Putting Language on What You Carry
Week 6 of 10 – Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week
The act of writing and rewriting is creativity. Total clarity is production.
Articulation is the second movement: putting language on what you have discovered. If discovery is about paying attention, articulation is about giving form. It is the bridge between the internal and the external, between the intuition and the conversation, between the surplus and the world.
This is harder than it sounds. Creative surplus, by definition, does not fit existing categories. If it did, it would not be surplus – it would be part of your job description. The challenge of articulation is to find words for something that exists before words, to give shape to a feeling of “there is something here” without reducing it to a formula or a pitch.
Making Sense (and Its Limits)
The world needs to make sense. Education, planning, and professional development are all sense-making activities. They take the raw material of experience and organize it into structures we can navigate: historical narratives, skill frameworks, career paths, business plans.
The pursuit is well-intentioned, but its foundation relies on a monolithic view of the world. It is deterministic in knowledge and allows for little true diversity. It puts blinders on the existence of individual experience and the range of possible futures. When we say something “makes sense,” we usually mean it fits a frame we already have. When it does not make sense, we tend to reject it rather than question the frame.
Under this frame, the epistemic idea of disabilities came into being, with its moral and creative cost. All this time, a complexity lens would have framed the same differences as co-abilities – different ways of sensing and processing the world that contribute to the collective intelligence of any group. People-Centered Economics, as developed by David Nordfors and Vint Cerf, makes this argument compellingly: value comes not from fitting people into predetermined roles but from creating conditions where each person’s unique capacities can express themselves.
Articulation offers an alternative. Instead of forcing experience into existing frames, articulation creates new ones. It starts with the experience – the felt sense of surplus- and works outward toward language, rather than starting with language and forcing experience to conform.
The Language Problem
One of the most common things I hear in coaching sessions is: “I know what I mean, but I can’t explain it.” This is not a failure of articulation. It is the natural condition of creative surplus. The surplus exists in a space that language has not yet reached. Articulating it requires a kind of linguistic invention- finding words, metaphors, stories, and frames that approximate what you know without reducing it.
This is why writing is such a powerful tool for articulation. Not writing-as-communication– not the kind of writing that transmits a known idea to a known audience- but writing-as-discovery: the kind of writing where you do not know what you think until you see what you say. This kind of writing is not efficient. It is full of false starts, dead ends, and revisions. That is the point. The revision is where the articulation happens.
Speaking serves a similar function, but with an important difference. When you speak your surplus to another person, their response changes what you are saying. Their questions, their misunderstandings, their connections- all of these reshape your articulation in real time. This is why circles and coaching conversations are so valuable for this work. They provide a space where articulation can happen relationally, in the back-and-forth of genuine exchange.
- 01 What No One Is Asking For Week 1 of 10 – Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week 4 min read
- 02 Why This Matters Now 4 min read
- 03 Design Is Not Production 4 min read
- 04 Aesthetics Is What Doesn’t Fit 4 min read
- 05 The Practice of Discovery 5 min read
- 06 Putting Language on What You Carry You are here
- 07 Integration Is Not Monetization 4 min read
- 08 From Communities to Circles 5 min read
- 09 Thirdness and the Efficiency Singularity 5 min read
- 10 56 Prompts for Your Creative Surplus Week 10 of 10 — Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week 11 min read