Resolution Without Closure: Processing Matters of Concern Through Robust Social Creativity

Collective creativity is increasingly mobilized to address complex societal challenges, such as environmental sustainability, marked by uncertainty, disagreement, and competing values. Yet much of the creativity literature implicitly equates effectiveness with convergence, consensus, shared problem definitions, or agreed solutions, leaving underexplored how collective creativity operates when agreement is partial or unattainable. This study reframed such challenges as matters of concern: sociotechnical controversies that resist definitive resolution and are processed rather than solved. Drawing on a historical case study of the early Comsat–Intelsat Network (early 1960s–mid-1970s), the paper traced how cross-sector actors advanced through iterative conjecture–test–contest cycling. The analysis showed that collective creativity produced plural resolution forms: stabilization into matters of fact, substantive agreement or procedural meta-consensus, and the sustained containment of productive tension. Each enabled coordinated action under radical uncertainty without eliminating all disagreement. The concept of resolution without closure was advanced to explain how cross-sector networks remained both governable and creatively productive when contestation persisted; robust social creativity was shown to depend on matching resolution strategies to the underlying concern structure. The study has contributed a process account of collective creativity centered on resolution plurality, iterative cycling, and the generative role of bounded disagreement in complex sociotechnical systems.