Creative NAGRENTS – What is co-evolution?

An early observation from my PhD interviews was that the participants’ personal lives were having a big impact on their business motivation and progress. This was not surprising – it happens with all of us. However an extra factor for the creative NAGRENTS was that they had recently graduated from University and their personal lives were in a considerable state of flux. As one of them said “I am learning to be a grown-up now”.

So their personal lives were undergoing great changes - just at the time when they were embarking on the almost impossible task of making a living out of creative business.

Additionally some of the participants were undergoing a re-think about their ‘art’. More than half of them were moving away from being an active practitioner.

So I was seeing a complex interaction between their newly emerging business self, their previously established artistic self, and the challenges of developing their grown-up personal self. I described this as ‘co-evolution’ and it is proving very interesting to see the learning that they go through, and whether/how this influences their business success.

The diagram below illustrates the three co-evolving threads, and their antecedents.

When I first drew up the diagram two years ago I was also anticipating that in following the three ‘threads’  (creative, personal and business) I would see a continuity between their prior behaviour at school/university and their business development behaviour. This is proving to be an accurate expectation.

The research has been designed to explore how the threads develop and interact over a four year period from business start-up - whatever the outcomes for the initial businesses.

In next week’s post I will describe how and why I have selected the participants in my research.