3) Play - The art itself is interactive. You can climb on it, operate it, power it and touch it. Most of the artwork has a surprise in it, which you only find when you explore. Pull on that chain and you send a twenty-foot tower of flame into the sky, warming everyone within 50 feet and lighting up the whole playa. The interactive nature of the art invites improv. Spontaneously, a skit breaks out. Our New & Improved colleague participated in a Monty Python-esque satire on idol worship, that began among the viewers of an art installation. One space ship had little round windows. When you peeked in the window, viewers inside the vessel saw you as the head of a little puppet whose arms you could operate by moving little sticks that came through the wall of the installation. Just by peeking in you became the entertainment for those inside.
When an art car called the Board room, a giant conference table on wheels surrounded by office chairs and a whiteboard, stopped at an installation known as the Office, a little bar in the desert, there was an explosion of spontaneous spoofs on corporate culture. Burning Man has found a way to invite one of its ten principles...radical self expression.
Judgment is pretty useless. With so many surprises and zany behaviors, there is little point in trying to size anybody up. Expecting something novel to happen is probably the best stance to have. It’s the only thing you can count on.
Great post! I believe that "Judgment is pretty useless." needs to be a tee shirt.
Posted by: Lynn | 10/20/2011 at 08:18 AM