GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Colombia is a country in the midst of a modern-day renaissance. As little as a decade ago, the country seemed off-limits to the casual visitor because of an ongoing guerrilla war between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels, as well as rampant drug trafficking in certain parts of the country.

A peace deal struck between FARC and the government in 2016 that called on the rebels to trade their guns for ballots brought an end to some of the violence and crime that had plagued many areas of the country.

Although recent events have called into question the long-term viability of the peace deal, the country is dramatically more peaceful now than it was over the 52 years of conflict that resulted in the deaths of at least 220,000 people, with over 7 million people displaced from their homes.

Colombia’s renaissance centered on the town of Medellin, former home of drug kingpins and a focal point for narco-trafficking. The city has received numerous awards recently, including the world’s most innovative city award from the Wall Street Journal and CitiBank in 2013, as well as the biennial Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize in 2016. Both awards cited the city’s progress in overcoming crime and transforming its urban areas by finding “new solutions to classic problems of mobility and environmental sustainability.”

These solutions included new gondolas and escalators that transport people from steep mountainside homes to the city center in minutes as opposed to their previous multi-hour commutes. The city also has a new metro system as well as new museums, cultural centers, libraries, and schools.

As I was planning a trip to Colombia with a focus on innovation, I decided to apply one of my own maxims to the voyage.

Cartagena at Night

The intuitive decision would have been to go straight to Medellin to see firsthand the implementation of these innovative ideas. After all, Medellin has gone from a feared drug-trafficking capital to a wonderland of urban innovation in just a few short years. In fact, many Americans are now moving to Medellin to take advantage of the perfect climate and low cost of living.

Yet so much has been written about Medellin that I was concerned that adding my voice to those others might not have been truly innovative.  Rather, I decided to save Medellin for a future trip and chose to spend my time in other Colombian cities: Cartagena, Bogota, and Villa de Leyva.

What I found in these other cities were worthwhile examples of innovation with more of a historical bend than what is taking place in Medellin.

The National Flag and Motto

The Colombian national flag, adopted on November 26, 1861, is striking and simple, with bold stripes of yellow, blue and red. The three stripes are not symmetrical, as yellow occupies 50% of the flag, with red and blue occupying 25% each. The story behind these colors aligns with Colombia’s natural wonders and its history.  The color yellow represents both gold and the sun.

For indigenous cultures in Colombia, such as the Muisca peoples who inhabited the area around Bogota, the sun was the most important god and gold was a way of representing drops of sunlight on the Earth. The band of blue in the flag represents the oceans that surround the country as well as the numerous lakes and rivers of Colombia. Colombia is the only country in South America with coasts on both major oceans (Atlantic and Pacific). Colombia is also blessed with a large number of rivers with strong flows from their sources to the sea.

Colombian Flag at Castillo San Felipe in Cartagena

The color red in the flag represents the blood that was shed to achieve independence from Spain in 1810, as well as the strength and perseverance of the Colombia people.

In addition to the messaging from the colors of the flag, the official seal of Colombia contains the phrase its Libertad y Orden, or liberty and order.  From the standpoint of a political scientist, these terms are inherently contradictory from a governance standpoint.

A society focused on liberty may not have order, whereas a society focused on order may not have much liberty. Combining the two into a viable political system is truly a challenge. However, doing so successfully can result in the operation of a society that is quite fulfilling for its citizens.

Innovation Perspective:  My plan for all future innovation workshops is to call them “Colombian Innovation Workshops” in the invitation. I assume this will raise some eyebrows and might even lead some invitees to reject the invitation (fearing that we are alluding to some illegal activity in the workshop), so I might need to explain the workshop concept as part of the invitation.

The workshop will prominently display the Colombian flag with the yellow, blue, and red bars. The yellow will represent gold, which aligns with the objective of the workshop – to find those nuggets of innovation that will demonstrate great value to the sponsors of the workshop.

Official Seal of Colombia – Liberty and Order

Yellow also represents the sun, which emphasizes how the workshop will shine a strong light on whatever topic is being discussed, leaving no areas in the dark or unexamined in our quest for new thinking.

The blue represents the vastness of the seas, which corresponds to the lack of limitations on what we will explore in the workshop. In other words, we don’t want necessarily to limit ourselves to a small set of ideas in out quest for innovation.

We want to be bold in our investigation.Red will demonstrate our commitment to the work effort involved in the innovation project, which we know will not be easy. While we don’t plan on shedding any actual blood (papercuts notwithstanding), the work will certainly be challenging and may involve long hours.

Finally, the motto for our workshop, just like the Colombian Seal, will be liberty and order. The workshop will be free-wheeling as we exercise our liberty in exploring new ideas and topics, but this freedom will be bounded with a sense of order that will keep the workshop running on a schedule with a focus on specific outputs. Should we encounter additional skepticism about the Colombian workshop, we could always just say that it is going to be fueled on the world’s best coffee – that grown in Colombia.

Coffee

No discussion about Colombia would be complete without mention of its famous coffee, as exemplified by Juan Valdez in his traditional Colombian garb. Indeed, the Juan Valdez Coffee Shops in Colombia rival the ubiquitous Starbucks Coffee stores in the US (and elsewhere). The question thus arises as to why Colombian coffee is so good.

According to locals, in addition to attributes such as the proximity to the equator, the richness of the soil, and the amount of rainfall, the nature of the terrain in the coffee-growing regions of Colombia have a hand in making its coffee among the best in the world.

Coffee Beans

The areas where coffee is grown in Colombia, known as the zona cafetera (coffee zone), tend to be more mountainous and have very little flat land. Flat land would rend itself more prone to mechanization in terms of harvesting, so the net result is that much of the Colombia coffee crop is picked by hand.

Unlike a machine that would grab the entire plant and harvest all the beans at once, hand-picking allows the farmer to select only the ripest beans and leave the others on the plant for future harvesting. In addition, by not taking the entire plant at harvest time, the farmer can come back again and again to pick ripe new beans at the appropriate time. The result is a rich and robust coffee bean that, according to many, makes some of the best coffee on the planet.

It should be noted, though, that the laws of the marketplace dictate that the best beans (which can garner the highest price), are shipped overseas, leaving the locals in Colombia with the middle and lower tier of coffee beans. However, based on comments from people who have tasted the coffee in Colombia, even these lower-quality beans are still top-notch compared to others around the world.

Innovation Perspective:  When working in the field of innovation, automation and substitution of machine labor or intelligence in place of human effort or intelligence is often a siren song that draws us towards these types of solutions. While there are cases where automation results in a superior solution, in terms of a more efficient or faster process, the coffee bean example reminds us that there are cases where human effort results in a more effective process, even if that process is not more efficient.

National Coffee Growers Federation of Colombia

The innovator should be cautious to define multiple objectives upfront in an innovation effort so that the focus is not solely on increased efficiency or lower cost.

That way the innovator can be sure not to miss opportunities to create value that lay outside the traditional realms of cost/benefit analysis.

Church Bells

Living in a modern, hustling and bustling city in the United States makes one forget about some of the older ways of life that have been predominant around the world for centuries. These traditional ways of life come roaring back to me when I travel in the form of something as simple as the church bell (or the muezzin’s call to prayer from a mosque in a Muslim area).

Main Square at Villa de Leyva

In Colombia I visited the small town of Villa de Leyva, which is a tiny, picturesque town northeast of Bogota that looks like something right out of a Hollywood movie set.

The town, dominated by an enormous main square, is a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site, with row after row of nearly identical, two-story white colonial stucco buildings with black, brown, or green wood trim and balconies. The town is easily walkable, and one setting out to walk around town quickly reaches the end of the main town area and returns back to the central square.

What struck me here, and in visiting other villages in Colombia, were the regularity of the church bells. The bells could be heard anywhere in town and announced to the faithful that mass was about to start, or had ended, or were announcing that the clock had reached key times of the day, such as 12 noon.

Church at Simijaca

Hearing the bells echoingacross the different villages transported me back to an era where villagers would not have their own timepieces (much less smartphones) and would rely on the bells to provide a sense of structure to the day, as well as reminding them not to miss their church services or other important events.

Innovation Perspective: The bells seem like an interesting way to think about communication on an innovation program.

Spreading the word about one’s work in innovation is important for several reasons. First, one needs to make sure that anyone who might have valuable input for an innovation effort is aware that one is working in that area. Communication can thus ensure that experts will find their way to assist the innovator.

Second, communication provides a reminder to executive sponsors that the project is underway so that there are no surprises in terms of support for the effort.

Third, given all the information bombarding workers in modern society, regular communication can keep the innovation effort near the forefront of people’s minds and thus its relative importance will seem high, especially if people are making decisions concerning whether to be involved in the work effort.

The frequency of ringing of church bells in a small village seems about right in terms of the amount of communication. The bells ring at set times on a daily basis (key times of the day), ring to announce important events that are a couple of times per week (mass), and ring voraciously at major events that are annual in nature (Easter, Christmas).

An innovator could use this model to lay out a communication plan that breaks messages down into these three groups, and thus stays top of mind with an audience but is careful to reserve communication for more important events as is warranted.

In other words, an innovator should have some sort of daily messaging about the innovation program in general, a more intense message when workshop sessions are about to take place, and a highest level of messaging when the innovation effort is announcing a major milestone, a new idea, or starting a new phase.

Cobblestones

The small town of Villa de Leyva has all of the attributes of a lovely, quiet colonial village surrounded by mountain peaks and bathed in brilliant sunshine with mild temperatures. The streets and the central plaza in this village are predominantly made of smooth, large cobblestones.  These cobblestones prove to be challenging for cars (they are bumpy and require going slowly) but their unevenness is also unnerving for pedestrians.

Whatever one thinks of the transportation difficulties caused by the cobblestones, one is left with the distinct impression that these cobblestones are very old, which aids in the ambience of the colonial village. Yet in this case one’s perception does not match reality, as these cobblestones are not very old.

Villa de Leyva Cobblestones

The original roads in Villa de Leyva were made of dirt, as was the case with many older towns in South America.  As part of an initiative to increase tourism in the town, city leaders decided that they would convert the dirt roads to cobblestone. The transformation worked, as Villa de Leyva is now an extremely popular weekend destination for Bogota residents (and foreigners as well).

In addition to adding to the ambience of the town, the cobblestones also serve the purpose of slowing down traffic and help avoid the dust and mud that can come from dirt roads.

Innovation Perspective:  An innovator should always be on the lookout for ways to make improvements by step-function. In other words, an innovator presented with a dirt road would inevitably recommend paving the road. After all, this would solve dust and mud problems and would make it easier for cars and pedestrians to navigate.

Yet in taking this leap, an older town would lose some of the character and charm that provides as much value to the location as would the incremental improvements in transportation. In the case of the cobblestones, Villa de Leyva took a step back towards the past but in doing so it created something that had much greater value than a small improvement in speed of moving about the town.

Defenestration

Ever since my days studying Latin I have always enjoyed seeing the word “defenestration,” which means throwing something out of a window.  Unfortunately, most of the episodes of defenestration in history have negative connotations, as they involve throwing people out of windows and starting major wars. The most famous is the second defenestration of Prague in 1618 (yes, there was a first defenestration of Prague in 1419), which was a triggering factor in the Thirty Years War. The window in question was about 70 feet above the ground, the men who were thrown from the window survived the fall by landing in a pile of manure.

In my travels around Bogota, I encountered a much gentler defenestration that was historically significant could, finally, be a defenestration that resulted in a positive outcome.

Window Where Manuela Saenz Defenestrated Simon Bolivar

On September 25, 1828, Simon Bolivar, the famous liberator of several South American countries, was asleep in his Bogota home with his mistress, Manuela Saenz. Some of Bolivar’s enemies broke into his house with the intent to assassinate him. Manuela woke him up and urged him to flee rather than fight, ultimately pushing a reluctant Bolivar out of the bedroom window where he was able to escape into the night.

This defenestration of Bogota thus permitted Bolivar to survive, though some say that his fleeing into the cold, night air without proper clothing may have resulted in an illness that eventually took his life in 1830 from tuberculosis.

After this event, Manuela Saenz became known as the Libertadora del Libertador, or the Liberator of the Liberator, as she had also saved his life six weeks earlier when she learned of an impending assassination attempt on Bolivar at a party he was attending. Manuela came up with a ruse to lure him outside of the building to safety. She first tried to gain entry to the party by dressing a soldier but was refused entry, at which point she dressed in tattered old clothes and stood outside the building shouting Bolivar’s name as his lover, pretending to be inebriated.  Embarrassed by her behavior, he was forced to leave the party and thus escaped the assassination attempt.

Innovation Perspective:  The lesson of Manuela Saenz and the defenestration of Bogota is that there will always be occasions where one has to think quickly of creative ways to pursue an overall objective.

Simon Bolivar’s House in Bogota

In an innovation initiative there will always be unexpected events to which we must react quickly.  While none of these will be the life and death situations that Simon Bolivar faced in Bogota, these situations will nonetheless be important in terms of protecting the overall work effort.

Fighting back against these challenges is not always the best option.  Sometimes clever misdirection is needed to maintain momentum.

It should be noted that the deceptions deployed by Manuela Saenz were not illegal or even dishonest acts. Honesty is always the best policy in all situations. Yet the acts undertaken by Manuela could be categorized as creative misdirection.

Sometimes in the course of an innovation initiative we need to think several steps ahead to keep our project going. It may mean combining our efforts with those of a more politically-popular innovation initiative from another part of the company.

Alternatively, it may mean making an alliance with someone with whom we don’t normally interact so that we can leverage that person’s influence to continue our efforts. In these cases, the key is that we remain focused on the overall objective and ensure that the steps we are taking are as honest as we can be given the various forces working against us.

To this day, the Colombians make it a point to note that Manuela was honestly able to tell the soldiers in Bogota that she did not know where Bolivar was, because once she pushed him out of the window, he disappeared into the night and she did not watch to see where he went.

In the beloved Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book about Bolivar’s final years, The General in His Labyrinth, Marquez goes to great lengths to point out that Manuela did not even lie to the assassins when they asked her why the bed in her room was warm. She said that it was because she had been sleeping in it, which was true. When Manuela found a way to get Bolivar away from the party where he had been targeted, she also appealed to honest and true love to get him out of the building.

Monserrate

High above the city of Bogota is the peak of Monserrate, situated at an elevation of 10,341 feet above sea level. The site was considered sacred ground by the indigenous Muisca peoples, who saw the sun as a key god and thus wanted to seek out a summit that would place them as close as possible to the sun.

View of Bogota from Monserrate

At the time of the December solstice, the sun rises over Bogota precisely at the summit of Monserrate, thus cementing its importance for the Muisca civilization.

The Sanctuary of Monserrate, built at the top of the peak in the 17^th century, houses a surprisingly lifelike statue of Jesus known as El Senor Caido, or the Fallen Lord. Legend has it that the hair on the statue sometimes grows, and the locals treat the statue with deep reverence.

At one point many years ago, the Bishop of Bogota wanted to have the statue in Bogota for services. Church members carried the statue down the winding foot path to the old city of Bogota and placed it in the cathedral in preparation for services. The next morning, the Bishop opened the cathedral doors and was shocked to find that the statue had disappeared.

Statue of the Fallen Lord at Monserrate

The Bishop frantically called in assistance from the local community and people began searching far and wide for the statue but were unable to find it. One person had the idea to go back to the summit of Monserrate to look for the statue there, and when he opened the Sanctuary, he found the Fallen Lord above the altar, back in his original position. From that point forward, the locals decided never to move the statue again.

Innovation Perspective:  As innovators we spend a lot of time searching.  We are searching for new ideas, or searching for experts to help us with our initiatives, or we are searching for new opportunities to which we can apply our innovation. When we search, we may inadvertently move farther and farther away from our starting point.  After all, it would not make much sense to spend a lot of time searching in the same area where we started.

We believe that the further afield we move, the better chance we have of finding something completely new or different from what we originally thought. Yet the legend of the Fallen Lord at Monserrate suggests that there may be merit in some cases to spending a little time reverting back to where we started from in a search effort.

It may be a worthwhile step in our process that after searching a period of time, we take a pause and go back to revisit the assumptions we made at the start of our investigation.

EL Dorado

Colombia is forever entwined with the search for gold.  One sees this as soon as one arrives in Bogota at El Dorado, or “the Golden,” International Airport. The indigenous Muisca peoples were highly reverent of gold, seeing it as equivalent to drops of light from the sun god. As such, they used large amounts of gold in their ceremonies and costumes.

Gold Mask at the Museo del Oro

Upon arriving in the region, the Spanish saw this gold and heard tales of even more gold to be found in other places. Spanish explorers set out on numerous quests in Colombia to find the mythical city of El Dorado, where they thought that gold would stretch as far as the eye could see.

Yet they never found this city in their explorations. The closest they came was a sacred Muisca site known as Guatavita Lagoon, north of Bogota.

A Spanish priest heard the story from the Muisca of a ceremony that took place at Guatavita when the Muisca ordained a new leader for their community. The new leader was covered in gold dust and taken out onto a small lagoon in the mountains. The lagoon was encircled by hundreds of followers who would bring gold offerings to the shoreline to give to the new leader.

The Spanish soon found this lake and forced the locals to begin draining the lake by hand (scooping out water one cup at a time). After draining about a meter of water, the Spaniards found thousands of gold offerings that had been left in previous ceremonies. The Spanish seized these gold offerings and melted them into ingots to be shipped to the King in Spain.

Guatavita Lagoon

Next, a group of Germans decided to cut a huge gap in the mountain to drain the lake level even more. They continued to find gold pieces and hatched a plan to drain the entire lagoon by tunneling underneath it. In the course of trying to build this tunnel, several workers died and eventually the work effort was abandoned, with the lake remaining today with a large gap in the side from the original project to drain it.

As the melted gold arrived in Spain, the King was not pleased because he realized that most of the gold offerings contained copper that the Muisca had melted together with the gold to make it more malleable for their designs. The Spaniards recognized that the expense involved in continuing to try to find gold at this location was not worth the resulting metals that were found. After all, copper could be obtained much more easily and cheaply at other locations.

Innovation Perspective: When we are heads down in pursuit of an innovation objective, we can sometimes behave like the Spanish in search of El Dorado. We know what we are searching for and we attribute great potential benefits to the innovation, sometimes to the point where we may over-estimate the value of the end result. We pursue this goal with a dogged determination and don’t let things get in our way in this pursuit

Gold Offering at the Museo del Oro

Yet in the end we may realize that all the effort that we undertook in pursuit of this goal was for naught, especially if the innovation fails to come to fruition (as if often the case). The Spanish were maniacally focused on the search for El Dorado and committed horrible acts against the indigenous people in search of gold. In the end, after all this pursuit, they found themselves with a lot of copper and not as much gold as they thought they would obtain.

In the meantime, they destroyed the sacred Guatavita lagoon of the Muisca and damaged it to the point where it will never look again as it did for thousands of years. Around this lagoon there were also many species of plants and animals that thrived in this unique ecosystem, yet many of those were damaged or destroyed as well.

From an innovation standpoint, this example serves as a reminder that one should periodically re-verify one’s overall objectives to make sure that the thing that one is pursuing is still relevant and that in the course of the pursuit one is not creating new problems whose costs outweigh the benefits of the potential innovation.

One should look not just at the project cost for the innovation initiative (in terms of direct spending on the work effort), but also at the opportunity costs and collateral costs associated with the project. In other words, one should think about what one is forgoing by not pursuing other opportunities as well as whether one’s work effort is creating new problems that must be addressed elsewhere.

The current debate about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potential negative effects on society is a good example of this phenomenon.

In addition, the Guatavita example and the pursuit of El Dorado provides us with another lesson. In the old city of Bogota one of the sights that should not be missed is the Museo del Oro, or the Gold Museum. This museum contains thousands of gold artifacts from the region and chronicles the importance of gold to the indigenous peoples of the area.

When one sees the intricate, detailed work that went into the creation of these gold pieces in the museum, one shudders to think about how much cultural damage occurred each time a Spaniard threw one of these items into a flaming cauldron to melt the object down into a gold ingot for shipment to Spain.

Muisca Raft at the Museo del Oro

Yet as one walks through this museum, the anticipation builds as one approaches the single most valuable and amazing piece of goldwork that was found at Guatavita. Somehow this piece, found in 1969, miraculously survived hundreds of years (or longer) in the mud without being damaged and escaped the eyes of those in search of El Dorado.

The piece, known as the Muisca Raft, shows the ceremonial raft that the Muisca used to transport their new leader out into the lagoon. The raft, as well as the figures on it, are intricately detailed in tiny proportions and it appears that not a single piece on the artifact is damaged.

The fact that there even exists a gold museum to house this masterpiece is a result of innovative thinking by the Bank of the Republic of Colombia in 1934 to establish this institution to preserve the country’s patrimony.  This serves as a reminder that sometimes the best things are not those that are consumed, but are saved.

Bricks from Glasgow

Walking inside the walled colonial city of Cartagena takes one back in time to the 1700s. Narrow, non-checkerboard streets, lovely colonial facades, cool ocean breezes, and the sudden appearance of small, pleasant plazas reminds us why even during Colombia’s rougher years, the city of Cartagena always beckoned outside visitors as a warm, inviting place.

Typical Street in Cartagena

In the Plaza Santo Domingo in front the Iglesia de Santo Domingo, though, there is a puzzling appearance of objects that seem out of place. Looking down at the bricks in the plaza, one notices that many of them are stamped with English writing which says “Cleghorn – Terracotta – Glasgow.”  Scottish bricks definitely seem out of place in Spanish-founded and settled Cartagena.

The story behind these bricks dates to the Eighteenth century. Over the course of its existence, Cartagena had to fend off numerous attacks from the French Navy, the English Navy, as well as freelance pirates, which explains why the city was so fortified (and why many of those walls and fortresses survive today).  In 1741, the English Admiral Edward Vernon launched an assault on Cartagena. Vernon had come from England with his ships and troops and vastly outnumbered the Spanish defenders of the city.

Brick from Glasgow

Through resilience and cunning, the Spanish were able to defeat the English and save their city from invasion. The famous bricks arrived on one of Vernon’s ships, likely brought over as ballast to stabilize the sailing vessel on its long voyage.

The English probably expected to use the bricks to build structures in the newly-conquered territory and replace that ballast with gold or other valuables for their return voyage home. When one (or more) of their ships were sunk by the Spanish, the locals were able to salvage the bricks and put them to use in the plaza where they appear today.

Innovation Perspective: The innovator can benefit from considering the case of the Glasgow bricks in two ways. First, in terms of the decision Vernon made for ballast materials for his ships, his idea to use bricks instead of rocks or sand or other material was instructive because it showed he was thinking ahead about the expected victory over the Spanish.

Plaza de Santo Domingo

Rather than throwing any old material in the ship, he wanted to make that weight into something that would be productive (building materials) in the next phases of his campaign. Second, the Spanish salvaging and use of the bricks shows a resilience that goes beyond any questions of pride concerning the origin of the bricks.

The Spanish could have let the bricks degrade in the ocean and disappear over time. After all, the despised British had created them and wanted to use those bricks to build structures after they subdued the Spanish. The British even had the temerity to stamp their bricks with their company’s name so that everyone would know who had created them. The Spanish ignored these concerns and realized that good building materials should be put to use whenever, and however, they are discovered.

Zipaquira

From ancient times, a mountainous region to the north of Bogota, around the town of Zipaquira, has been the source of key minerals for the inhabitants of the region. From the time when the ocean flowed inland over this area, enormous salt deposits were left behind and were mined by the indigenous Muisca peoples.

The Spanish found these mines and accelerated production of the minerals, yet there was a key problem with the mining technique of the time. The mines could be unstable, and many miners lost their lives to cave-ins and other disasters.

Zipaquira Hallway Showing Mining Method

In 1801, the famed German Naturalist Alexander von Humboldt visited this mine as part of his explorations across the continent of South America.  Humboldt saw the challenges of the mine and noted that the old techniques were both dangerous and not extracting the amount of materials that one would expect from such an amazing deposit of minerals.

Humboldt recommended that the locals leverage mining techniques from Prussia to created underground caverns to extract the minerals rather than the open quarries that were used at the time in the area. Humboldt’s model consisted of a single shaft with regularly-spaced, deep perpendicular caverns alongside, leaving enough material in between the caverns to protect the overall integrity of the mine.

The results of his suggestions can be seen today in one of the most amazing underground spaces in the world – the Zipaquira Salt Cathedral.  The cathedral was created to honor the many miners who lost their lives in the area over the years, and consists of a huge, main cathedral as well as several artistic crosses and worship spaces that align with Christ’s journey on the day of his crucifixion.

Zipaquira Cathedral

Innovation Perspective:  Zipaquira provides a simple lesson to the innovator – sometimes one can obtain more by taking less. This seemingly counter-intuitive advice is embedded within the mining strategy advocated by Humboldt. By maintaining a consistent structure underground, Humboldt’s design enabled the miners to dig deeper and longer than they would be able to do using traditional methods that would run the risk of a collapse.

Indeed, the underground open spaces created in the Zipaquira mine are enormous, rivaling the size of the world’s greatest cathedrals in terms of the length and height of the caverns. Thousands of people are able to worship in this underground church, with many more able to worship at the stations of the cross as well.

Zipaquira Cavern

Our standard approach to efficiency assumes that we can always find a small, marginal improvement to any work effort. When one sees the size of the caverns created at Zipaquira, one assumes that adding another few feet of extraction on either side of the cavern would result in huge additional amounts of minerals to extract.

Yet this small amount of additional material could jeopardize the stability of the entire operation. In this case, the innovator (Humboldt) was able to determine the precise amount of extraction that would align with the integrity of the underground structure. By digging a little less, the miners were able to obtain more than they ever could using their old methods.

El Infiernito

Just outside the town of Villa de Leyva, the Muisca established what is believed to be an astronomical observatory on a hill with 360-degree views in a region that has more cloudless skies than one would find further south in Bogota. The area is popular today for stargazing, given the clear air and open vistas and lack of light pollution.

When the Spanish discovered the site in the 1500s, they considered the phallic symbols and aligned rocks to be an area of pagan worship and named it el infiernito, or “little hell.”  The Spanish built a monastery nearby and set out to convert the Muisca to Catholicism.

Recent archaeological investigations into the area have discovered that the site aligns precisely to various astronomical events (as well as a calendar) and that the site contains sacred tombs for the Muisca.

El Infiernito Observatory

On the summer solstice, the main set of pillars at the sites aligns precisely with the sacred lagoon Iguaque, which is believed to be the birthplace of the Muisca civilization.

It is also hypothesized that the phallic shape of some of the pillars represent the union of the sacred Earth with the sky and sun. In front of one of the uncovered tombs, the Muisca built six small pillars outside that are believed to represent a calendar indicating when the person in the tomb died.

Innovation Perspective: Jean-Paul Sartre once said that “hell is other people.”  In Colombia, hell is a Muisca astronomical observatory. In other words, one person’s hell is another person’s astronomical observatory. An innovator should adopt a perspective when encountering a new finding that enables him or her to see an astronomical observatory where others might see phallic symbols and pagan worship areas.

This perspective requires at a minimum an open mind, which is perhaps best exemplified by immediately challenging one’s first reaction.  Although it is important to capture that first reaction (and sometimes that first reaction can provide valuable

Tomb at El Infiernito

information), one should also discard that impression and consider other possible interpretations of the information one is receiving. That approach is a more effective pathway to innovation than would be the case if one always reviewed new information through the lens of past experience.

The El Infiernito site demonstrates this in two ways.  First, the initial impression of the Spaniards was correct in that the site was sacred and the stone pillars had a phallic shape (there were tombs at the site and the pillars represented the union of Earth and sun). However, subsequent analysis by the Spanish could have helped them recognize the astronomical importance of the site, especially in terms of the alignment of the stones with key astronomical events. The stones might also have told a story in terms of stargazing and the history of the Muiscas. It should be noted that when Humboldt visited the site in 1801 he surmised that it was as astronomical observatory.

Although it is not altogether appropriate for us to apply a modern, inquisitive scientific ethos to a Spaniard from the 15^th century, the example still holds merit for the innovator today, as we can imagine how much knowledge could have been obtained about the Muiscas, and potentially the stars, had the Spanish spent time interviewing locals about their site and writing down for future generations what they heard.

Since the Muisca did not have a written language, much of this information has been lost. Indeed, simply knowing what the 6 pillars in front of the tomb meant would be fascinating information to have obtained. Likewise, a modern innovator should always capture as much information as is meaningful about a legacy process prior to transforming that process.

Sources:

Photos courtesy of the author

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/world/americas/colombia-farc-accord-juan-manuel-santos.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/10/colombian-peace-deal-jesus-santrich-drug-trafficking-charges

https://cities-today.com/medellin-wins-world-city-prize/

https://www.andovar.com/medellin-most-innovative-city-of-the-world/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Colombia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombian_Declaration_of_Independence

https://www.britannica.com/event/Defenestration-of-Prague-1618

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague

https://www.newhistorian.com/mistress-saves-bolivar-from-assassination/4904/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monserrate

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in His Labyrinth (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Museum_Bogota

Carlos López Galviz, Paul Dobraszczyk, Bradley L. Garrett, Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within (London: Reaktion Books, 2016).

https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-americas/el-infiernito-sacred-site-muisca-civilization-colombia-003975

https://www.federaciondecafeteros.org/

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

The country of Panama, which gained its independence from Colombia in 1903, is best known as the home of the path between the seas – the Panama Canal.  The Canal was started by a French consortium in the late 1800s and completed by the United States in 1914.  The Canal, with twin sets of locks on the Atlantic and Pacific sides, continues to serve thousands of transits per year, well over 100 years after its opening.  In 2016, Panama completed an expansion of the Canal with new wider and longer lanes designed to serve the larger cargo ships that ply the seas with thousands of containers on board (as well as other mega-ships carrying chemicals, cars, or even vacationers).

Miraflores Locks at the Panama Canal

The Panama Canal transformed global trade and continues to this day to make it easier to move goods from one ocean to another.  The benefit lies in the simple math of the Canal.  A typical Canal crossing, known as a transit, takes 8-10 hours, plus maybe a day of waiting to enter the Canal.  This compares to the 10-14 days it requires a ship to travel around the entire continent of South America, with the costs in fuel, crew, supplies, risks of traveling through rough seas, and the opportunity cost of getting one’s goods to market 10-14 days later than would be the case with a Canal transit.  Each year, nearly 17,000 ships use the Canal carrying over 300 million tons of cargo.  On a recent trip to Panama, I spent time examining locks on both sides of the Canal and experienced a transit in the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks on the Pacific side to get a feel for how this masterpiece of engineering works.  While exploring the Isthmus of Panama, I encountered a number of interesting perspectives on innovation that are worth exploring.

 

Trust the Natives

The first European to reach what is now known as Panama was the Spanish Explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa who arrived on the Atlantic Coast in 1501.  Balboa was told by the indigenous population that there was a great sea to the south of their settlement and in 1513 Balboa was able to reach this sea, what we now know as the Pacific Ocean.  At its narrowest point, the isthmus is only 40 miles wide in this area, but the terrain in between the seas is mountainous and covered in dense, thick jungles filled with dangerous animals and insects.

Innovation Lesson – Having traversed the isthmus in an air-conditioned car on a paved highway in about an hour, what struck me was the sheer determination that must have been required of the Spanish explorers to hack their way through the hills and jungles of the isthmus to reach the other coast.  When one thinks about Panama, one assumes that the land is relatively flat (like a beach).  However, one has to remember that millions of years ago the isthmus of Panama rose up via tectonic forces to separate oceans that were once connected.  The explorers had no idea that there was an enormous ocean just 40 miles away.  They had no reason to believe that the indigenous population were telling the truth (especially given the poor treatment the Spaniards afforded the locals) or could tell the difference

Mountains Behind Old City Shoreline in Panama City

between an ocean and a large lake.  Nonetheless, the Spanish pushed through this terrain in difficult conditions and reached the other coast.  Upon discovery of this pathway, the Spanish quickly realized the value of this shortcut as a way to get gold from their conquered territories in modern-day Ecuador and Peru back to the King in Spain.

For the modern innovator, the lesson here is a reminder of the importance of trusting local sources of information.  When we arrive with a mandate to develop an innovative approach to solve a problem, we sometimes dismiss input from those individuals who have the most experience with the current environment.  We assume that these individuals will not be able to provide information that is useful for innovation because they are too connected to the old way of operating.  However, a true innovator will be able to glean input from these legacy sources that can be used to make the overall innovation project even more successful.

 

Just Because It Worked Once Doesn’t Mean It Will Again

Before the creation of the Panama Canal, the most famous canal in the world was the Suez Canal in Egypt, which connected the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.  That canal, built between 1859 and 1869 by a team of workers led by the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, fulfilled a dream that dates back as far as the Pharaohs of Egypt in the 2^nd millennium BCE.  The Suez Canal is 121 miles long and its most important characteristic is the fact that it is a sea-level canal.  In other words, the Suez Canal for its entire length does not require any locks to raise or lower ships.  Basically, de Lesseps simply cut a channel from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and allowed the seas to flow into the channel from both ends, effectively uniting those two great seas into a single, flowing body of water.  Nonetheless the construction was quite challenging, and thousands of laborers died from cholera and other diseases.  Yet de Lesseps remained persistent and completed the project to much acclaim.

De Lesseps next set his sights on the Panama Canal.  In 1878, he set up a company similar to the type of firm he used for the Suez project and gained a concession from the Colombian government (Panama was controlled by Colombia at that time) and started work on his project.  De Lesseps believed that he could replicate his success on the Suez project in Panama, and set out to build a sea-level canal, just as he had done in Egypt.  The spot he chose to cross the isthmus was only 40 miles long, which was one-third the length of the Suez Canal.  Moreover, technology had advanced in the decade since the Suez Canal was completed, and de Lesseps assumed he would triumph over nature.  As the Suez Canal took ten years to complete and the Panama Canal was shorter, de Lesseps thought he would be done in six years.

Unfortunately for de Lesseps, Panama proved to be a much greater challenge than Egypt for several reasons.  First, he had to cross the continental divide in Panama, which reaches a height of 360 feet on the Canal route.  Second, the terrain in Panama was a combination of rocks (which are harder to dig into and move than sand), jungle (which is harder to traverse than desert), and tropical downpours (some areas receive 16 feet of annual rainfall).  Third, the workers in Panama had to deal with tropical diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and other ailments that

Culebra Cut at the Continental Divide

decimated the crews.  At the time, doctors did not know how these diseases were spread and the steps they took to try to contain the diseases, such as having bed posts sit in pails of water to keep insects from climbing up from the floor, actually became breeding grounds for malarial mosquitos.  By 1887, some ten years into the project, de Lesseps reluctantly acknowledged that his sea level plan would not work and changed his design to one that uses locks.  However, with over 20,000 workers dead over the decade of work on the Canal, the company finally went bankrupt and put the project on hold.

Innovation Lesson:  Perhaps the most difficult time for an innovation leader to exercise restraint is after he or she experiences a successful implementation of an innovative solution.  After all, the innovator has probably invested a tremendous amount of time and energy in the project and expended proverbial blood, sweat, and tears to make the project a success.  While one is experiencing the high of the winning project and basking in the glory of a fully-implemented innovation (which is rare, given the high rate of failure in our line of work), the last thing one wants to consider is how that same innovation might not work in another environment.  To the contrary, one is often eager to find another application of the innovation and deploy it as quickly as possible to continue experiencing the benefits of success.

Unfortunately, this can be a recipe for disaster, as the de Lesseps example shows.  In his case, the previous innovation (a joint stock company combined with a sea-level canal and French engineering) was applied to what was presumably an easier challenge (a shorter distance to traverse).  As history shows, the innovation failed in Panama and required completely new thinking and technology, as was brought by the Americans in 1904.  Had de Lesseps started from scratch in Panama and not applied the lessons of Suez, it is possible he would have come up with the appropriate set of innovations to complete the project.

 

Use Physical Demonstrations

Panama City today is a modern metropolis with huge skyscrapers filled with condominiums, offices, and banks.  The old city, known as Casco Antiguo or Casco Viejo, occupies a small area to the south of the modern city and consists of lovely colonial buildings with charming squares, restaurants, hotels, and shops.  While wandering the old city one comes across an interesting small plaza surrounded by brick walls of a building that once stood on the site.  This is the location of the ruins of the Church of Santo Domingo, which was built in the 17^th century but was destroyed by fire in 1756.  After the fire, all that remained were the walls and one curious arch across the middle of the plaza, connecting the two sides of the structure.

This arch is known as the Flat Arch because, unlike a typical arch, it does not have much curve in its central arch structure.  The Flat Arch is 10 meters high and 15 meters long and is made of recessed bricks.  At one time the flat

The Flat Arch

arch supported the choir section of the church.  The arch seems to defy gravity because it is not shaped like a traditional arch, where each stone is locked into the structure by the keystone at the top of the arch, with gravity supplying the force to keep the arch together.

Legend has it that in the early 1900s when the United States was considering taking over and completing the stalled French Panama Canal project, Panama City was struck by a series of earthquakes that made the Americans nervous about completing the project.  After all, who would want to invest millions of dollars in canal infrastructure that could be destroyed in an earthquake?  These concerns over seismic activity led the Americans to consider an alternate path for the Canal that would have run through Nicaragua (though that route was plagued by the possibility of active volcanoes).  The locals wanted to keep the project in Panama so they took the Americans to see the Flat Arch and said that if earthquakes were such a problem, then there would be no way that a flat arch could remain standing since the 1600s.  Supposedly, this convinced the Americans that earthquakes were not as much of an issue as they feared and the project continued.  The site was declared a national monument in 1941, and the arch survived until 2003 when it unexpectedly fell.  The current arch is a reconstruction of the original.

Innovation Lesson:  In 1900 the people of Panama probably presented the United States with all sorts of information they had collected over the years about the prevalence of earthquakes in their region.  Presumably there would have been records of all the major quakes dating back as long as the area was settled by the Spanish.  Although this data would be nothing like what we could muster up today with seismic analysis, nonetheless it would have provided a solid foundation for understanding the impact of earthquakes in the area.  However, Americans were understandably still skeptical about the viability of the location for the Canal, and the alternative Nicaragua route was receiving strong billing as a potentially better route.  Yet the Panamanians understood the importance of physically demonstrating a point rather than simply relying on data.  A flat arch standing for hundreds of years spoke volumes about the stability of the land in the region compared to pages and pages of data about past earthquake activity and analysis of fault lines.  For the innovator, this story reminds us that physical demonstrations can sometimes provide exponential returns compared to dry data.

 

Always Consider Peripheral Innovations

As one approaches the Panama Canal entry channel from the Pacific Ocean side, one notices a large number of shipping containers and loading/unloading cranes on both sides of the channel.  While it makes sense that there would be a shipping port for the country of Panama (with a population of over four million people), these ports are much larger than one would expect to see for such a small country.  The same is true on the Atlantic side at Colon.  The reason these ports are so large is because of a vital service that the Panama Canal Zone also provides, which is a convenient way to transport a small number of containers across the isthmus to the other ocean.  After offloading containers at the port of Colon (Atlantic) or Panama City (Pacific), a company can transport the container to the other coast either via truck along the trans-isthmian highway or via the Panama Canal railroad.

Container Terminal at Pacific Entrance to Canal

Given the short distance, this trip can be completed in about an hour (in addition to time to offload and move the container to the transportation method and reload it on another ship).  This allows a company to use the advantages of the short distance of the isthmus without having to take their entire ship through the Canal, incurring high fees (ranging from $100,000 to $1 million, depending on the size of the ship).  For example, a company in Argentina might want to ship a large number of containers to the US East Coast, but a few of those containers might need to go to the US West Coast.  That ship could stop at Colon, offload the small number of containers, and move them via rail to the Pacific Ocean where another ship already heading in that direction could pick them up and continue to the US West Coast, while the original ship continues its journey to the US East Coast.

Innovation Lesson:  The fundamental purpose of the Panama Canal is to facilitate the movement of large ships from one ocean to another.  Its core innovation was finding a way to do this efficiently and quickly.  Yet beyond this foundational innovation, the Canal has other uses in terms of peripheral innovations, such as the railroad, the highway, and the container terminals on each end of the Canal.  These innovations provide additional utility for the Canal and give shippers more options in terms of how they move goods from one place to another, further cementing the importance of the Canal in global commerce.

 

Get a Pilot

As one approaches the channel that leads to the Canal near marker buoy 1, a small boat comes up alongside bearing the Canal Pilot.  Every ship that enters the Canal, no matter how large or small, must have a Canal Pilot onboard during the entirety of the transit.  From the smallest sailboat to the largest cargo ship, a Canal Pilot will always be on board in the Canal Zone.  The pilot is an experienced navigator with charts and communications equipment who coordinates every step of the voyage for that particular ship.

Pilot Ship Approaching Our Vessel

Innovation Lesson:  No matter how much experience one has in a particular subject, there is almost always someone with more expertise nearby who can assist.  In our case, on a tourist boat, the captain of our ship had probably made hundreds of transits in his career, but, no matter, the Panama Canal Authority required us to be boarded by a Canal Pilot.  It is likely that the pilot had little to do on our journey given the expertise of our crew, but he was still there.  One has to remember that the Canal is a multi-billion dollar operation and that the slightest mistake (for example, if a ship damaged a lock gate), could cause the loss of millions of dollars in terms of repairs and lost transit fees, not to mention delaying shipments of time-sensitive cargo.  The pilot is there out of an abundance of caution, but also brings expertise to bear that improves the performance of the crew of the ship in transit.  For the innovation practitioner, the lesson here is that expertise is often available and it is advisable to take advantage of this expertise when offered (or required) to help one along one’s journey.

 

Stick with the Methods that Work

Aside from navigating within the tight locks on either side of the Canal, the most difficult portion is certainly the navigation channel between the Pacific Locks (Miraflores and Pedro Miguel) and Lake Gatun.  This 7.8-mile-long, narrow stretch was carved out of the mountains of central Panama and is known as the Culebra Cut.  It is quite narrow, surrounded by mountains, and must be constantly dredged to stay in service.  The Canal Authority has an entire team in this location, known as Gamboa, whose job is to run dredging equipment at all times.  When navigating through the cut, one sees large white boards placed on the hillsides at various intervals throughout the

Navigation Boards

landscape.  These are navigation aids, similar to the visual aids used by aircraft to line up their approach to a runway.  The navigation aids in the Canal consist of vertical and horizontal white blocks that, when the ship is in the proper point of the narrow channel, line up perfectly to provide a visual aid for the Captain and the Canal Pilot to ensure the ship is in the middle of the channel where the water is deepest.

Navigation Boards

Innovation Lesson:  Modern cargo ships possess a tremendous array of sophisticated navigation tools that operate anywhere on the planet.  Using satellite-guided GPS, a ship’s captain can discern his or her position within a few feet.  After all, a ship is always within line of sight of a satellite.  Yet despite all of these sophisticated technologies, the Canal still relies on navigation boards that likely were in place soon after the construction of the Canal.  These boards provide precise, consistent feedback of a ship’s position and work for any type of ship.  Other than foggy conditions, which are rare in the tropics, these navigation signal boards are redundant and cannot fail, unlike a computer-aided system that could encounter errors.  The innovation lesson here is that one should not always trust new technology to solve a problem.  Older methods can continue to work and, in some cases, may work better for their purpose.  After all, navigation boards can be used by any ship, any captain, and in almost any conditions, whereas one might encounter slight differences in GPS technology used by different ships entering the Canal.

 

Anticipate Unexpected Uses for Technology

In 2016, the Panama Canal Authority inaugurated a new set of locks on both sides of the Canal.  The new locks were designed to accommodate larger ships (longer and wider, known as Neo-Panamax) than those that could traverse the early 1900s locks (known as Panamax).  This was needed because of the increasing size of cargo ships, both container vessels and car carriers.  One of the most important trade routes runs from Asia across the Pacific to the East Coast of the United States, and without the expansion of the Canal these huge ships were having to take much longer routes to reach their destination.  The best place to see the new locks in action is at the Agua Clara Locks Visitor Center on the Atlantic side of the Canal.  As we were driving towards the new locks, we needed to decide whether to go straight to the locks to see a ship transiting or whether to go to see other sights in the area, such as the 17^th century Spanish Fort San Lorenzo, which once guarded the mouth of the Chagres River where it meets the Atlantic Ocean.  Our driver launched an application called “FindShip” which showed a map of the local area and identified all of the large ships

Ship Entering Agua Clara Locks – Located via Findship App

in operation, including metadata about those ships such as the name, owner, home port, cargo, destination, and speed.  We saw that a large ship was about to enter the Agua Clara Locks, so we headed straight to the visitor center to see the transit take place.

Innovation Lesson:  The people who designed and built the FindShip application probably never expected it to be used by tour guides in Panama.  It was likely built so ship owners or other interested parties could keep track of where their vessels were around the world.  Yet those whose livelihood depend on the movement of ships in the Canal quickly realized that this application could help them improve their performance with customers by determining the best way to tour different locations.  The application is also helpful when one is crossing the Canal by ferry near Colon so one can see if the ferry boat will be delayed because larger ships are transiting the area.  The innovation lesson here is that a great idea will always have additional, unanticipated uses that bring value in entirely new ways.  One of the jobs of the innovator is to think about these new ways when one is designing the original innovation.

 

Innovations Still Need the Fundamentals

One striking aspect of the new, wider locks on the Canal is how similar some of the fundamental components are when comparing the original locks from 1914 with the new ones completed in 2016.  The 2016 locks certainly leveraged advanced CAD/CAM design and modern engineering techniques.  The new lock gates were built in Italy by one of the best engineering firms in the world and shipped by barge to the Canal.  The new locks operate on tracks that allow a single moving part to open and close rather than two separate gates (like doors) that must open and

Old Locks – Dual Swinging Doors

close together to seal each lock.  Yet at its core the new locks still share two key elements with their century-old brethren.  First, the new locks still use gravity to move water in and out.  There are no massive pumps that move water in and out of the locks.  Rather, the effort is entirely handled by gravity.  This means that there are fewer technological failure points, as gravity will always work in the same way every time it is engaged.  A second common element between the old and new locks is the use of redundancy in the lock gates.  Every lock is protected by two gates, so if one is breached or fails, the second lock will continue to hold the water in place.

Dual Gates at New Locks

Innovation Lesson:  One could imagine that when designing the new locks, a particularly confident engineer might have thought that he or she could design a single, foolproof lock gate and obviate the need for redundancy.  After all, these new lock gates were enormous pieces of steel and were certainly expensive to build, transport, and install.  Yet the fundamental rule of redundancy must always come into play, no matter how innovative or technologically advanced a solution may be.  The lesson for the innovator here is to not forget the fundamentals when building something that is brand new, even if it seems to be extremely advanced.

 

Innovate by Doing More with Less

While the new and old locks share some common characteristics, the most striking difference between them lies in how the new locks are able to conserve water.  In the 1914 locks, fresh water enters from Lake Gatun and as each chamber is emptied as the ship is lowered to sea level, the fresh water contained in each lock is emptied into the sea, merging with salt water at the end of the set of locks.  This results in the loss of millions of gallons of water on each transit.  In fact, one often sees birds soaring near the lock exits because the fresh water often contains fish that, when they encounter salt water, are unable to live, resulting in a feast for the sea-birds.  Although this design worked in the past, given the huge size of Lake Gatun and the 16 feet of annual rainfall that replenishes the lake, the designers of the new Canal locks knew that they needed a more sustainable approach for the 2016 locks.  The result was the current design where each lock chamber contains water retention basins that save 40% of the water used in each lock, resulting in a smaller outflow of fresh water for each transit.

Water Capture Basins to Conserve Water

Innovation Lesson:  The mindset around the new 2016 locks was focused on doing what it takes to make them bigger.  The new locks needed to be wider and longer than the older locks to accommodate the larger vessels that had come to dominate global commerce.  Yet an innovative mindset also prevailed in the design to focus on making the locks better, not just bigger.  One of the most important ways to make the locks better was to make them operate with less water, especially given the enormous size of each lock.  The lesson here for the innovator is that it is always important to look at all elements of a design and not just focus on the core objective of a new initiative.

 

Innovate with the End in Mind

One of the challenges of having the Panama Canal bisect one’s country is the need to build bridges in several places to cross the Canal.  The bridges need to be high enough to allow some of the largest ships in the world to pass.  As Panama’s economy has thrived in recent years, the country has been on a building spree.  Evidence of this building boom is present on the Atlantic side near Colon, the Canal entrance, and the Agua Clara locks.  Currently this area is served by a small car ferry that can transport about 15 cars at a time across the shipping channel, and the ferry must wait to cross when any large ship is passing by to enter or exit the Canal Zone.  This new bridge, designed by the firm Louis Berger Group and built by the French firm Vinci Construction, consists of a 1,050-meter dual carriageway in a cable-stayed span.  The 530-meter main span is the longest concrete four-lane cable-stayed span in the world.  The goal of the bridge is to link the two regions of Panama to boost development and tourism.  The bridge was nearly completed when I visited it in April 2018.

New Canal Bridge under Construction

While the bridge itself is a marvel of modern technology and construction techniques, that attribute alone is not what makes it important from an innovation standpoint.  Rather, what is interesting is what is on the other side of the bridge, away from the heavily-populated areas around Colon.  The bridge ends in a dense jungle area that is known as the Fort Lorenzo Protected Forest.  The four-lane massive bridge terminates into a single, two-lane road that is heavily potholed and where the jungle grows over the sides of the road to the point that there are places where the road seems to be only a single lane.  That road goes through an old abandoned US Army Base, Fort Sherman, that is sparsely used by the Panamanian military, with dozens of abandoned Army buildings crumbling into the ground due to lack of use and maintenance.

Once one passes through Fort Sherman, the tiny road continues past a small marina (Shelter Bay Marina) with a single hotel, then the potholed and jungle-surrounded road continues for miles and miles until it dead ends at Fort San Lorenzo, a historic Spanish Fort that is a very rarely visited tourist site.  Turning the other direction from the new bridge, a two-lane road crosses the Chagres River by the dam that formed Lake Gatun then runs through jungle

Terminus of New Canal Bridge

and passes by a few small towns.  Years ago in the US, there was a Congressional scandal concerning a “bridge to nowhere” being built in Alaska, where millions of dollars were being spent to build a bridge to connect a small island with a few dozen residents to the mainland.  Presumably the dollars could have been better spent improving roads that were more heavily traveled.  The same may be true for this new bridge in Panama.

Innovation Lesson:  The lesson here for innovators is that no matter how spectacular one’s innovation may be in terms of technology, one must also think about, and prepare for, the eventual use of that innovation.  The sight of a giant

Two-Lane Road at Terminus of New Canal Bridge

four-lane highway terminating into a tiny, pot-holed two-lane road is quite stunning.  One would think that a visionary behind the project would have invested resources in starting to improve the infrastructure on the other side of the bridge.  Otherwise, hundreds of cars will cross over and encounter frustrating driving conditions, thus limiting the effectiveness of the new bridge.  The only thing I saw in terms of new development on the Western side of the bridge was ground cleared in the jungle to build a new visitor’s center for Fort San Lorenzo.  True innovators and visionaries must think well beyond their core innovation if they want to build something with lasting value.

Fort San Lorenzo

 

Innovate by Not Finishing

Some may think of the country of Panama as the halfway point in the drive from North to South America (or vice-versa) on the Pan-American Highway.  Yet Panama is more than just the halfway point – it is a dead end.  The Pan-American highway ends in Panama and resumes in Colombia, requiring a transfer by ship to complete the journey.  The reason for this is an area known as the Darien Gap.  This is a 60 to 100-mile wide swath of dense jungle that represents the only break in the 19,000 miles of highway that run from the Arctic Ocean to the Southernmost point of South America.  Indigenous people still occupy this region, but its lack of development and lawlessness make it a haven for drug-trafficking and human migration.  Some politicians have considered completing the highway through the Darien Gap, with the goal of improving economic development in the region, but they have brushed up against several objections.  First, the impact on the indigenous people with modern development would almost certainly be

Dense Jungle Terrain

negative.  Remote villages with little outside interaction could be flooded with tourists, impacting the culture in a way that would be difficult to turn back.  Second, deforestation would accelerate.  There are already cases where illegal logging of rosewood in protected forests is taking place in the Darien, and improved transportation links would only make this more profitable for smugglers and thus more prevalent.  Third, animal diseases, such as bovine foot and mouth disease, are prevented from spreading from South to North America by the gap, so removing that barrier could result in unintended propagation of these diseases.

Innovation Lesson:  Sometimes the most innovative thing to do is not to finish something.  In our daily lives, we are highly-attuned to the importance of finishing tasks or projects.  Every project plan shows a start and finish, and we often manage our to-do lists by crossing off, or finishing, tasks through the day, which gives us a measure of satisfaction.  Innovators focus energy on completing key elements of a project step-by-step, with an end-goal in mind.  Yet in some cases, the best thing to do may be not to finish a project, especially if one of the penultimate steps yields greater value that one would expect to obtain from reaching the final step.

Sources:

Photos courtesy of the author

https://www.britannica.com/place/Panama

https://www.npr.org/2016/06/25/483523910/the-5-billion-panama-canal-expansion-opens-sunday-amidst-shipping-concerns

https://panamaforbeginners.com/23-facts-know-panama-canal/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Panama-Canal

https://www.panamacanalpanama.com/history-panama-canal/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal

https://cascoviejo.com/iglesia-santo-domingo-and-the-flat-arch-arco-chato/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culebra_Cut

https://www.louisberger.com/our-work/project/third-panama-canal-bridge-panama

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/darien-gap-dead-end-desperate-journey/

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28756378

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

I spent some time last year visiting a butterfly sanctuary in the cloud forest near Mashpi, Ecuador.  In this sanctuary, local support staff have identified 300 species of butterflies and have been able to reproduce 50 of them in a research facility referred to as the Life Center, which is basically a large, screened-in habitat for butterflies.  I watched intently as the staffers gently moved butterflies in the four stages of their lives: egg, larvae (caterpillar), pupa (chrysalis), and adult butterfly.

I had always considered these creatures to be things of beauty (with the incredible colors and patterns on their wings), and I had thought about the short lifecycle of the butterfly as an interesting analogy for the fleeting beauty of life’s experiences, but when I heard a podcast recently about the incredible lifecycle of the monarch butterfly my appreciation of this tiny creature increased exponentially.  I also thought about how these astounding facts about the life of the monarch butterfly could provide guidance for those of us facing the daily challenge of developing innovations for our customers and organizations.

Every year around 300 million monarch butterflies travel nearly 3,000 miles from North America to Central America, ending up in the trans-volcanic range of south/central Mexico.  The migration begins each September when most of North American monarch population East of the Rocky Mountain range heads south for the winter.  This migration is needed because the butterflies are a tropical species and cannot endure the freezing winter temperatures of the North American continent.

Throughout the summer, the butterflies feast on milkweed plants, but those plants stop growing at the end of August, which triggers the butterflies to spend their final weeks before migration drinking nectar to get ready for their trip.  The butterflies navigate by using sensors that track the length of daylight, the position of the sun above horizon and, in general, follow the sun towards the south.  Starting as far north as Canada, Michigan, and Maine, the monarchs fly as much as 50 miles a day, following currents of warm air.  By October, the migration routes from different regions of the United States converge in Texas, while others cross the Gulf of Mexico to take a more direct route.

The migration paths in Mexico follow the geography of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range, then at the Sierra Gorda the butterflies change direction and cut through a pass heading southwest towards the interior of Mexico where the butterflies finally reach their objective – the trans-volcanic range.  None of these butterflies has ever made the migration before.  There are no leaders or adults in the group with previous experience, but somehow the butterflies end up in exactly the same place as generations did before them.  Here the monarchs rest for the winter, with multiple colonies of millions of butterflies living in a state of almost suspended animation.  The high-altitude location of the colonies provides a climate with a temperature range of between 35 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit, which enables the butterflies to minimize their expenditure of energy during the winter.

Once spring arrives, the butterflies search for nectar and water to prepare themselves for a migration to the north.  This migration corresponds with the appearance of a new crop of milkweed in Texas.  They lay eggs and follow the milkweed as it blooms north, all the way to Canada, then they lay eggs and start the cycle over again.

 

Four Generations

Every year the monarch butterfly population passes through four distinct generations.  The first generation, born in the warm climates of Mexico or California in February or March, awake from hibernation to migrate north and east in search of milkweed plants upon which to lay their eggs.  These first-generation butterflies must complete their tasks in a short lifespan of two to six weeks.  The eggs hatch into baby caterpillars, launching via metamorphosis the second generation of butterflies in May and June.  These butterflies thrive during another two to six week cycle, continuing their migration, then lay their eggs on milkweed plants again for the third generation of caterpillars to be born in July and August, change into butterflies, and die after two to six weeks.

The fourth generation, born in September and October, deviates from the two- to six-week lifecycle and is able to live for a full six to eight months – a longer lifespan that is needed for the arduous migration.  This generation is known as the Methuselah generation, named after the character in the Hebrew Bible who lived for 969 years.  These butterflies migrate south for the winter and spend their time in the warmer climates of Mexico and California, biding their time until the winter dissipates and they start the process over with the first generation awakening from hibernation in February or March.

Innovation Insight – When we apply innovation to solve a problem we can sometimes be trapped by the thinking that the solution we develop to solve the problem has to be one that works the same way when the same situation reappears.  In other words, we sometimes suffer from an overbearing focus on symmetry or logic that stipulates that the same factors applied in the same manner to the same situation will always result in the same outcome.  In the case of a reengineered process, for instance, we assume that we can improve a single step and the process will always work better on each iteration as a result of our intervention.  However, by tying ourselves too much to logic and symmetry, we may be overlooking a non-linear, or asymmetrical innovation that we could apply to a problem.  What if instead of applying our change to every iteration of a process we were to apply it to every third or fourth iteration?  We might find that the process as a whole works better with this non-linear approach.  If the monarch butterfly always had two- to six-week lifecycles, it would never be able to complete its migration to Mexico.  An innovator should not always assume that the same solution will be the right one in all scenarios, even if it appears on the surface that all other conditions remain the same.

 

Four Life Stages

Every butterfly passes through four stages in its lifecycle: egg, larvae (caterpillar), pupae (chrysalis) and butterfly.  Each stage serves a specific and distinct purpose.  The egg is the starting point for the creature and resides on the milkweed plant.  By sticking to the plant as the caterpillar forms, the egg’s location on the leaf ensures that when the caterpillar emerges it has an abundant and nourishing source of food.  The larvae or caterpillar stage allows the creature to consume a huge amount of plant matter to build up its body and obtain the energy it needs for its subsequent metamorphosis.  The pupae or chrysalis stage provides a safe space for the caterpillar to transform into the butterfly.  After all, if the creature remained a caterpillar, it could not complete its migration any great distance due to its slow-moving nature.  The butterfly stage, with its powerful wings, allows the creature to complete its migration and land on milkweed plants to lay eggs to re-start the cycle again.

Innovation Insight – When we think about applying innovation to solve a problem, we sometimes try to come up with a single design that solves all the problems we are trying to overcome.  We may over-engineer a solution because we think that the more utility our solution has, the more innovative it will be considered to be by others.  This is the classic example of design by committee, where everyone involved tries to add a feature or function to a concept, which results in a clunky, sometimes less-useful solution, as in the well-known phrase that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.  The four stages of the butterfly show that an innovator should not be restricted to thinking of a single solution for a problem.  Rather, one can focus intensely on solving individual problems with individual solutions.  The caterpillar would do a horrible job migrating to Mexico, while the butterfly would do a poor job consuming tons of milkweed leaves.  Butterfly wings would not form well in the open air without the protection of a chrysalis, while a chrysalis would be difficult to transport on the small bodies of a butterfly to be laid on a milkweed plant.  Another phrase that describes this and, happens to refer to horses, is “horses for courses.”  This is derived from the notion that in different track conditions (dry, muddy, long, short, grass, dirt, etc.), different horses will succeed or fail.  It is often applied to people and reflects the concept that different individuals have different talents and skills and thus will succeed or fail depending on the challenge they face.  An innovator should acknowledge this and consider different solutions to solve different problems.

 

Singular DNA

From a genetics standpoint, one fascinating aspect of the butterfly’s four stages and four generations is the fact that these very different creatures all emerge from the same core set of DNA, or genetic code.  In other words, the same basic DNA in the egg can form the caterpillar, the chrysalis, and the butterfly, and can provide the extended lifespan of the fourth generation to enable it to migrate to Mexico during the winter.

Innovation Insight – Just as the same DNA results in the creation of four very different phases of life for the butterfly, so too can an innovative idea spawn numerous progeny.  This could, perhaps, be the measure of the value of an innovation in terms of how it can be applied to many different problems or situations.  Another way to look at this is that the innovator is like the butterfly DNA.  In other words, an innovator is a single person who is expected, over the course of a career, to develop numerous unique and creative ideas to solve problems.  The same person must wear many hats and apply innovation to many different types of challenges.

 

Take a Break

During its journey from North America to Mexico, the monarch butterfly crosses the Gulf of Mexico.  Scientists have found a unique location from which to monitor these creatures in the middle of their transit – oil rig platforms.  Scientists have observed the butterflies landing on the platforms and resting before continuing their journey south and posit that perhaps the creatures are attracted by the lights on the rigs in the midst of a sea of darkness.  Scientists who spent several nights on the oil platforms noticed that at daybreak the butterflies spread their wings to warm their flight muscles then resumed their journey.  Scientists liken the wings to solar panels in their ability to absorb heat and transfer it to the flight muscles.

Innovation Insight – Although monarch butterflies have been migrating to Mexico and crossing the Gulf for thousands and thousands of years, they have not always had a place to stop and rest along the way.  Oil rigs in the region are a relatively new phenomenon, with the first derrick out of sight of land deployed in 1947.  Clearly the butterflies had been able to make the journey for thousands of years before the appearance of the first well, but the behavior of the butterfly when encountering an oil platform results in an interesting observation.  The butterfly could probably make the entire journey without assistance but it chooses not to do so.  Likewise, an innovator could single-handedly drive an entire innovation program himself or herself, but if others are offering to help, the innovator should gladly accept the assistance.  There is no award for heroism in innovation.  The award lies in the end result.  If someone offers to help, the innovator should smile and add that person to the team.

 

Internal Guidance

One of the mysteries about the monarch migration is how these butterflies are able to fly thousands of miles and converge in a single location in Central Mexico.  Scientists have discovered a clue to this puzzle in that the trans-volcanic range in Central Mexico contains large deposits of heavy metals near the Earth’s surface.  This geologic phenomenon creates an anomalous magnetic field.  Scientists have also found that the monarchs have tiny particles of magnetite in their wings, thorax, and abdomen, and the magnetite in their bodies rotate like a compass inside a cell and may help them navigate to this specific place on the planet.

Innovation Insight – When faced with a distant objective, an innovator can sometimes get overwhelmed by the vast gulf that lies between him or her and the overall goal.  For instance, a leader may set a goal for an organization that is beyond a ”stretch” goal and may require a number of innovations to reach.  When the innovator is positioned at step 0 of 10, it may seem daunting and one may doubt that he or she will ever get to step 10.  In this scenario the example of the monarch is perhaps instructive.  Just as the monarch internalizes (tiny particles of magnetite) the objective (the heavy metal-laden trans-volcanic range), so too can the innovator internalize an objective so that it does not seem so far out of reach.  It can be a physical act of internalizing, such as spending time with a research team working on a new prototype, or as simple as putting reminders all around one’s workspace, such as “zero defects by 2020” or some other slogan that encapsulates the objective of the overall initiative.  Seeing or living the goal on a daily basis brings it home to the innovator and makes it feel more attainable.

 

Follow the Milkweed

Milkweed plants are only source of food a butterfly’s offspring will eat.  Butterflies have a keen sense of smell and can identify a milkweed plant from miles away.  Butterflies can also recognize the leaf shape and will scratch a leaf with its legs then taste the leaf with its proboscis to make sure it has found the correct plant on which to lay eggs.  Caterpillars, which emerge from these eggs, are eating machines whose purpose is to build up raw materials for next stage of life.  A caterpillar can eat its own weight in leaf matter in a single day and can multiply its birthweight 3,000 times in less than two weeks.  When the monarchs depart from Mexico to return to North America, their migration follows the blooming of the milkweed plants as they spread from south to north, following the increasing warmth and sunshine of springtime.

Innovation Insight – As innovators we are sometimes tempted to get out in front of our support networks, whether that be colleagues or Executive Sponsors.  We want to be on the cutting edge of thought and push boundaries, but the lesson of the monarch is that it is important to recognize and not outpace our support mechanisms.  A monarch that flies too far north too quickly will find itself without milkweed plants to support its offspring, and that generation will not make it through its lifecycle.  As such, an innovator should work closely with his or her support team to make sure that he or she is not too far out in front of an initiative.

 

Benefits of a Short Lifespan

The asymmetric four generations of the monarch butterfly are puzzling at first glance.  After all, why would the first three sets of butterflies only survive two to six weeks while the Methuselah generation survives for months?  Would not it make more sense for there to be two Methuselah generations lasting for six months each to round out the year?  It is possible that the shortened lifecycles of the first three generations allow the butterfly to align its growth cycles with the spreading milkweed as spring moves into summer.  In the end, however, it may be that this is just a mysterious characteristic of the monarch butterfly.

Innovation Insight – This example can remind innovators that short lifecycles are not always a negative thing.  When working on a project, a quick phase, or a series of quick phases back-to-back, may yield results that are better than would be the case if one tried to run the entire duration of a project from start to finish.  Breaking up work into smaller phases can make those individual phases more manageable.  Likewise, an innovation does not always have to be the most complex, all-encompassing solution to a problem.  It may be a series of smaller steps that are taken individually but then collectively result in a better outcome.

 

Sources:

Photos Courtesy of the Author

https://www.mashpilodge.com/explorations/the-life-centre/

https://www.monarch-butterfly.com/

https://www.acast.com/americanconservativeuniversitypodcast/show-3007-metamorphosis-documentary-intelligent-de

https://aoghs.org/offshore-history/offshore-oil-history/

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Lines of Innovation – Part II

In a previous article (Lines of Innovation – Part I) I wrote about the importance of lines in thinking about innovation.  In this sequel, I will focus on additional examples where lines provide insight into the challenge of driving innovation.  A common theme of this article is the importance of the abstract and the simple.  In other words, innovators tend to spend a great deal of time focusing on the literal (what surrounds us, what we see, feel, and hear in our daily lives).  Yet there is tremendous power in focusing on the abstract, or stepping away from concrete reality to make new, insightful observations about the world.

The scholar Robert Kaplan captures this well in his study of the American West, Earning the Rockies.  Kaplan writes that a “traveler and journalist constantly talks to people; what they tell him helps shape his experience and perceptions.”  He contrasts this to the work of an analyst, who “thinks about what is not being said but what is obvious.”  Kaplan sums this up with the succinct phrase: “[a]n analyst works inside the silences.”  Although the innovator must spend some of his or her time interacting with colleagues or customers to gather data to solve a problem, he or she should also remember to spend time working “inside the silences,” or thinking about what is not said and not seen.  This is a location from which truly innovative ideas can emerge.

The use of abstractions is a powerful tool in academic research.  In one of my past careers, International Relations Theory, scholars have spent (and continue to spend) decades debating reductionist theories that postulate that all relations among countries are defined by the state of anarchy in international politics and relative power capabilities among the states.  In other words, all state behavior in the international arena can be attributed to the fact that there is no central government on the planet that can use force to control or regulate how states interact with each other.  The only force to persuade states is power, so a country’s power relative to others defines its behavior relative to those other states.  Scholars in this field sometimes seek out the most parsimonious, or simple, theories to explain a phenomenon.  These theories can be powerful tools even though they clearly do not take into account all of the variables associated with a particular action.  The parsimonious theories can also give guidance to a scholar to head down a certain path of investigation, where deeper analysis can reveal new insights.  For the innovator, the power of abstraction can be used in a similar way as we shall see in many of the examples below that focus on the importance of lines in innovation.

Roman Decumanus Line

One of my favorite activities when traveling is to visit ancient Roman cities.  While the most obvious place to do this is in Rome, I found very interesting lines in Roman cities in areas as geographically distant as Volubilis in Morocco and Jerash in Jordan.  In both of these cities (and indeed in many other Roman cities including Barcelona, Damascus, Split, and Beirut), the town layout was in a consistent model known as the Decumanus maximus.  The Decumanus maximus was a main road with an East-West orientation.  If one closes one’s eyes and is transported from one Roman city to another, one would see very similar structures in terms of the main road running into and out of town.  Although there are many reasons why the Romans built their cities this way, one key reason is for defensive purposes.  The famed Roman Legions would be sent all over the empire to defend various locations.  By having a consistent design in terms of how the city is oriented, Roman Legionnaires from other cities would be able to defend cities in any location.  Strategies that worked to defend Jerash in Jordan could also be applied to Volubilis in Morocco.  Likewise, knowing that attackers were likely to approach from certain directions simplified the challenge of preparing defenses.

Innovation Lesson – As innovators we often think that the most creative or best solution is something that is entirely new or different.  After all, the very root of innovation is thinking differently about a problem.  Yet the Roman Decumanus line shows us that consistency can be innovative too.  Having the same setup for cities across the empire proved to be a defensive innovation for the Romans.  Consistency is not always, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, the hobgoblin of simple minds.  Rather, it can be the inspiration for better approaches to solving challenges.

The Four Corners

For any student, one of the earliest lessons in the geography of the United States is the arrangement of the 50 states.  At a young age, a budding geographer should be able to fill in the names of all 50 states on a blank map, and in thinking back to my younger days, I recall that it was always interesting to identify the four states that meet perfectly in a single point in the Western U.S.: Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado.  This place, known as Four Corners, seemed quite distant for many decades, but now that I live in one of the four states, I decided to visit the site for the first time.  The place where the four states meet is in a desolate, remote, dry, and windy area in the desert Southwest of the US.  The exact boundary line was marked in 1912 and refurbished in the 1990s, giving visitors the chance to stand in four states at the same time.  One visitor while I was there decided to putt a golf ball across several states.  In addition to Four Corners, there are other locations that receive tourist traffic because of the intersection of state borders, those these other locations consist of the alignment of three state borders in a single location.  People who seek out these sites refer to themselves as “tri-pointers,” and one particularly diligent tri-pointer catalogued 65 sites in the U.S. where at least three states come together at a single point. 

Innovation Lesson – At first glance, the concept of Four Corners may not strike one as particularly innovative.  The location is in the Navajo Nation and enterprising Navajo residents constructed a very nice building and observation area which improves the experience for anyone arriving at the site.  The Navajo owners of the site charge a fee to visit it, and it is likely that this is the only revenue-producing activity that could come from that specific piece of land (except perhaps for wind and solar energy, as the wind and sun were constant companions at the site).  The real innovation lesson here is the importance of the power of transforming something that is abstract into something that is real and tangible as a way of helping humans experience the phenomenon.  If the Four Corners monument merely consisted of a sign indicating that somewhere nearby this location the four states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet up, then it is unlikely that people would do much more than take a quick picture then move on.  The structures built by the Navajo that precisely define this location and allow people to take an abstract concept – a state border on a map – and turn it into something tangible – brass and concrete markers on the ground – demonstrates how a simple, physical action can dramatically increase the value of an abstraction.

Tennis Court Lines

In sports, lines are key elements that define the boundaries of where games are played between competitors.  The game of tennis, in particular, has very distinct lines, in the form of rectangles on either side of a net, that define whether a ball played is considered “in” or “out.”  In professional tennis tournaments, one sees several line judges placed in various positions on the court to watch the lines and determine if a ball played by a competitor is in or out.  In the old days of wooden tennis rackets where the ball did not travel as quickly, the human judges were able to make mostly accurate calls about the location of a ball.  Periodically the chair umpire, who was perched in a high chair above the net and able to see across the entire court, would overrule the line calls.  As racket technology advanced over the years (graphite and other materials), and player technique and conditioning (strength training, etc.) improved, the balls started traveling faster and faster, making it harder and harder for the human judge to be able to spot a quick-moving ball on the court.  This was particularly true on serves, where a player would launch the ball at over 120 mph covering a short distance.  As player frustration mounted over perceived incorrect calls, professional tennis organizations rolled out a technology known as cyclops, which placed an electronic eye along the service line, just at the point where the line ended.  Cyclops would issue a loud beep anytime a ball on a serve breached the eye, which indicated that the ball was beyond the service line and thus out of bounds.

The loud beep was unarguable by the players, and what went from an argumentative process with human line calls on serves gradually became a definitive process with few complaints from the players.  This, however, still left side lines and other lines subject to human calls, so the arguing shifted to that part of the court.  Over years, as technology improved, the professional tennis tours developed computer-assisted line calls that monitoring all lines on the court with cameras that, when needed, would convert video of balls traveling near a line into a computer-generated image that could be shown to the entire stadium on a screen and clearly indicate where a ball landed.  Although the tool can only be used when players challenge what they perceive as an incorrect line call by a human judge, the process has proved bulletproof, with the video evidence provided to the entire stadium, leaving no doubt about what happened on a particular shot.

Innovation Lesson – The lesson here for the innovator has to do with the importance of visually presenting important information as part of the process of introducing a new technology.  In the case of cyclops (the old beeping system on serves), tennis fans had nothing more than a beep to go on in terms of their ability to process whether a serve was in or out.  The possibility existed that the system malfunctioned, so fans were not always confident in the results.  The new system used in professional tennis presents a computer-generated image of the ball and clearly shows whether the ball is in or out, and the entire stadium can see the evidence.  I do not watch that much tennis, but I have never seen fans react negatively to a call presented with video evidence, as opposed to the old cyclops system that sometimes resulted in jeers and whistles by displeased fans.  In both cases, advanced technology is presenting information to the fans, players, and umpire, but the newer, more visual technology has been much more successful.  For an innovator trying to gain acceptance of a new technology, one should try to incorporate additional senses into the experience of a new technology.  Visual and tactile solutions are likely to be the best accepted, though, of course, this could depend on the technology under consideration.  Nonetheless, the maxim that the more one can demonstrate of a new technology, the more likely people are to accept it.

Trading Assembly Lines for Lines of Future Customers

Lines played an important role in one of the most successful technology exhibits of all time – the GM Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.  A visionary industrial designer from Michigan, Bel Geddes created an interactive, scale model that took Americans of the 1930s into a simulated overflight of the world of the 1960s.  For its exhibit, GM originally planned to build a mock-up of its automobile assembly line, just as it had done at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago.  Indeed, this would likely have been a fine display, showcasing the latest in GM assembly-line technology.  The concept of the moving assembly line, with its innovative notion of moving the product to the workers instead of making the workers move to the product, was still a relatively new technology at that point, having been invented just a few decades earlier.  Attendees to the GM exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair would likely have enjoyed seeing how GM builds a car and might even have marveled at some of the technological advances of the process.  Yet GM would not have been able to escape from the fact that what they showed in 1939 was hardly different from what they had shown in 1933.

It was this line of argument that Bed Geddes pursued when he convinced GM Leadership that they could not “afford to create the impression that they’d had no new ideas in five years.”  Bel Geddes won a $2 million contract (equivalent to $33 million today) and went to work creating a vision of the future that tied GM into the future of America.  According to Earl Swift, author of The Big Roads, Bel Geddes created something truly innovative and amazing for his client, “a simulated flight over the America of 1960” that was remarkable.  Bel Geddes “performed his magic with the biggest scale model ever built, a diorama of farm, forest, suburb, and city that covered nearly an acre and featured about half a million individually designed and crafted houses, a downtown bristling with skyscrapers ten feet tall, more than a million tiny trees representing eighteen species, and about fifty thousand streamlined cars and trucks, of which ten thousand moved on roads, bridges, and highways.”  The simulated overflight lasted for 15 minutes and people waited in line for hours to go through it.

Swift notes that “Bel Geddes and his people not only built the model but engineered the 1,568-foot conveyor, on which the rubber-wheeled chairs moved at 103 feet per minute and turned at orchestrated points to face highlighted features of the diorama, each chair doing so independently of the other 599.”  The ride had a sound system that could deliver “150 overlapping copies of the narration, so that the words you heard always corresponded with what you and your three nearest neighbors were seeing.”  In addition, Swift continues, “Bel Geddes and his staff devised myriad little tricks to boost the model’s realism; [including a]irplanes in flight [that] cast shadows, […w]aterfalls [that] were shrouded in spray, […c]louds of real water vapor [that] hung over the mountains.”  The model also contained “[t]heatrical lighting [that] brought on dusk, drew the eye to specific targets, [and] manipulated mood.”  So as to remind audiences of the sponsor of the exhibit, the motorway in the diorama had numerous cars speeding by in motion.

Innovation Lesson – The GM Futurama exhibit and the amazing work of Normal Bel Geddes reminds the modern innovator of the importance of stretching one’s boundaries to drive innovation.  GM clearly could have shown innovation in automotive manufacturing in its World’s Fair exhibit, and Bel Geddes would have been rewarded for putting together a display of this manufacturing prowess.  Some might even have deemed the exhibit “innovative.”  Yet it is unlikely that a depiction of the GM assembly line in 1939 would still be written about nearly 80 years later.  Bel Geddes applied his visionary instincts to take the GM product, the car, and show how it fit into the American of the future.  He used techniques from his background in theatrical production to make the experience even more powerful, and replaced assembly lines with lines of eager future GM customers, waiting patiently to get a taste of their future world.

The Equator Line in Ecuador

Any visit to Ecuador is incomplete without a trip to the Mitad del Mundo, or middle of the world tourist site near the capital city of Quito.  In fact, the country’s name, “Ecuador,” is derived from its location on the equator.  The Mitad del Mundo site contains a number of structures, including a line showing precisely where the equator is located, allowing a person to have one foot in the Northern Hemisphere and one foot in the Southern Hemisphere at the same time.  The location was identified by a team of French and Spanish scientists in a Geodesic Survey in 1736 (more on that in a future article).  Ostensibly at 0 degrees, 0 minutes, and 0 seconds, the location of the monument is actually a few seconds off of the actual, GPS satellite-identified modern line, which is about 150 meters away from the site.  Interestingly, at the precise 0-0-0 location there is an ancient site called Inti Nan that was created by the Quichua people, who ruled this area in pre-Columbian times.  Although it was quite a feat in 1736 to identify the location of the actual line within 150 meters, the fact that the Quichua people recognized the significance of this place hundreds of years earlier, and actually found the exact spot without instruments, is quite astonishing. 

Innovation Lesson – The Quichua people did not leave written records that explained how they so precisely located their Inti Nan site.  At this point, one can only make assumptions, unless we believe that the Quichua possessed extraordinary intelligence or used some sort of magic to locate the spot.  Since this all happened before Columbus sailed across the ocean to the New World, it is not clear that the Quichua would even have a concept of the planet as a sphere with a precise midpoint.  An educated guess could be that the Quichua people made use of what today we would call “relentless focus” to find the precise spot where the sun reached its maximum on the equinox.  The ability to devote a tremendous amount of time and patience to observing natural phenomena may have been the key to this insight, but that alone might not be enough to permit them to achieve their goal.  Perhaps it was this intense focus guided by some sort of hypothesis as to the puzzle they were trying to solve that led them to the breakthrough.  For the modern innovator, in our world of myriad distractions, rapid-fire responses to texts and emails and tweets, perhaps the lesson from the Quichua could be the value of slowing down and focusing intensively on solving a problem.

The 100^th Meridian and Climate

Driving across the continent of the United States makes for a long but rewarding journey.  Seeing the countryside change from the forested East to the barren and mountainous West is a memorable experience.  There is an interesting theory about this land area that is tied to an important line – the 100^th meridian.  The line, which runs from north to south, crosses Texas, Oklahoma, Kansa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas.  A scholar of the Great Plains, Walter Prescott Webb, identified this line as the dividing line between dry and wet parts of the continent.  Kaplan, writing about this line, observes:

To the west of this invisible line, in the midst of a flat and monotonous landscape, all the way to the Pacific slope, there is only an average of twenty inches of annual rainfall.  The arid West begins at this demarcation.  Here is where the tall grass gives way to the short grass of poorer soils.  East of this line, all the way to the Atlantic, the landscape is heavily timbered; west of this line the land is mainly treeless, with some obvious exceptions like the Pacific Northwest.

When one drives across the invisible line, the change is not immediately apparent, but over time one certainly senses a change in climate and topography as one’s journey progresses across the flat landscape.  By the time one realizes that he or she has entered a completely different environment from before, the 100^th meridian is long passed and the Rockies loom ahead.  The sensation is somewhat like the gradual climb from sea level to the mile-high city of Denver on the plains.  Other than some rolling hills along the way, one never feels as though one is driving uphill going from East to West.

Another fascinating extrapolation from the 100^th meridian proffered by Webb relates to American history and the spread of slavery.  According to Webb, this invisible line represented the end of the line for slavery because its economic model of large plantations and labor-intensive farming could not survive in the arid West, which rendered its expansion impossible.  The economic model of the northern states, which relied on small farms and growing industrialization, was better suited to the climate west of the 100^th meridian.

There are two more observations that can be ascertained from the invisible characteristics of the American West.  Kaplan writes that the large size of the continental United States was part of the reason that it became a superpower.  Kaplan states that “the immensity of the continent that required the development of more powerful and efficient locomotives than in other parts of the world, something which, in turn, enabled the development of long-distance engines for our warships, so that the strength of our navy is directly related to the size of the dry-land continent and the rail lines spanning it.”  Another observation from Kaplan relates to the makeup of the Federal Government as it relates to the geography of the US:

The bureaucratic power of the federal government as we know it today has its origins in such bodies as the Geological Survey, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Bureau of Standards, the Bureau of Mines, and the Reclamation Service – all connected in one way or another to the surveying of the thinly soiled West.  It might even be argued that had the United States been settled from west to east, rather than from east to west as it was, a more centralizing autocracy would have taken hold.  Liberty in America emerged in part because the water-rich thirteen colonies had little need of regulation.  And that natural abundance extended deep into the prairie.  Whereas Iowa was almost 100 percent arable.  Utah, for example, had only about 3 percent arable land.  Thus pioneers could not simply overrun Utah and prosper.  Strict guidelines from a centralizing state authority were required for them to thrive.

Innovation Lesson – In each of these examples, the 100^th meridian, the steam engine, and the Federal Government, Kaplan demonstrates how a process of simplification and abstraction can derive real insights into larger, more complex systems.  This is exactly how an innovator can create new insights.

Lazy Bed Farming Lines

From 1845 to 1847, over one million Irish citizens lost their lives as a result of a potato blight fungus that spread like wildfire across the island.  One of the mysteries of the blight was why it spread so quickly and why it struck at that particular epoch.  Charles Mann in 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, observes that “[t]oday Ireland has the melancholy distinction of being the only nation in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries than it did more than 150 years ago.”  Research performed by Michael Myers from the University of Texas at Austin suggests that an innovation launched in the 1700s inadvertently resulted in conditions that led to the rapid spread of the blight.

Mann writes that “Irish farmers for centuries had grown crops by cutting out blocks of sod, flipping them upside down, and piling them into long, broad ridges separated by deep furrows – “lazy-bed” farming, as the system was known.”  The name came from an English term for the potato – the lazy root.  The ridges were about four feet wide and sat about one foot above the surrounding land and looked quite similar to an ancient Incan farming method called wacho in the Andes.  Mann notes that the lazy beds possessed several advantages over traditional farming:

They were built in boggy soils; the ridges warmed up more quickly in the morning and retained heat longer in the evening than the surrounding flatlands, and advantage in cold places like the Andes and Ireland.  Constructed from several layers of sod, the ridges represented concentrations of good soil; farmers could plant them densely, which naturally stifled weeds.  Because the ridges were not plowed, they had intact root systems that resisted erosion; the roots also ensured that grass returned quickly after harvest, restoring nutrients. 

These farming methods ran headlong into the farming innovation movement of the 1700s, led by activists such as Andrew Wight and Jethro Tull, both of whom saw the lazy bed furrows as inferior to modern farming methods.  Wight and Tull advocated deep plowing to release soil nutrients, planting on every possible inch of farmland, copious amounts of fertilizer, constant weeding, and efficient harvesting.  The new farm tools of this era could not operate in the furrows (they required flat land), so the Irish began removing their traditional rows and replacing them with the new techniques.  By 1834, hardly any lazy bed furrows remained.

In a recent empirical study, Myers set up test potato fields to compare lazy furrows with modern rows.  Myers “found that the lazy beds were half as susceptible to potato blight as modern farming fields, not to mention the old furrows needed less fertilizer and had fewer weeds.”  The keys to this reduced susceptibility were temperature and moisture.  Myer observed that “[t]he furrows created a sharp temperature differential between the top of the furrow and the surrounding soil, and also drained water away more effectively which carried away blight spores before they could germinate.”  By abandoning the lazy furrows and replacing them with “modern” agricultural techniques, Irish farmers inadvertently created the conditions that allowed the potato blight of 1845-1847 to kill over a million Irish citizens.

Innovation Lesson – One of the challenges we face as innovators is knowing how to recognize value in the old ways of doing things.  Because we are so focused on finding new approaches to solving problems, we do not spend much time thinking about the ways in which an older system is working well.  There is value in spending time understanding in more detail how an old system or process works before tossing it aside to implement a new solution.  The lesson of the lazy bed furrow lines can serve as a reminder to the innovator to slow down and spend a little more time understanding that innovation can reside as much in the old ways of doing things as in the new.

A Horizontal Border Line

If one could devise a calculation to show the intensity of focus on a piece of land in terms of the ratio of the number of people interested in that land to the actual size of the land, the Old City of Jerusalem would certainly be at the top of the list.  Jerusalem is the holiest place for Judaism, Christianity, and is one of the top 3 holiest sites for Islam.  The Old City is only about one square kilometer in size, but in that small space reside an amazing collection of religious sites, from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (site of Jesus’ resurrection) to the Western Wall (the only remaining part of the Second Temple) to the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock (the site where Mohammed ascended into Heaven). 

As one can imagine, control over this land is hotly contested and has been the location of battles among these religious groups for thousands of years.  Currently controlled by Israel, Jerusalem is surrounded by lines in terms of borders.  One can see this plainly in terms of the security wall between Israeli territory and the Palestinian-controlled West Bank.  The lines of these borders are vertical, with the security fence separating one area from another.  In fact, as long as there have been states, international borders have served as vertical dividing lines between areas.  Yet as Edward Hollis notes in The Secret Lives of Buildings, one innovator tried to think of borders in a new way.  In the year 2000, Bill Clinton (U.S. President), Yasser Arafat (Palestinian Authority President), and Ehud Barak (Prime Minister of Israel) met at Camp David for a peace conference, trying to resolve the seeming unsolvable issue of Middle East peace.  Hollis notes that the three participants “weren’t making much progress, and perhaps President Clinton wanted his guests to reflect on their intransigence.”

Clinton observed that the Temple Mount was built on top of ground that Israeli archaeologists wanted to excavate to search for remnants of the First and Second Temples.  Cleverly he stated that “in this area the border between Israel and the future Palestine should not be a vertical plane, but a horizontal one.”  In other words, the top of the Temple Mount could belong to the Palestinian Authority, while the ground beneath it could belong to Israel.  Hollis concludes that “[i]t was an absurd proposal, but in the context of Israel and Palestine nothing could have seemed more natural.”  None of the parties accepted the proposal, and the conflict continued.

Innovation Lesson – Had the story of the horizontal border ended with the parties agreeing to terms and signing a Middle East peace deal, then perhaps this could have been the greatest application of innovation in world history.  Yet just because this did not result in peace, it does not hold that the idea was not innovative.  President Clinton’s example of the horizontal border line provides two specific lessons for the innovator.  First, one of the quickest ways to arrive at innovation is to perform a complete inversion of whatever area one is investigating by asking fundamental questions about the topic.  Clinton asked why borders always had to be vertical, especially when the point of contention was about the horizontal plane.  Simple questions can sometimes lead to great insights.  A second lesson for the innovator stems from Clinton’s use of an absurd example to drive home a larger point.  By talking about a horizontal border, Clinton was highlighting the fact that the two sides could never reach agreement on a peace deal as long as they were stuck in old ways of looking at things, such as traditional vertical borders.  Innovators need to find ways to help their colleagues or customers step outside of their old ways of doing business, and sometimes it is the job of the innovator to shine a light on absurdities to show how the old ways of thinking will not lead to any breakthroughs.

The Greenwich Meridian and Longitude Lines

One of the most famous North-South lines in the world is the Greenwich Meridian, just outside of London.  This represents 0 degrees longitude and also is the basis for measurement of global time (Greenwich Mean Time [GMT]).  Just next to the Greenwich Observatory is a Maritime Museum where I went in search of one of the most important innovations in maritime navigation, the Harrison Clock.  In the early 1700s, one of the greatest challenges to maritime navigation was determining longitude, or a ship’s position East or West relative to its origin or destination.  Latitude (north/south position) was less of a challenge because a navigator could examine the sun’s position at noon (local time) and the North star to determine how far above or below the equator one was sailing.

Longitude, on the other hand, required the ability for a navigator to compare local time to a fixed time elsewhere, and by calculating the difference between those two readings, one could determine how far East or West one had traveled.  Every hour of difference between local time and the fixed time at the origin equaled 15 degrees of longitude.  Accomplishing this feat required the creation of a clock that could maintain very precise time while handling the swaying and rolling of a ship at sea (not to mention variations in temperature and corrosive salt air), which confounded the mechanical clocks of the era.  The winning design was created by the Englishman John Harrison, who developed a series of chronometers (known as the H-1, H-2, H-3, and H-4).

Innovation Lesson – Although Harrison’s innovation in spring and wheel design is meritorious, a more interesting innovation lesson lies in how the overall Longitude problem was solved.  The solution indeed required mechanical expertise on the part of Harrison, but the general concept of establishing a base point and measuring against it was more profound.  In other words, to determine where a ship was located at sea, a navigator would not solely focus on intensive calculations of where the ship was situated at the immediate moment.  Rather, the navigator would combine observations from the current location with a fixed piece of information from his or her origin (via the chronometer).  The combination of these two elements would provide more accurate longitude information.  An innovator should thus remember not to get too obsessed with detailed observations of the present state of a project or initiative but should also take into account how far one has evolved from the starting point of the effort.  This can help the innovator determine if her or she is heading in the correct direction.

The De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) on the Korean Peninsula

Situated at the 38^th parallel of latitude, the DMZ separates North and South Korea and is one of the most heavily militarized stretches of land on Earth.  The location is based on roughly where the competing forces were positioned when a truce was negotiated in 1953 by the United Nations.  The DMZ is about 160 miles long and 2.5 miles wide and contains a series of defenses on both sides of the line, including millions of land mines as well as barbed wire fencing, observation posts, and explosive-charged tank traps.  Visiting the DMZ is an intense experience, especially when one stands in the conference room that straddles the actual border and one can officially step into North Korea from the South, all the while protected by South Korean and US soldiers. 

Another interesting border line between countries is that between India and China.  Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Stacey and Alastair Gale note that in an era of increasing tension between India and China as the latter increases its influence over the East Asia and South Asia, India faces a conundrum with its borders.  Stacey and Gale write that “India has long believed its vast land and sea borders were best left undeveloped to avoid providing useful infrastructure for potential invaders.”  However, they continue, “with China building highways along India’s Himalayan border and constructing ports in neighboring countries, India is facing the reality that it needs to spend heavily to keep up.”  While China is spending billions of dollars on new ports in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, India has not yet developed key sites in the Indian Ocean, such as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.  Both border management strategies have advantages and disadvantages, and their best use depends on the scenarios faced by the different countries.

Innovation Lesson – For the innovator, a border between countries is similar to a place where one’s company meets another in the marketplace.  For instance, a company could develop a product that goes up directly against a competitor’s product.  In the direct competition scenario, a company could choose to go in strong, like the Korean border, or enter weakly, as would be the case with the Indian approach of leaving areas undeveloped.  In the Indian approach, a company might confront a competitor but not put all of its intellectual capital into the product in the marketplace, recognizing that there is a risk that the competitor could co-opt that product and leave the original company in a poor competitive position.  Conversely, in the Korean approach, a company could enter with as strong a product as possible and seek to confront the competitor on every front.  An innovator can use these different thought processes to determine which approach would be the best use of his or her time and intellectual capital.

Sources:

Photos courtesy of the author

Robert D. Kaplan, Earning the Rockies (New York: Random House, 2017)

“https://www.romeacrosseurope.com/?p=2448”

Pat Eaton-Robb, “Travelers look for spots where 3, more states touch,” The Park Record (July 29, 2017), p. B8.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclops_(computer_system)

Earl Swift, The Big Roads (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)

https://www.roughguides.com/article/equatorial-differences-in-quito-ecuador/

Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Vintage Books, 2012)

Edward Hollis, The Secret Lives of Buildings (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009)

https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/longitude-found-john-harrison

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude

Larrie D. Ferreiro, Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition that Reshaped Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2011)

Daniel Stacey and Alastair Gale, “China Races Ahead in Indian Ocean While India and Japan Take Baby Steps,” The Wall Street Journal (July 24, 2017)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

The phrase “Pilgrim Innovation” could appear in the dictionary as an example of the word “oxymoron,” which is defined as two contradictory terms placed next to each other in a single phrase. After all, Pilgrims are often seen as relics of a bygone era, known more for their large, shiny belt buckles, funny hats, and quaint ways than for delivering new thinking and ideas. Yet as many of us take time off this week of Thanksgiving in the United States, a brief investigation of some of the events in the story of how the Pilgrims voyage to America yields lessons for the modern-day innovation practitioner.

Nearly every student in America can recite the story of how the Pilgrims arrived at the tip of what is now known as Cape Cod on board the three-masted sailing ship known as the Mayflower. Less is known, however, about the second ship that the Pilgrims originally planned to take on their voyage, the Speedwell. Facing a long, dangerous voyage across the Atlantic to a largely unknown destination, the average passenger would probably have chosen to go on board the Speedwell, figuring that any ship with “speed” in its name would likely make the 3,000-mile journey in a shorter period of time.

The name Mayflower, on the other hand, invokes thoughts of slowly walking through a field of spring flowers, daisies perhaps, and connotes a softness and delicateness that seems counter to the idea of survival across a brutal ocean passage. As history instructs us, the Speedwell proved to be unseaworthy and returned to port, with a smaller group of Pilgrims making a successful journey on the Mayflower.

The lesson for the innovation practitioner is to avoid falling into the trap of always trying to name an innovation or transformation initiative after a positive term tied to its potential outcome.

This can apply to any big IT initiative named after a given year, such as “CRM Transformation 2014” or “Customer Master Data Integration 2015.” Tying the name of a project too closely to its objective, while at first seeming like an obvious thing to do, can sometimes imperil the success of the project because too much focus is placed on that very precise target and not enough on other aspects of the overall project.

I noticed a possible example of this on a recent visit to a hospital room. In the corner of the room was a large sticker in the outline of a chair and a similarly-colored folding chair. The program was called the “Share Chair” [I am disguising the actual name so as not to offend its creators] and I discerned the intent of the program to be a means of encouraging Physicians and Nurses to spend more time at the bedside of patients to improve their interactions with patients and give the patient time to ask questions and not feel rushed.

Since sitting on the bed itself is not a good idea because of tubes and germs and various other issues, having a lightweight, portable chair nearby for the staff to use seemed like a great, innovative idea. However, I asked around and couldn’t find any examples of staff using the chair. Indeed, during my time in the room the Nurses would always stand up during their visits and the Doctor would sit on the corner of the bed if he sat at all.

While my case study only had a sample size of one, my guess would be that the same phenomenon was happening in other rooms and I lamented the fact that somewhere there was an innovation team that came up with a great idea but their solution was not being used in practice. This led me to wonder whether a different name for the program could have yielded different results. Was the name chosen by the team, for lack of a better term, too “cute” and did it trivialize the project? Was there a better way to encourage more staff/patient interactions? For the innovator, these are items we should consider when we reach the stage where one of our ideas makes that wonderful step from concept to real implementation.

Another innovation lesson from the Pilgrims stems from the composition of the passengers aboard the Mayflower. Contrary to conventional wisdom, these passengers were not all motivated by a desire for religious freedom. According to Beth Dunn, the former Director of Technology and Communications for the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, around half were indeed Separatists, while the remaining individuals were either somewhat sympathetic to the Separatist cause or completely disconnected from the cause and brought along as workers with specialized skills, such as soldiers and craftsmen.

For example, one of the eventual leaders of the Pilgrim community, John Alden, was brought along to make and repair barrels. Myles Standish, a well-known leader of the Plymouth settlement, was originally part of the security detail for the voyage. The lesson here for innovators is that not everyone engaged in a successful mission needs to be completely bought into the vision that is motivating the leaders of the endeavor. Some can be brought along for other purposes, and as long as they are generally supportive of the effort, their specific skills can be leveraged to lead to a successful outcome.

Consider, for instance, the case of William Francis Gibbs, the naval architect who designed the S.S. United States, one of the greatest transatlantic passenger liners of the era before jet travel. Gibbs was messianic in his devotion to the cause of ship design and manufacturing. From the time he was a little boy, he sketched designs for ships and knew that his life’s ambition was to build the greatest, fastest ships in the world. Gibbs accomplished this with the creation of the S.S. United States, which won the famous Blue Riband award for setting a speed record in crossing the Atlantic ocean faster than the previous champion, the Cunard Lines Queen Mary.

Despite his obsessive attention to details, Gibbs has made a mistake in his original design for the ship. The twin smokestacks on the S.S. United States were the largest ever installed on a passenger ship, measuring 55 feet tall and 60 feet across at the base. Gibbs designed a set of soot-deflecting fins at the top of the teardrop-shaped funnels that provided a signature for his design and leveraged some of his past, well-received work as a naval architect.

Prior to construction, Gibbs initiated thorough scale-model testing of nearly every element on the ship, including his beloved fins. Unfortunately, this setup proved deficient in wind testing, raising the concern that soot and ash from the smokestack would fall on passengers on the upper decks of the ship. The solution to the problem came from a young Newport News shipyard apprentice, Howard E. Lee, Jr., who recommended to Gibbs that he rotate the fins to where they were horizontal rather than vertical. Gibbs was skeptical that so simple a solution would work, and he may also have been concerned about changing his signature design, but he reluctantly agreed to allow Lee to test his idea. The new design worked well and, according to Lee, upon seeing the results Gibbs “grunted and walked away without comment.”

The new horizontal fin design made it into the final blueprints for the ship and can be seen on the ship to this day (though the ship itself is in limbo in a Philadelphia-area port while it awaits its ultimate fate). We do not know whether shipyard apprentice Howard Lee shared Gibbs’s zeal for creating the greatest ocean liner in the world. For all we know, that individual was just happy to have a steady job and spent most of his day taking the innovative ideas of others and turning them into parts for ships. However, his contribution to the S.S. United States proved to be lasting and valuable.

A final example of Pilgrim Innovation is recounted in Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction. Philbrick describes a process whereby the ship’s Master Christopher Jones sometimes was faced with such intense seas that he had to engage in a radical maneuver to protect the ship and its passengers even though the move meant that he lost many of the miles he had successfully traversed. The procedure was known as the “lie ahull” and consisted of furling the sails and securing the helm to the leeward side (downwind) and allowing the wind and seas to push the ship where they pleased.

Philbrick notes that in 1957, a British team sailing a replica of the Mayflower experienced what it must have been like for the crew in the 1600s facing powerful Western gales in the Atlantic. Near the end of the voyage, in the midst of a powerful storm, the captain of the 1957 version of the Mayflower recognized that the severe motion of the ship under sail was reaching a breaking point so he ordered the crew to engage in the “lie ahull” configuration. He removed the sails, tied down all items on the deck, and, with hesitation, turned the helm to leeward. The crew was astonished to find that the ship responded perfectly to the change. Philbrick describes the scene as follows:

[a]s soon as the ship’s bow swung into the wind, a remarkable change came over the Mayflower II. Even though she was under bare poles in a howling gale, her slablike topsides functioned as a kind of wooden storm sail, magically steadying the shop’s motion. Almost perfectly balanced, the Mayflower II sat like a contented duck amid the uproar of the storm. After being pounded unmercifully by the waves, the ship was finally at peace.

Although modern ship designers are unlikely to model their ships after the Mayflower, it is intriguing to see how the Pilgrims leveraged an innovative ship design to ensure their survival in the rough seas of the Atlantic. Moreover, the “lie ahull” maneuver also reminds us of the familiar notion that sometimes we have to go backwards in the face of a gale of resistance in order to make progress and succeed in our mission in the long run.

Sources:

https://www.history.com/topics/pilgrims

https://www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-pilgrims

Steven Ujifusa, A Man and His Ship: America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p. 239.

Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), pp. 31-32.

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

On this night of the annual tradition of All Hallow’s Eve, or Halloween, I was thinking about a shared experience that many of us likely remember from our youth – the house that no one wants to approach while trick or treating.

It seems that in many neighborhoods there is at least one house with few lights on a long, dark driveway, which appears uninviting to the local children who are festooned in their costumes and enjoying the right of ringing doorbells and shouting “trick or treat” to their neighbors. The younger the trick or treat participant, the more ominous even the shortest walk from the street to a darkened house can seem.

The experience of walking up to a particular house, ringing the doorbell with trepidation, and experiencing the scary moment when the owner opens the door and attempts to frighten the children contrasts sharply with the immense satisfaction a child feels when the scary moment has passed and he or she is rewarded with candy or other goodies from that previously daunting house.

In fact, subsequent scary houses seem less and less frightful as the night wears on and the process repeats itself throughout the neighborhood.  This experience can prove informative to the modern practitioner of innovation, as the same process that we went through as children can sometimes re-appear as we are trying to drive innovation in a static environment.

The key innovation-related experiences from Halloween to consider are: paying attention to things one might not normally observe, embracing the haunted, and being bold by ringing the doorbell without fear.

The first admonition on Halloween is to be aware of one’s surroundings to an extent that is significantly greater than how one would behave on a normal day.  While walking up to a house, one should be watchful and keep in mind that the homeowner might have hidden a noisemaker in a bush or have motion-sensing light switch that is intended to turn on suddenly to frighten visitors.

The trick or treater approaching a house should be on guard to notice things that one does not normally notice. This mindset is useful for the innovation practitioner as well…

…to the extent that finding innovation may require looking around us at our mundane, everyday surroundings to spot something that was always there before that that has implications that we might have previously missed.

A good example of this is the Waffle House indicator used in disaster management.  W. Craig Fugate, formerly the Emergency Management Chief for the state of Florida and now the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), developed an innovative mechanism for determining the extent of damage from a natural disaster using the status of the ubiquitous Waffle House restaurants, which are open 24 hours a day and thus good sources of data on the availability of electricity, passable roads, and gas in an area.

Fugate’s measurements rated Waffle Houses as either green (open and serving customers), yellow (open but with a limited menu), or red (closed and inoperable).  Rather than creating a complex mechanism for tracking the damage from a natural disaster using data from hundreds of sources with elaborate interfaces and algorithms, Fugate took an unconventional look at conventional information and derived innovative and useful insights for disaster management.  Fugate looked at the obvious elements of his surroundings in a new way and demonstrated powerful innovation.

A second instructive element of Halloween for the innovator is the importance of embracing the ‘haunted’.

Most of the time we follow our natural instincts to avoid those locations where we sense danger. On Halloween, however, we walk straight into darkened rooms and move towards strange noises or sights rather than turning the other way and running. For the innovator, a comparable situation is the haunted failed project from the past that doubters will bring up anytime someone presents a new idea about solving an old problem.

For instance, a failed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) project from years ago will rear its ugly head anytime an innovator talks about transforming business processes using application-driven innovation.  That entire area of discussion at a corporation can be viewed as “haunted” to the extent that people turn and flee from endeavors launched back into those areas.  The innovator, on the other hand, is taught to embrace failure and not to shy away from those areas but, rather, to learn from them.

There are hundreds of articles in the innovation literature on the importance of failure, and one of my previous articles, Midden Innovation, addresses this concept by noting the value of shelfware as a history of past transformation projects, some of which could be viewed as “haunted” if they were not successful. In that shelfware, an innovator could find new ideas based on the present situation at a company and could use those failed ideas to develop new successes.  Embracing the haunted could be a pathway to new thinking, especially if by averting their attention from a topic for many years, colleagues may have missed out on the opportunity to identify obvious insights.

A final aspect of Halloween for the innovator to consider is the need, in some situations, to simply walk up the steps and ring the doorbell as a bold action, even though other indicators suggest that the person should turn and go the other way.  Boldness, in other words, has its time and place and can lead to rewards (treats) for the Halloween participant.

As innovators we should be bold and channel the mindset of a child who does not hesitate to knock on a scary door on Halloween.

In innovation, there is often no substitute for bold action.  A great example of this comes from the British inventor Charles Parsons, inventor of the steam turbine in 1884.  In the early 20^th century, large ships used reciprocating steam engines to push pistons to turn their propeller shafts but had reached a brick wall in terms of the horsepower that could be generated by these engines.

In addition to requiring large amounts of space and weighing many tons, reciprocating engines vibrated incessantly and could be felt all over a large ship, which was a particularly bad attribute for a luxury cruise ship.  Parsons designed a new engine that leveraged concepts from windmills in using pressure steam from boilers to blast a rotor with thousands of small blades.  The rotor would turn a propeller shaft and could fit in a smaller space and yield significantly more power than the older designs.

The challenge for Parsons was to figure out how to get the conservative Royal Navy to pay attention to his new design, so he decided to “knock on the door” of the 1897 Naval Review at Spithead by launching his craft and darting in between the lumbering battleships and cruisers at a speed of 34 knots, successfully eluding the naval pilot boat that tried to corral him.  Since the Naval Review was part of the Diamond Jubilee celebration for Queen Victoria, even the Queen herself had the chance to witness Parsons’ exploits and although he triggered outrage on the part of many in the Admiralty, other observers saw the innovation in Parsons’ engine and the power plant eventually found its way into the Royal Navy.

Parsons was bold in “knocking on the door” of this event, and where reasoned thought and analysis of his engine may have fallen short, his aggressive action of introducing his innovation to a broader audience cemented his successful development of what many consider to be one of the greatest breakthroughs in nautical engineering history.

Sources: Clay Dillow, “Comfort Food: How Waffle House became a disaster indicator for FEMA,” Popular Science (November 2013).

Steven Ujifusa, A Man and His Ship: America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

image credit: history.com

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

View of Easter Island from its highest point. Hanga Roa, its only city, is to the right. The 10,000 ft runway goes from left to right across the center of the photo.

I just returned from a trip to Easter Island. Also known as Rapa Nui, Easter Island is one of the most remote inhabited areas of the planet, a tiny speck of land in size surrounded in all directions by thousands of miles of empty Pacific Ocean. The nearest inhabited land, Pitcairn Island, has only 50 residents and is 1,289 miles away.

The flight from Santiago, Chile, to Easter Island takes over four hours and covers over 2,200 miles, roughly the equivalent of crossing the continental United States but instead of flying over midwestern croplands and the Rocky Mountains, the flight to Easter Island crosses endless expanses of deep blue ocean. The island is serviced by one flight per day from Santiago on a LATAM Airlines widebody 787, which is able to access the island thanks to a project completed by NASA in 1987 to extend (to 10,885 feet) and widen the runway at Easter Island’s Mataveri International Airport to serve as an abort site for the U.S. Space Shuttle.

Ahu Tongariki – the Fifteen. The most famous set of moai on the island

When one hears “Easter Island,” the first thing that comes to mind are the giant stone statues, known as “moai” and perched on large, cermonial rock platforms known as “ahu.”  The statues are indeed giant, with an average height of 13 feet tall and weighing 14 tons, though many are much bigger than that. The largest moai found is over 70 feet tall, weighing 150 tons. The statues were carved out of volcanic rock by Rapa Nui islanders between AD 1400 and 1600 using only obsidian stone tools. Rapa Nui islanders carved at least 887 of these status, chiseling them by hand out of a volcanic cone at the center of the island then raising and transporting the statues many miles across the island to place them on their platforms, usually next to the sea with the statues facing inland (though there is one ahu with seven moai that faces the sea).

The only moai on the island with eyes (reproductions of the original eyes)  Rapa Nui islanders carved at least 887 of these status, chiseling them by hand out of a volcanic cone at the center of the island then raising and transporting the statues many miles across the island to place them on their platforms, usually next to the sea with the statues facing inland (there is one ahu with seven moai that faces the sea). Reproductions of the red and white coral eyes in the Hanga Roa museum. The actual pieces are stored in a vault as too many attempts have been made to steal them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The moai take human form but with somewhat strange features, with large eyes, big heads, small hands, and no apparent feet. The moai were believed to have been created to signify reverence for the dead, with each moai resembling a member of the tribe who passed away and whom the islanders wanted to honor. Despite their strange features, the moai are surprisingly lifelike and one is able to discern different features from one to the other, such as tattoos.

None of the moai today has its original eyes, made of white and red coral, though archaeologists have recreated this on one statue based on materials found that are believed to be the original eyes from a moai (all the rest of the eyes have disappeared). The addition of the eyes seems to render the statue almost alive.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the moai concerns what archaeologists refer to as “transport,” which refers to how the islanders were able to move these giant stone statues from the quarry at the center of the island to locations around the island, then stand them up on the ahu platforms and, in some cases, place a one-ton pukao (a red stone hat made of volcanic rock from a different quarry) on top of the statue. Rapa Nui oral tradition states that the statues “walked” from the quarry to the ahu.

Modern archaeologists have offered numerous hypotheses concerning transport, ranging from the use of wood from trees on the island to create sleds and rollers (thus possibly contributing to deforestation, resulting in population decline and wars, as per Jared Diamond’s book Collapse) to multiple ropes attached to the heads of the moai that would allow islanders to rock the statues back and forth and move them along trails, just as if the statues were walking.

Stone tools used to carve the moai

The moai are magnificent in terms of their size, detail, positioning, and spiritual aspects. Upon seeing any of the statues, one wants to pause and contemplate what the islanders were thinking when they went to the effort of designing, carving, transporting, and placing these giants. One can sense the reverence of these people for their fallen ancestors, and one must appreciate how islanders equipped with only obsidian rock tools were able to accomplish these impressive feats, and that nearly 500 years later we can still stand and admire their work.

The moai are also stunning because they are so unlike anything else on the planet. Although stone carvings appear on every continent, the distortions of the human form of the moai are unique and have an effect on the viewer that is difficult to describe. I came away from my time at Easter Island with a great appreciation for the moai and a Rapa Nui people who created them.

A moai that was being carved out of the rock at the quarry but was abandoned before completion. A moai that fell face-down on its way from the quarry to an ahu on the island and was abandoned.

As I left the island and returned to Chile, I began to think about the moai from an innovation standpoint. Indeed, the statues were innovative from the standpoint of being unique and new. The islanders obviously felt a need to honor their ancestors and were exceedingly clever in their use of local materials to produce the moai.

The volcanic rock that forms the base of the moai is relatively soft and easy to carve with harder rock.  Obsidian rock appears throughout the island as a result of volcanic activity (indeed, one sees the shiny black obsidian rock all over the island), so building tools to carve the rock required some creative thinking about how to leverage a ubiquitous material.

In the quarry today, one can see a moai in the process of being carved (it was apparently left incomplete in the middle of production), so one can see how the craftsmen carved out the stone in a way that allowed them to extract the moai from the ground and transport it to the ahu platforms. The transportation question is a gold mine of innovation, no matter what the actual method was used by the Rapa Nui people to move the Moai statues all over the island. Either way, they accomplished a feat using only their own brainpower and muscles to move enormous stone objects weighing many tons great distances on uneven, rocky terrain.

One can see “transportation” in amazing detail today on the road of the fallen moai, when one leaves the quarry and walks along a path and sees numerous moai that fell down during transportation (usually face-first) and, for some reason, were left in that spot and not recovered.

From an innovation standpoint, any innovator would be glad to find out that one’s creation continued to amaze future generations for hundreds of years. Yet I was struck by another analogy for innovation and the moai that could be relevant for modern practitioners.

I thought about the work involved in preparing the moai and contrasted it with the immense constructions of the Inca in Peru. I specifically thought about the Inca agricultural research station of Moray, near Cusco, Peru, as well as the famous Machu Picchu hilltop citadel, which some argue was also used by the Inca as a research location perched on the border between the lands they knew well (the high Andes) and the beginnings of the jungle terrain of the Amazon. Both Inca edifices were from roughly the same era as the moai on Easter Island (the 1500s), and both continue to marvel modern visitors today.

Half-buried enormous moai at the quarry.

However, the end purpose of the massive human effort for these different creations are quite distinct. Archaeologists believe that each moai required over 10 months of human effort in the quarry to carve and extract the statue, followed by a similarly long time to transport the statue to its platform, depending on how far each moai had to travel (sometimes several miles). Multiply 10 months times 887 moai and one gets a sense of how much labor was directed towards these endeavors.

In addition to the labor to carve and transport the statues, the Rapa Nui islanders also had to cut down trees to use for transportation, as well as other vines for ropes and banana plants to lubricate the wooden sleds. Diamond’s research for Collapse suggests that overpopulation, a Polynesian rat infestation from abroad (with no natural predators), along with an escalating contest among the Rapa Nui tribes to build bigger and more ostentatious moai contributed to the collapse of their civilization to the point where humans nearly vanished from the island.

The deforestation was particularly important because of the prevalence of windy conditions on the island, which I witnessed firsthand while hiking around various sites. Heavy winds from the South Pacific rake the island on a regular basis, making it hard for crops to take root and grow without some sort of shelter. Rows of trees, such as the millions of tall palm trees, could shelter crops and protect the topsoil from wind-driven erosion, but as the trees were cut down to feed into the moai construction processes, this agricultural benefit disappeared.

Inca agricultural research station at Moray, Peru

All of this work, while targeted at the noble purpose of venerating one’s ancestors and, according to the archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg, serving as a conduit between the people and their gods, sits in contrast to the more scientifically-oriented structures of the Incas. At the agricultural terraces at Moray, for instance, the Incas could grow crops and simulate different micro-climatic conditions, with temperatures varying by as much as 27 degrees Fahrenheit from the top of the terraces to the bottom.

Presumably data gathered from this research center would be used throughout the empire to find new and better ways to grow crops at different elevations, which one sees in the form of terracing throughout the Inca empire. Machu Picchu, likewise, allowed the Incas to grow crops in terraces near the climate of the Amazon region in a protected manner to ensure their ability to survive in that climate as their empire expanded.

The Innovation Moai Test

From an innovation standpoint, I would offer what could be called the innovation moai test. This applies to any innovation project in which one is investing a great deal of time or resources. No matter how noble or impactful the end result of an innovation project may be, it is always worthwhile to step back and ask the question if one’s efforts are truly aligned with the potential marketplace benefits that may accrue from the innovation. What the innovator is working on may be truly revolutionary and may continue to astound people for hundreds of years (though this is unlikely), yet we have to remember that we also have an obligation to our companies to ensure that our efforts address a pressing marketplace need, even if that need is situated in the future.

Similar to a phase-gate process that is part of any innovation project, I would challenge innovators to periodically ask themselves if they are creating a Moai or a Moray?

A moai may be amazing and stunning, but its purpose may not be aligned with the marketplace needs of one’s company.  It may absorb a ton of resources, but those resources could be put to better use solving a more immediate marketplace need.  A Moray is more scientific and targeted to addressing a specific need.  Both result in transformational and innovative outcomes, but only one has a tie to the marketplace.

Postscript

An interesting thing happened when I was visiting the platform known as Ahu Tangoriki, which is the largest and most famous platform on the island, containing 15 standing moai statues.  I was using my iPhone to frame a photo of the statues head-on, trying to get all 15 statues in a single shot, when I noticed that the yellow frames that indicate the camera has identified a human face in the photo started popping up. This suggested that the face-finder algorithm of the iPhone had recognized features in the moai faces that met the requirements for a human face.  I captured a screenshot of this fleeting moment where the 16th century statues met the latest 21st century technology and shook virtual hands across the centuries.

iPhone capture of the Fifteen moai with the yellow facial recognition boxes highlighting two of the statues

Sources:

Photographs provided by the author

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mataveri_International_Airport

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/civilization/giants.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Anne_Van_Tilburg

https://www.nature.com/news/easter-island-statues-walked-out-of-quarry-1.11613

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin Books, 2011)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machu_Picchu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_(Inca_ruin)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island

 

 

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

I have spent a lot of time thinking about lines lately. There were several reasons for this, including a repeated experience at the local Post Office where the line (or queue) to get to the service desk was long, slow, and frustrating.

My other recent experiences with lines included a visit to the Mitad del Mundo (center of the world) monument in Ecuador at the equator as well as a visit to the Four Corners site of four converging state borders (Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado) in the American Southwest. It struck me that lines can be sources of inspiration for innovation in terms of physical lines (queues, roads, structures, etc.) as well as virtual lines (borders, latitude/longitude, etc.).

In thinking about lines and innovation, I was surprised at how quickly multiple concepts of lines starting popping into my mind and how so many of these provide important lessons for the modern innovation practitioner. Because of the large number of examples of lines in innovation, I will divide this article into two parts.

Lines (Queues) at the Post Office

My current residence does not have onsite mail delivery, which forced me to rent a Post Office box at the local Post Office. Like other Americans, I use regular mail less and less, but on occasions where I need to receive a package that was shipped via the U.S. Post Office, I sometimes have to go to the service desk at the Post Office so a worker can retrieve my goods.  On many occasions, this line is long and slow-moving, which can be frustrating for a person who spends a lot of time thinking about process efficiency.  I have analyzed the line while waiting and have redesigned the process (in my mind, at least, for the Post Office does not seem to be interested in my suggestions), recognizing that about two-thirds of the people in line were picking up mail or packages from their PO Box while the other third needed service at the desk (sending packages, setting up a PO Box, or other time-consuming tasks). Picking up mail or packages took about 1-2 minutes each customer, while the other tasks took 4-5 minutes or longer. The line bogged down when all of the postal workers had to process the slower customers, thus holding up the rest of the line to the point where it almost reached the outer door.

If the Post Office had changed its process so that the package and mail pickups were in a single line and all other requests were in a different line, then the former would keep moving quickly and the latter would be a subset of the larger population, thus the line would not stretch out to the door.

Innovation Lesson – I do not pretend to offer any fundamental insight into queuing theory.  Indeed, queue management is an area that receives a great deal of attention in innovation, from the numerous studies to determine the fastest way to load passengers onto an airplane to how to keep customers happy while waiting in extremely long ride lines at Disney Theme Parks. At its most basic element, the challenge of a queue is typically addressed through manipulation of supply or demand. A company can increase the supply of people processing the individuals in the line by adding more service agents or gates. A company can also reduce demand by finding other ways to deliver the required services to the people in the line, such as self-service or automation.

The innovation lesson here is a reminder that innovation can be applied to solve simple problems using simple techniques. The Post Office line would move much more efficiency with a simple A/B gate at the entrance to divide customers depending on their needs, and a corresponding specialization at the service desk.  Note that this would not require a new smartphone application, artificial intelligence (AI), or automation of any sort, yet it would still result in a superior outcome.

As innovators we sometimes focus too much on trying to apply the latest and greatest technologies to drive solutions to problems, which comes at the expense of simpler, easier to implement solutions.

This is not to say that the Post Office could not benefit from smartphone apps, AI, or automation, but there are simpler steps that can be taken to precede these others.

Phone Lines to Call Centers

During part of my career in Information Technology I specialized in the technologies of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and call routing. Although phone calls have dropped in importance with the prevalence of web, smartphone, and other means of accessing companies for customer service, there are still individuals who prefer to speak to a live agent to solve their customer service issues.

This requires the IVR (to provide self service and determine why the customer is calling) along with a call routing system (such as Cisco Intelligent Contact Management) to route the call to the correct call center and agent to handle the call. Such a system sounds simple, but when you have dozens of call types, dozens of call centers, thousands of agents, and thousands of calls every day, the complexity can become overwhelming.

Although there are numerous strategies for call routing, the one that we used most often from Cisco was a combination of Longest Available Agent (LAA) and Minimum Expected Delay (MED). These two call routing strategies are used depending on the state of agents in the various call centers. Assuming that there are agents sitting at their desk ready to handle calls, but not on a live call at the time, the call routing system would use LAA as a technique to can find the agent who has been idle the longest time and send the next call that comes in to that agent. This ensures the most efficient use of the agents in responding to customer calls, and balances the workload so that one group of agents aren’t handling calls every second of the day while others sit idle.

If there is a large burst of calls and all agents are occupied when a call comes in, then the call routing system would analyze all the agents at all the call centers and perform calculations to determine where the caller is likely to have the shortest delay in waiting for an agent. For example, if one call center has 5 busy agents and another has 50 busy agents, then it is more likely that the center with 50 agents will have an agent free up to be ready to handle the next call, so that site will get the next caller, who will wait in queue until the call can be taken by an agent. The actual calculations are more complex than this example, but this should give you an idea of the general concept behind the system of how to move callers efficiently across a network of call centers.

Innovation Lesson – Although the technologies behind LAA and MED were innovative at the time they were created and first used, the lesson for the innovator lies in the fundamental concepts behind these terms. At its most basic level, these two routing strategies focus on the efficient use of resources, with the key variable being whether any resources are available at a given point in time.

For the innovator, this thought process can be applied to a technology or process in terms of where one should focus one’s energies in applying innovation.  As one looks at a technology or process, an early step should be to review the utilization of resources individually. If there are steps in a process where excessively idle resources repeatedly appear, then the innovator may want to think about how to combine steps or change the process flow so that those resources are more effectively utilized.

To use an overly-simplistic example, if one is studying a 10-step process with 10 workers (one worker for each step), and the workers at steps 7 and 9 are frequently idle (for whatever reason), then one should examine whether changes could be made to the process to combine steps so that those idle resources could help out other workers in the overall process. The same could be true for any under-utilized component of a technological solution, perhaps in terms of replacing a single-use component that is rarely used for a dual-use component that provides multiple functions at a lower cost. In the case of MED, an innovator might study a process and see that all the resources involved in executing the process are overloaded.

In this case, the thought process for applying innovation could be to think about the process step where an input of new thinking could most effectively reduce the workload on an overloaded resource to return it to full utilization. In other words, the innovator should analyze what steps could be taken that would result in the minimum expected delay in returning a resource to normal utilization. If all the resources are fully utilized but not overloaded, then the innovator could examine which resource would reduce its utilization the most through an application of an innovative solution.

Pilgrimage as a Line

A pilgrim is someone who has a destination in mind and focuses on that destination throughout the journey. Some pilgrimages are long and arduous, and often have a religious theme. Faithful Muslims must commit to making the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia at least once in their lifetimes, while Christians can follow a number of pilgrimage paths, among which the most famous is probably the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Some modern pilgrims even take this trail barefoot in order to simulate accurately the experience of their medieval ancestors who walked on the route.

The Camino de Santiago’s well-known and ubiquitous symbol is that of the scallop shell.  The shell, along with a yellow arrow, appears on trees, sidewalks, roads, and buildings along the trail to help pilgrims find their way. It is not known precisely why the scallop shell became a symbol for the trail, but there are several possible theories.

One theory states that the parallel and converging lines on the outer part of the scallop shell are a metaphor for the various routes that pilgrims take to get to the tomb of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela in Spain. The pilgrims often wore scallop shells attached to their garments or hats throughout the centuries, and the shell itself may have found use as a cup for drinking, a bowl for eating, and a measuring device for donated food from churches along the route.

Graham Robb, a British author and scholar of French history and literature, has spent a great deal of time exploring the French countryside as part of a 14,000-mile bike ride across the country. In The Discovery of France, Robb makes an interesting observation about pilgrimage trails and remote villages.  Robb notes that as a cyclist, he was able to observe towns and villages that one would never see in detail from a car, and he found a correlation between the way dogs behaved towards him and the location of the village relative to nearby pilgrimage trails.

In the Pyrenees Mountain region in Southern France, Robb writes, dogs would be more aggressive in terms of barking and chasing cyclists when he was in a village that was part of a centuries-old pilgrimage trail. He reasons that this is because those villages had grown accustomed over the centuries to a series of strangers passing by frequently and moving on, never to return. This contrasts with the typical village or town where passersby were locals on the way to the market or church who would frequent an area. In those types of places, he noticed a friendlier reception from the local canines.

Innovation Lesson – From an innovator’s standpoint, we often find ourselves in the position of the pilgrim traveling through new territory with limited guideposts for directions.  We know where we are trying to go in many cases, but we must undertake an arduous journey to get there. The destination is a vision of where we want to take our innovation in terms of a new product or service, but that typically would start as just an idea, just as the pilgrims start their journey knowing that they want to arrive at the tomb of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela without thinking about what exactly they plan to do once they arrive.

Innovators can benefit from several lessons from pilgrims.  First, the value of the pilgrimage is often in the journey itself, and innovators should remember that the discovery process, even a lengthy one, of arriving at an innovation is valuable, particularly if that discovery process yields a better final product or generates other ideas to explore in parallel. Second, a pilgrim needs signs and guidance along the way, and just as the Camino de Santiago has arrows and scallop shells, so, too, does the innovator need to look for signs along the way of his or her journey to make sure he or she is on the right path to innovation. These signs can be feedback from colleagues or the marketplace, and can serve as reassurances that the work one is undertaking is heading in the right direction.

Finally, an innovator, like a pilgrim, should be prepared to handle difficult challenges (barking dogs), because the essence of the innovation journey, like the pilgrimage, involves treading down a known path as a stranger. In other words, one may be following in the footsteps of others, but the inherent nature of the innovation work requires one to be working in new areas in which the innovator is not familiar.

Power Lines and the Transition from Steam to Electricity

The BBC produces a fascinating podcast called the “50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.” In this series, Tim Harford, senior columnist for the Financial Times newspaper, discusses inventions that have changed the world in ways that make our modern way of life work. The episode titled “Dynamo” examines in detail the technological ramifications of the transition from steam power to electricity.

Before electricity and small electric motors became prevalent in factories, Harford notes, the overall design of a factory and the flow of work was organized around the siting of a large steam engine and the various pullies and contraptions that were required to impart force from the engine to various machines around the factory.  Steam engines were only efficient at larger sizes, so a factory would typically have one or a few large steam engines generating power for the machines in the factory.

Through a large spinning driveshaft that fed power from the large, onsite steam engine to a series of cables and pullies running all over the building, the factory’s engineers would move the power from the engine to various machines required to perform the work at the factory, such as metal stamping tools, cutting saws, or other mechanisms. The factory layout in the steam era was not much different than the pre-steam design where water power, such as from a running stream, would turn a wheel and other gears, cranks, and pullies to transfer power to machines throughout the factory. Work had to be arranged and organized in ways that adhered to the various belts and pullies around the factory.

The steam engine and its mechanisms drove the entire layout and design of the factory. If a single piece of machinery in the factory needed to operate, the entire steam engine contraption had to run as well.  Workers had to constantly oil and lubricate various components of this maze of gears, levers, belts, and pullies.

Electric power, arriving at the plant via power lines, and the electric motor, or dynamo, completely transformed this model because the power source for the machinery in the plant was distributed to precisely the location where the work was needed. Electric motors could be built for exactly the type of work needed and, with just a wire running to them for power, could be located anywhere. Unlike small steam engines, which were hopelessly inefficient, small electric motors could run very efficiently.

With just a single power line coming into the building, the factory would have the power available to run any machinery in any means necessary to accomplish the work. Plant engineers could think about designing proper workflows based on the needs of their products rather than basing workflows on the needs of the steam engine. Moreover, buildings could be constructed with lighter materials since they did not have to support the massive infrastructure of the steam engine and its driveshaft and pullies (think of modern steel-clad warehouses versus the old brick and stone factories).

Harford observes that in the old factories, the steam engine set the pace of work.  In the new electric factories, the workers set the pace.  Yet productivity did not appear immediately with the arrival of the electric motor, as plant designers did not simply tear out their old steam mechanisms and replace them with the new technology. As Harford notes, plant designers had to think about entirely new ways of organizing their factories and, moreover, had to look for workers with the skillsets needed to work more autonomously than their predecessors.

The net result, he concludes, was a 50-year lag time in the arrival of productivity gains from the new technology, which he likens to today’s experience with computers and the productivity paradox inherent therein.

Innovation Lesson – For the modern innovator, there is often a temptation to take a new technology and simply insert it into the location of an old technology, with the expectation that the amazing capabilities of the new technology will result in overall improvements in performance. Colloquially, this is sometimes referred to as “paving the cow path,” which is a metaphor suggesting that if one takes a new technology (the macadamized road surface) and applies it to an old foundation (a wandering path through a field created by plodding cows), then the results of the injection of new technology will be suboptimal since the road will still follow the old, meandering cow path (as opposed to a newer, more efficient pathway).

The example of the electric motor replacing the steam engine is an excellent reminder that new technology sometimes requires a broader rethinking of a process before that innovation can be applied properly.

A Line of Bikes in the Peloton

Summer is the time for great bike races, including the most famous bike race of all, the Tour de France. Biking is an interesting sport from the standpoint of how one must combine individual and team effort to achieve victory.  Spectators at a bike race will notice the appearance of breakaway groups of a small number of riders and a large pack of riders, the latter famously known as the peloton. In group stages of a bike race, bikers will start out together in a large group and periodically there will be small numbers of riders who try to break away from the group and take a lead over the peloton.

As one watches the race over time, there appears to be an inevitability to the peloton catching the breakaway group. This is because of the aerodynamic and group efficiency of the peloton, where cyclists can ride in a line in the slipstream of others, reducing their wind resistance and allowing them to ride with less effort than would be the case if they were on their own digging into the wind. Moreover, in the peloton, riders can take turns in the front of the pack of bikes, allowing themselves to rest in the middle or back periodically after they have done their part to keep the group moving.

In a breakaway group of just a handful of riders, one has less of a chance to rest as one is almost constantly battling the wind and terrain. Even if a breakaway group jumps out to a big lead, the peloton usually catches them towards the end of the race. One of the enjoyable aspects of watching a bike race on television is to keep an eye on the time interval between the breakaway group and the peloton and watch the gap between the two shrink as the race progresses, with the peloton usually catching the smaller group in the end.

Innovation Lesson – As innovators we often feel as though we have to operate like the breakaway riders in a bike race. We think that we will not be innovative or creative if we hang back with the pack, and must always drive forward facing the various challenging headwinds of the marketplace. While new thinking does not often occur in the middle of the pack, the innovator has to be careful to bring along teammates and not constantly face the world’s challenges alone. Like a rider in a bike race, the innovator needs teammates to help him or her along the way.

Lines of Roads through a Town

Before the advent of controlled access interstate highways, America was a land of interlaced state and local roads.  Road planners often designed their paths to go directly through towns and cities, seeking convenience for drivers going to and from those urban and semi-urban areas as well as commerce for the companies whose businesses were situated along the road. Even when road builders created bypass highways, the new routes soon became crowded with businesses that added traffic and stoplights to the route, diminishing the benefits of the original attempt to go around the urban area.

As Earl Swift describes in his study of the history of the American highways system, The Big Roads, “daytime movement on [U.S. 13 the Ocean Highway from Delaware to New Jersey] is so hobbled by traffic lights, so gluey with the sheer number of vehicles squeezed onto its lanes, so crowded by the furniture stores and gas stations and pancake houses pressing its flanks, that you measure your progress in obscenities more than miles.”

The way to solve this problem was to create a highway that would handle cars without all of the other elements that conspire to slow traffic.  The idea behind the limited access superhighway came in 1930 from the New England conservationist Benton MacKaye, also known as the founder of the famous Appalachian Trail hiking system that runs from Georgia to Maine. MacKaye was an advocate for building cities that were accessible by car but were not oriented solely around the car.

MacKaye and his colleagues built a city called Radburn in Bergen County, New Jersey with a series of “novel controls on the automobile and its everyday impact.”  Radburn leveraged “residential superblocks, at the center of which were open parks.” Roads did not reach into these superblocks, but only operated on the periphery. Houses in the superblocks faced towards the central garden space, and “both cars and streets were invisible during most of one’s day.”  Anywhere a sidewalk had to cross a road, the builders incorporated bridges or underpasses to facilitate the pedestrian traffic. Children could walk to school from their homes without having to cross a single street.

Although the vision for Radburn succumbed to the stock market crash and depression, Radburn launched a set of ideas that soon came to prominence in American suburban life, such as the cul-de-sac and winding subdivision streets.  Yet perhaps the most innovative thing to emerge from Radburn came with an interesting 180-degree flip in thinking that MacKaye performed as he thought about the impact of the Radburn town village concept. MacKaye posited that “[i]f it was possible to build a roadless town […then] why not the reverse?”  In other words, could someone design a townless road?

Recall that at the time, even many bypass roads were crowded with roadside businesses and traffic lights which stymied the flow of traffic.  MacKaye wrote an article in the New Republic titled “The Townless Highway,” in which he called for “a highway completely free of horses, carriages, pedestrians, town, grade crossings; a highway built for the motorist and kept free from every encroachment, except the filling stations and restaurants necessary for his convenience.”

Innovation Lesson – What MacKaye envisioned in 1930 was the modern, limited-access highway that is such a familiar sight to us today. He called for “properly guarded approaches to, and crossings of, the main motor highways at proper intervals” and stated that the government should maintain “possession of the surrounding right-of-way, keeping it free from haphazard commercial development and obtaining for the benefit of the motorist the pleasant views and aspects of the country.”

As Swift notes, this was “a conceptual quantum leap beyond the so-called superhighways envisioned by most of his contemporaries.” For the innovator, the lesson here is a reminder of the value of the simple flip of logic to explore an alternative. MacKaye’s thought process went from a roadless town to a townless road, and the result was a brand-new way of looking at road building.

An innovator can take a simple concept and flip it around 180 degrees, which allows one to look at the problem from a unique perspective to develop new solutions.

A Straight Line Up a Hill

It is often said that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.  While this is case in some scenarios, that does not mean that a straight line is always the best way to go from one point to another. In the case of air travel over the globe, the most efficient flight paths are great circles, or rounded arcs, that seem to take aircraft out of the way to reach their destination.  Another example of a straight line failing to provide the best route appears in mountainous areas with the prevalence of the switchback.

When one is standing at the base of a mountain with a relatively steep incline, the most direct route to get to the summit would be a line straight up the face of the mountain directly to the top. Yet we know that this path would be extremely difficult to take, whether on foot or in a vehicle. As such, the paths around mountains take advantage of the switchback, which is a series of long, gradually-sloping paths that take 180 degree turns periodically to send the path in the other direction, all the while gently gaining in elevation until reaching the summit.

The switchback allows a person or vehicle to climb a steep mountain using pathways whose slopes are not very steep, reducing the amount of effort or power needed to climb up the mountain. Although the 180 degree turns at the end of each path can be sharp, they are nonetheless passable and result in an overall track to the summit that is efficient and safe. The switchback is also useful for those individuals descending down the mountain, where, unless one is on skis and snow, a direct line is not a safe way to get from the top to the bottom. Although the switchback adds mileage to the overall journey, the costs of the additional distance are greatly outweighed by the benefits of the safer and more gradual ascents and descents.

Innovation Lesson – When innovators face a new challenge, the tendency is often to dive right in and attack the problem with full force.  A confident innovator may believe that he or she, by working extremely hard, can come up with an amazing technological solution to a problem that is vexing an organization or company.  The innovator is seen by others as a potential hero in solving this big problem, and our tendency as innovators is to wear this hat and try our best to meet the expectations of those around.  Yet, just like a person standing at the foot of a mountain, the direct path to the top of the mountain is going to be the most difficult way to get to the summit.

An innovator may need to break the problem into smaller pieces and attack each one gradually, one pathway at a time, just like the hiker walks along each pathway of the switchback, gradually climbing the mountain a few feet at a time. Solving little problems along the way also has the benefit of gaining incremental wins, with benefits accruing from those solved problems that help the organization along while one is on the journey to solve the major problem.

The Midwest Rain Line

Travelers across the Midwestern United States observe that the climate changes gradually from the water-abundant lands around the great rivers of the Midwest (Mississippi, Missouri) towards the more arid grasslands and scrub brush of the Great Plains.  As the United States population expanded from East to West through Manifest Destiny and the Homestead Act, this lack of water should have discouraged Easterners from pulling up stakes and taking their families out West in search of a better life.

Yet the settlers came by the thousands and thousands and, according to historian Ian Frazier, this was partly due to an innovative marketing scheme hatched by various individuals that gave the impression that farming was possible in this relatively dry climate. The “public relations device” developed by “scientists, college professors, U.S. Geological Survey officials, and railroad promoters,” Frazier notes, “was the meteorological theory that ‘rain follows the plow.’”

This theory stated that human activity, in the form of plowing fields, cultivation of the soil, and even steam from railroad engines, resulted in increased rainfall.  In other words, all of the various by-products of settlement and development had a positive effect on climate to the point where it would render a dry area more prone to precipitation. Indeed, Frazier, writes, the “Santa Fe Railroad went so far as to identify the ‘rain line,’ the front edge of this advancing rainfall, which supposedly moved at a rate of about eighteen miles a year, staying just ahead of the new settlements.” The railroads also incorrectly posited that “deep cultivation of the soil conserved moisture,” which led the new farmers to break up topsoil and dig deeper furrows into their fields than was prudent.

In the end, none of these assumptions proved true, yet the railroads succeeded in profiting from the settlers by transporting them, along with supplies, to towns throughout the region.

Innovation Lesson – The rain line anecdote serves as a reminder to the innovator to avoid the causal fallacy. That is, one should not assume that there is causality between event A and event B, even if the two events seem to be happening in a related manner. This is also referred to as correlation not causation.

As an innovator, it can be tempting to think that a new technology one introduces to solve a problem, or a process change one recommends to improve a process, is the reason why that problem is solved or that process is improved shortly thereafter. Like the farmers looking up to see rain after plowing a field, the innovator should make sure to have a data collection and analysis framework in place so he or she can be very precise in analyzing an outcome to ensure the changes one recommended were causal and not merely correlated.

This requires more upfront work when developing innovation approaches, such as identifying and isolating all of the variables involved in a particular problem or process.  Indeed, as Frazier observes, “[h]omesteading the plains might not have been possible at all without the invention of barbed wire for fencing, and of a windmill which reduced its blade surface in high winds to keep from blowing apart.”  As such, the technological innovations that the farmers needed were very different from the rain line (barbed wire to keep herds in order and windmills to pump water up from aquifers), so an innovator focused solely on the rain line would have missed out on the opportunity to develop or implement these improvements.

Sources:

Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007).

https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/audio/radio/programs/program-371a

‘https://caminoways.com/the-scallop-shell-and-the-camino-de-santiago’

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p057xsl0

Earl Swift, The Big Roads (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), pp 108-109.

Ian Frazier, Great Plains (New York: Picador USA, 1989)

image credit: pmbag.com

 

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Morocco is a land that has mystified and enchanted travelers for ages. Situated between the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlas Mountains, and the Sahara Desert, Morocco is a place of geographic and cultural diversity, situated at the confluence of civilizations. Morocco has absorbed the influence of the native Berber and other North African tribes, Arabs from the East, and French and Spanish cultures from across the Mediterranean.

Morocco is the destination of the huge Saharan caravans of lore, with hundreds of camels traversing vast expanses of desert to bring trading goods from as far away as Timbuktu in Mali towards the sea. Even the names of the key Moroccan cities evoke a sense of wonder and excitement: Casablanca, Marrakesh, Ouarzazate, and Fez.

This agglomeration of Moroccan cultures and geography makes for an interesting locale in which to study innovation.

There are numerous attributes of Morocco that warrant investigation in terms of examining how ancient and modern inhabitants of this land were able to innovate to solve various problems they faced as they sought to develop and extend their civilization in the face of natural and man-made obstacles to survival.

In addition to survival, these innovations include efforts by the inhabitants of Morocco to make their lives more bearable in the harsh climate of some parts of their country.  Many of these innovative solutions can still be seen today, and I have chronicled them in the sections below based on information I gathered from a recent trip to Morocco.

Moroccan Desert Climate

Build with the End in Mind

In an extremely dry climate such as one finds in much of Morocco, the predominant construction mechanism for centuries has been the mud brick and mud wall.  A mud brick is made using the soil from the area which, combined with straw, other organic materials, and water, can be cured in the sun to form a hard, reddish-colored building material. Mud wall construction techniques involve pouring mud into form boards and packing the substance down manually to form a strong building material.  One of the best examples of mud-based construction is the famous fortress of Ait Ben Haddou, located near the modern town of Ouarzazate, on the caravan route between the Sahara Desert and Marrakesh (known as the route of a thousand Casbahs (castles)).  Mud brick would not be a suitable construction material for a wet climate, but it works well in the very arid portions of Morocco.

Building Constructed of Mud Walls

 

Ancient Mud Wall Construction Technique Modern Mud Wall Worker

 

What is particularly interesting about the design of Ait Ben Haddou and many of the other mud-brick casbahs of the region is the appearance of numerous square holes in the sides of the walls of these buildings. The holes are about four inches wide and were the location where the builders of the walls inserted long wooden posts horizontally to serve as scaffolding to support workers who were assembling the structure. Since timber was scarce in a desert climate (the trees had to be obtained far away in the more forested Atlas Mountains), the builders could not afford to leave the posts in place. Moreover, they would have given enemies a means of climbing up the walls. Instead, the designers of the casbahs removed the posts and left the openings intact, which, in turn, served a secondary purpose.

In the desert climate, the mud walls needed the ability to handle intense heat and to shed any water that seeped its way into the relatively porous mud bricks.  These holes, when properly positioned in the structure, allowed the walls to breathe in the intense heat by circulating air throughout the structure while also shedding water in the rare event of a rainstorm.

Mud Wall Hole – Detailed View

 

Mud Wall with Construction Holes

Innovation Lesson – The builders of the mud edifices in Morocco found a way to add a step to their construction process that ended up benefiting the overall structure later in its life.  We often think of the process of building something as a temporary process, and we do not usually integrate the two processes (construction and eventual occupancy) in a way where there are specific ties between the two.  In other words, we see construction as a phase that we have to get through in order to occupy a structure, and we think about construction as a temporary step.

The lesson here for innovators is to think about steps early in the process of creating something new where those initial steps become foundations for long-term success of a project.  Scaffolding components that are needed to build a building may not always need to be temporary, especially if some element of the building process can be leveraged to improve the long-term viability of the structure.

Complexity can Benefit a Design

A word one hears often in Morocco is medina, which is Arabic for the old town or city center.  Many Moroccan cities have well-preserved medinas that continue to be inhabited today, of which the best-known example is that of Fez.  A characteristic of the Moroccan medinas is the chaotic design of these areas.  When we think of a city, we often think of sweeping boulevards or grid networks of interconnected streets with a logical, often symmetrical layout. The Moroccan medinas are the exact opposite of that model. A medina is a maze of tight alleyways, illogical dead-ends, strange angles and turns, and two-story buildings on both sides of the street that prevent a person walking through the streets from being able to see anything in the distance to provide bearings and direction.

Fez Medina Overview

Walking through the Fez medina is an adventure even for the modern traveler equipped with GPS location finding and digital mapping.  It can be disorienting and confusing, even with (limited) street signs posted on some of the walls.  Add in fast-moving crowds, donkeys carrying goods, moto-scooters, loud noises from artisans’ shops, smells emanating from restaurants, and shopkeepers with goods spilling out onto the streets, and even the savvy traveler can become lost in a medina.

The question thus arises as to why a city would ever be designed in this manner.  After all, many ancient civilizations had logical layouts to their streets, such as the four intersecting routes (the East-West orientation of the decumanus) and common elements found in almost every Roman city (coliseum, theater, temple, forum, etc.).

Medina Dead End Street

One reason why medinas are so chaotic is that the design itself served as a defensive mechanism. In a relatively insecure area, a city would typically be protected by walls and gates. Indeed, some of the cities in Morocco were surrounded by several layers of outer walls. Yet history shows that even the highest and strongest gates can be breached, so the medina is designed in a way where once the attackers gain entry into the city, the defenders would still have an advantage against the them because only the inhabitants of the city would know the maze of streets.

In other words, once the breach in the walls occurred, the attackers would have trouble maintaining the discipline of their forces in terms of advancing towards an objective given the tight, twisting, and turning streets.  Moreover, the inability to see more than a few feet in any direction would hamper communication among attacking troops.  Although this erratic design does indeed benefit the defender of the city, it should be noted that there is some sense of order in the medina.  As Corinne Verner writes in The Villas & Riads of Morocco, “[t]he first impression of anarchy is nothing more than an illusion […for t]he medina is arranged in different sectors, separating the economic life of the city from the private life of its residents.”

Fez Medina

Innovation Lesson – The medina design introduces complexity to enhance its overall security.  As innovators, we typically strive for simplicity and avoid complexity at all costs, especially in terms of our pursuit of efficiency in operations.  The question for the innovator thus becomes whether complexity might be of value in a process or technology for certain scenarios.

A great example would be a computer firewall.  Although we typically focus our efforts on making strong firewalls to prevent intrusions into our systems, we do not spend a lot of time thinking about what the system looks like once the hacker is able to gain illicit entry into the environment.  Sensitive data is almost always encrypted, but it is also typically in the same place, as we focus on maximizing the performance of database queries and simplified internal design.  In an environment that requires extreme protection, perhaps the lesson of the medina is that even if an intruder gets past the firewall, confusion should be a tool one leverages to continue the battle to protect sensitive information.

Provide Shared Value

One of the most striking things one encounters in the various medinas in Morocco is the public fountain. As one walks through the labyrinth of the medina, with its dark and sometimes dirty streets, all of the sudden one will stumble upon an elaborately decorated fountain. The fountain is typically 8-10 feet tall and 6 feet wide and consists of zellij tiles covering its walls and basins, along with brass spigots for dispensing water.  Zellij tiles are brightly colored, geometrically-shaped pieces of fired terracotta (clay) that are glazed and chiseled by local craftsmen. A fountain might also have a green tiled roof overhang, to create a semi-private space for the person seeking replenishment.

The fountains are usually designed to provide water both for people and for animals, and in a desert climate such as that found in many Moroccan cities, the fountain is a life-sustaining entity. These fountains were not public works projects managed by the government. Rather, they were the result of gifts from wealthy patrons in the city who sought to fulfill the Koranic requirement to engage in acts of piety and donations to the poor. The wealthy residents of the city would sometimes endow the fountains with plaques documenting their beneficence.

As Achva Benzinberg Stein of the University of California at Berkeley notes in Morocco: Courtyards and Gardens, “[t]he fountains of Fez are miniature public oases in the city,” and the Arabic word for fountain (seqqaya) is related to the Farsi word meaning “to give drink.”

Public Fountain – Fez

Fountains have been ubiquitous in Fez in the past, and Stein writes that at one point in 1550, the author Leo Africanus counted nearly 600 fountains in the city. Water is an extremely valuable commodity in the desert, and its role in sustaining life for people and animals, in cleansing and protecting from disease, and in purifying before prayer sanctifies the location of the fountain. For the wealthy donor who builds the fountain and gives it to his city, the benefits are an improved overall environment in which to live. If the fountain is near the home of the wealthy person, then people and animals delivering goods to the home would benefit from being able to drink nearby. If it is near a shop owned by the wealthy person, then customers would be more likely to spend time in that area, thus helping the business. The fountain would thus enhance the overall quality of life in the community, which, in turn, benefits the wealthy person who lives in that community.

Public Fountain – Fez

Innovation Lesson – In business innovation in modern times, we usually are forced to focus our work on either reducing costs or increasing revenues.  We either seek to find new efficiencies that help us reduce costs in operations, or we create new products and services that bring in new revenue.  Since our innovation work is funded from company revenues, this is understandable.  However, writing in the Harvard Business Review, the authors Michael Porter and Mark Kramer remind us that there is a third potential objective of innovation efforts: shared value.

Porter and Kramer define shared value as “generating economic value in a way that also produces value for society by addressing its challenges.”  In other words, they continue, “[a] shared value approach reconnects company success with social progress.”  The story of the fountains in Moroccan cities shows a centuries-old connection to this concept of shared value and can point the modern innovator in the direction of finding ways to deliver value to one’s community.  Innovation can be focused on delivering social benefits which, in turn, provide commercial benefits in terms of helping the community overall.

Public Fountain – Fez

There is another lesson to be learned from the fountains – that of beauty and function.  Unlike the utilitarian public fountains in the United States and elsewhere, the public fountains in Morocco are often amazingly beautiful. A wealthy patron could fulfill his Koranic injunction by simply installing a metal spigot and stone basin in a wall, thus meeting the basic needs of the community. Yet what we see in Morocco are elaborately ornamented fountains that are works of art in and of themselves.

Although some fountains have faded in their glory, many are still stunning in appearance even today.  This serves as a reminder to the innovator that when designing something that is functional, it is not necessary to forgo beauty in the design.  In other words, just because something is functional does not mean that it cannot be beautiful.

Indeed, the zellij tiles that one sees so often in Moroccan interiors often rise up to about the height of the shoulder of the average person.  This is because, Stein observes, the tile served an additional function besides being decorative.  The inhabitants of a dwelling did not want to brush up against plaster walls and discolor their clothing with the dust of the plaster. Thus in addition to being easy to maintain, the smooth, glazed tile from the floor to the shoulder helped keep clothing clean while also beautifying the space.

Do Not Let the Outside Define the Inside

Another characteristic of Moroccan architecture is the riad, or private home with a garden or courtyard.  Located within the medinas, the riads are places where the wealthy would isolate themselves from the din and clatter of the busy streets.  Indeed, many riads today have been converted into private hotels, and one of the most popular places to stay in a city like Marrakesh is a converted riad.

Zellij Tiles – Shoulder Height

When one approaches one of the many entrances to the medina in Marrakesh, one sees numerous hand luggage carts affixed with the logo of various riads that will be used to transport the luggage of visitors to the hotel, since cars cannot enter the medina.

Riad Luggage Carts

What is perhaps most interesting about riads is the contrast between their outer and inner appearances.  Although some riad doors are made of elaborately-carved wood, for the most part the entry to a riad consists of a tall door and even taller walls, tucked away on some non-descript street corner in the medina.

One often stumbles across a riad unexpectedly, since there are not always large signs or grand entryways into these dwellings. Yet once one passes through the wooden door, one enters a world of tranquility and beauty, in stark contrast to the noise and chaos of the street outside.  The entryway typically opens to a courtyard containing a fountain, with colorful zellij and the sound of flowing water filling the space. The multi-story courtyard is open to natural light and is surrounded by the rooms of the riad, with dining areas and sometimes even a pool on the top floor looking out over the rooftops of the city.

As Verner writes, “Moroccan homes are almost hermetically sealed and their facades are devoid of adornment […and o]nly some muted ornamentation on the street-side doors, designed to allow a laden donkey to pass through easily, hint at the refinement to be found within.”

Riad Non-Descript Entry Riad Interior Courtyard Riad Rooftop Pool Doorway to Courtyard

Innovation Lesson – When we think about great buildings and structures, we often think about their exteriors, with wide, sweeping entryways and gardens, tall columns, grand porches, and ostentatious facades.  While the interior behind these entryways is often just as elaborate, we sometimes forget that in a typical residence, the place where one spends most of one’s time is on the inside.  The designers of the riads were limited in what they could do on the outside because of the narrow alleyways of the medinas.  Yet they probably also recognized that it made more sense to invest energy in beautifying the interior because that is the place where the occupants would be spending most of their time.

For the innovator, the lesson here could be that one should invest more time working on innovative features and designs for those portions of an entity where the user will spend the majority of his or her time rather than on the upfront portion of the entity.  In terms of a software application, this would mean thinking less about the initial screens of an application and more about the working parts where users will spend the most time.  We often hear that first impressions are of great importance, so we tend to focus on the upfront steps in a process or technology.  Yet this should not come at the expense of the more intensively-used portions of a process or technology.

Repeated Patterns can be Innovative

A prominent design theme in Moroccan buildings is the use of zellij tile on the floors and walls.  Zellij tiles are made from local clay which is fired into small squares about 4 x 4 inches, with a thickness of about one-fourth of an inch.  The tile is then glazed with one of seven colors and cut into smaller pieces in various shapes to be used in decoration.  Stein notes that traditional Moroccan zellij used turquoise and white colors, but over time the palette expanded to include seven colors: “three basic (white, black, and sandlewood brown) and four complementary colors (red, green, yellow, and blue).”  Stein writes that this set of seven colors appears “throughout the Islamic world and is based on the sacred associations of the numbers three, four, and seven.”

In addition to tile, Moroccan interiors also use plaster for walls and carved-out decorative elements in the hardened surface. There is a repeated combination of elements evident in the tile and plaster in Moroccan design: geometric, floral, and epigraphic (script).  As one goes from one building to another, whether the structure is a riad, medersa (Islamic school), a tomb, or a mosque, one sees frequent use of these three design elements along with the seven colors in various combinations.

Zellij Tiles – Detail

Geometric shapes are triangles, polygons, stars, squares, and other mathematically-familiar designs, with small pieces of tile combined in elaborate detail to result in larger patterns.  Designers tend to favor smaller, more intricate geometric pieces woven into designs with astronomical or religious significance.  Floral shapes are more natural looking, shaped like plants and flowers.  As Stein notes, “[for floral patterns, o]ne of the principal motifs is the touriq, a botanical ornamentation composed of interlacing floral, foliage, and palmette patterns.”  The palmette leaf appears frequently, reflecting the importance of the date palm tree, which grows in abundance in various locations in Morocco.  Dates are an important source of nourishment for Moroccans, and they are prized as a sweet used to break the all-day fast during Ramadan.

Zellij Tiles and Geps Plaster Carvings

Script is Koranic verse in Arabic, carved into plaster or painted on tiles in flowing characters.  Stein observes that “[i]n the epigraphic patterns, the cursive form appears most frequently [but w]hen sculpted in stone […] the Kufic style, a monumental script par excellence, is preferred.”

The script is usually carved into plaster as part of a process known as geps (derived from the Greek word Gypsum, meaning the rock base of the plaster).  Geps, featured prominently at the Alhambra site in Granada, Spain, is carved onsite by artisans following a stencil of the Arabic script for the decoration. Geps appears fragile because of the delicate appearance of the carved plaster shapes, but it can survive a long time, with some geps dating from the 12^th century still intact in Morocco today.  As one enters a new building, these three elements (geometric, floral, and script) along with the seven colors appear as familiar friends, yet each dwelling has its own aura and sense of place, despite leveraging these common design themes.

Zellij Tiles at Saadian Tombs in Marrakesh

Innovation Lesson – When we think of innovation, we think of things that are completely new or novel.  In other words, the very essence of the word “innovative” itself focuses on things that are new, or never before seen. The repeated patterns in Moroccan architecture remind us that innovative does not need to always be “brand new.”  Despite the shared components of these three elements and seven colors, each building in Morocco has its own sense of novelty and creativity. The spaces decorated by the geometric, floral, and script elements and seven colors feel alive and new, as each designer uses the elements in different manners to arrive at his or her final design.

Each time I entered a Moroccan edifice for the first time, I looked for the repeating patterns and colors and was amazed at how the designers could create something that is at once uniform and yet is also unique at the same time.  For the innovator, this can serve as a lesson that building something novel can be accomplished using repeatable patterns and common design elements.

Zellij Tiles, Geps, and Wood Ceiling

Rather than struggling to find a brand-new approach to solving a problem, an innovator could make a small modification to a previous approach to solving that problem to see if he or she could generate new results.

Innovators often shy away from using repeatable or consistent patterns, wary of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum that “[a] foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”  Yet in the case of Moroccan design, the consistency of these three elements and seven colors results in an experience in every building that is arguably more transcendent than would be the case if every building tried to be dramatically different.

The zellij tiles are more than just decoration.  As Stein notes, “[t]his multidimensional art form has deep religious meaning expressed through its geometries and the mathematic and astrological significance the figures carry […and t]he hypnotic, repetitive designs are used to foster a meditative and religious connection to the Divine.”  Repeated patterns appear in architecture dating from Roman times to the present as well.

According to one critic, the great American architect Louis Kahn “never gave up on his fascination with ancient Roman architecture and lessons learned from his classical Beaux Arts training in the 1920s about the visual power of the strong axis, load bearing structures and the fundamental resonances of the circle, square and triangle.”

Think About Human and Natural Design Elements

Although there are places in Morocco with enough snow in winter to permit alpine skiing, the country is for the most part a dry, desert climate in its inland cities (such as Marrakech).  The desert presents many challenges to an architect in terms of extreme heat and sunlight during the daytime, along with the potential for extreme cold at night.  The architect in Morocco confronts the challenge of living in such an intemperate climate at two levels.  First, he or she leverages the natural processes of heating and cooling to improve the livability of a structure.  Second, he or she leverages the way humans react to a structure to increase its livability as well.

In terms of nature, the Moroccan structures are designed to ensure airflow in the summer (taking advantage of prevailing winds in the desert) while providing for warmth at night to fight against the cooldown that occurs in the desert after sunset.  Stein writes that “[l]ow, wide courtyards […] capture cooling breezes, while taller buildings provide more shade and shelter from the hot sun.”  Patio areas, she continues, possess shaded areas and cool tile flooring to counter the heat of the day, while later in the evening the stone of the building radiates back the heat it gathered during the day to keep the residence warm.

During the day, the shade and shelter provided by overhanging roofs is preferred by residents. At night, Stein concludes, the heat captured from the sun during the day is radiated out through floor tiles and the courtyard is transformed into a pleasant place to stroll. Moroccan edifices also typically have thick walls and high ceilings, which allows rising hot air to escape through small holes at the top of exterior walls.  Patio doors allow air and light from the courtyard into the house.

Interestingly, Stein notes, Moroccan homes are typically designed around maximizing summer cooling rather than winter heating, and one often finds the interior rooms to be rather cold in the winter.  In my travels around Morocco in the warm month of May, I was struck by how often I would enter an ancient Moroccan structure and find that it was much cooler than the climate outside, even without modern air conditioning.

Courtyard Garden – Marrakesh

A second design attribute focuses not on nature but on the human experience.  When one enters the interior of a Moroccan courtyard, one is struck by two sensations: colors and water.  The zellij tile provide vibrant colors on the walls (and sometimes floors), and floors are also sometimes colored  or white marble.

Stein observes that “[b]rightly colored tile decorations can simulate the sensory experience of a garden without the water needed to maintain living flowers and shrubs.” Outside the home in the medina and the outskirts of town, Morocco can be a monotone palette of reddish brown due to the dry climate and prevalence of red clay in the exterior building materials. By contrast, according to Stein, the Moroccan architect designs the colors in the house to ensure a “contrast with the monochromatic landscape and provide a simple and effective means of creating the illusion of lushness and keeping the desert at bay.”

Courtyard Fountain – Marrakesh

One sees a lot of green in the courtyards, including the roofs of the galleries which are often covered in green tiles, thus creating what Stein calls “an abstract substitute for plants.”  In courtyards where the builder integrates actual plants into the design, she continues, the focus is on “[l]ong axial paths, often lined with tall evergreen trees, [that] draw the eye into the distance, while green blocks of vegetation make a dark corridor to entice the visitor.”  Stein writes that the designers even leverage a trompe de l’oeil (trick of the eye) by placing flower and vegetable plants below the level of the footpaths, which serves the dual purpose of providing shade for the plant roots while giving the human occupant the impression of “walking on a colorful, fragrant Persian carpet.”

Courtyard Garden

In addition to visually stimulating the human occupant of a property by colorful design elements, the Moroccan architect also incorporates the precious resource of water into the design.  Water is a scarce resource in the desert, and designers are careful to incorporate it in low-flow and modest, but nevertheless enticing, forms.

Typically, the designers will locate a fountain at the center of a courtyard in a basin and will ensure that a small flow of water spills over the edge of the basin into an overflow area to be reused.  Verner reminds us that “[t]he paradise of Islam is […often] portrayed as a perpetually gushing fountain.”  Articulating the same concept, Stein notes that this is a “symbolic expression of plenty” and the basins are often built “in the shape of an octagon, symbolic of the eightfold nature of Islamic paradise.”  The sounds made by the flowing water, she writes, “reinforce the feeling of calm and the illusion of plenty in this hot, dry climate.”  She observes that water can either be rippling, to add a sense of motion to the static environment of the courtyard, or it may be “dark and quiet, a meditation on the infinite nature of the Almighty.”

Innovation Lesson – Moroccan interior design is a classic case of form following function, which is a key element in modern innovation.  For the innovation practitioner, the lesson here is a reminder that it is not sufficient simply to design a structure that is beautiful, nor is it sufficient to design one that is merely functional.  Form and function can be combined in ways that significantly enhance the human experience.

Another lesson for the innovator is the reminder to take human perception into consideration when working on the design for a new solution.  The Moroccan designers wanted to give the human the impression of being in a colorful garden with abundant water, even though the reality of their desert environment was limited flora and very limited water. Perception, it is often said, is reality, and innovators should leverage this notion to achieve creative new solutions.

If an innovator has limited resources available for a project, then he or she can leverage these types of techniques to improve the way that people experience the innovation.  In other words, where resources constrain one’s ability to provide a complete experience, leverage the human power of imagination to render those elements that cannot be physically created.

Build to Last

One of the most striking attributes of ancient civilizations is the ability of something built hundreds or thousands of years ago to survive in good shape in the present day.  As Verner observes, one Moroccan technique that resulted in a long-lasting method of construction is the tadelact technique of finishing plaster, which is used for the surface of fountains, pools, and walls.  Tadelact is a finish that is applied to masonry surfaces at the end of the construction process in which the tadelact artisan spreads limewater over the masonry surface then allows it to dry.

The artisan then very slowly rubs the surface in a circular motion using a hard stone that becomes polished over time.  The process of circular rubbing takes an incredibly long amount of time, with the tadelact finishing process progressing at a rate of about one square yard per day. Once completed, the surface becomes enamel-like and is impervious to water, thus its use for fountains and pools.  In Marrakesh, the pools of the 12^th century Menara Gardens use this technique and survive intact today.

Tadelact Fountain

Innovation Lesson – In our contemporary society we rarely have the patience to focus on things that last longer than a few years.  Innovation is seen as meaning that we move forward constantly, rejecting and removing the old so we can focus on the new.  This example of something that is built to last reminds the innovator that innovation is not just about short-term usage and disposal.

Rather, innovators can stake a claim by building things that leverage techniques that last for centuries.  In the case of tadelact, the practice had fallen into disuse in Morocco but has recently seen a revival in Marrakech due to its beauty and longevity.  The innovation lesson here is that sometimes a simple process, repeated over and over, can expand to become a great innovation that lasts for centuries.

Follow the Flow

One of the most stunning visual experiences in Morocco are the seas of date palm trees that seem to appear out of nowhere in desert regions.  The stark contrast between the reddish tint of the soil, mountains, and surrounding buildings, and the intense green fronds of the tall date palm trees, is an amazing sight. The date palms resemble an inland sea as they follow the course of underground aquifers for miles and miles in various parts of the central region of Morocco.  Some of these are fed by small spring sources that form rivers then divert underground to support the date palm trees.

Sea of Date Palms

A great example of one of these water sources for date palms is the Dades River, which carved out the Todra Gorge, a stunning rock canyon that is as narrow as 30 feet wide in some areas with 500-foot high cliffs on both sides.  It is possible to walk through the Gorge to the source of the Dades river, which begins as a tiny spring that generates a constant stream of fresh water that travels through the gorge and into the aquifers supporting the date palms.

What is amazing is how this source of water, which seems so small that it could be covered by a few shovels full of dirt, becomes a massive underground river that supports the gigantic date palm farms that extend as far as the eye can see in many places.  Interestingly, although they make intensive use of the water from the aquifers, the Moroccans have not attempted to dam this river or massively divert it for other purposes, trusting, rather, to the course of nature to allow the water to keep flowing to support the people in the area.

Todra Gorge Water Source – Dades River

Stein notes that date palms are well-suited to the region, with a high tolerance for salinity in their water and the ability to survive in hot, sunny climates with proper irrigation.  According to Moroccan folklore, the date palm “has to have its feet in the water and its head in fire.”  Date palms are also very useful as a bulwark against the encroaching sands of the desert.

Moroccans invented a process by which they take the dead palm fronds from the trees and lash them together into fences, which they then allow to be covered by advancing sands.  The workers then build another palm frond fence on top of that one, and repeat the process several times until they form a sand dune about 15 feet high, which then can be planted with other brush to anchor the entire system in place, thus effectively stopping future migration of the sand in that area.

Innovation Lesson – There are three innovation lessons to be learned from the example of the Moroccan water sources and the date palm farms.  First, it is surprising that this impossibly small source of water results in the support of massive agricultural businesses.  Although it is common knowledge that even the mightiest rivers all start out as a small water source, actually seeing these sources can remind the innovator of the power of a single concept to drive amazing results.  One goal of innovation is to find these small streams that can lead to mighty torrents, rather than expecting to find the torrent right away. Sometimes it is the smaller entity itself that is the source of the innovation.

A second lesson from this example is a reminder that while humans have the ability to make artificial modifications to nature, in some cases the most innovative solution is to let nature run its course and not overly-engineer the solution. Moroccans have harvested date palms in the region for thousands of years (they were originally brought to North Africa from the Indus River Valley), and rather than trying to grow other crops using diversions of the water in the region, the Moroccans have stuck to their traditional form of agriculture, using a crop that is well suited to the unique characteristics of their region, rather than another crop that might work well at first but not be sustainable in the long run.

A final lesson of the date palms is the importance of dual-use technology.  In addition to being a great source of produce (up to six tons of fruit per acre), the dead fronds of date palms also provide the foundation for fencing that is critical for survival in a desert region, as high winds tend to blow the light-weight sands which can encroach on human dwellings if not protected by dunes.  The date palms provide sustenance for the inhabitants as well as structural support for their fencing, and innovators should remember not to limit their focus to a single use as they come up with a new technology.

Date Palm Trees

Trust the Specialists

The need to manage water sourcing and distribution is a recurring theme in Morocco.  Moroccans have been using systems of water basins, aquifer taps, and tunnels to distribute water dating back to the 12^th century through structures called khettara.  The first khettara in Morocco, built near Marrakesh, transported water a distance of 25 miles into the city.  Stein writes that the “khettara comprise a series of shafts reaching down to an underground gravity-fed channel.”  Building a khettara, she continues, is a labor-intensive effort, as large amounts of soil must be removed to build the various elements of the system.  In places where the water is transported across long stretches of flat terrain, one can still see above ground the remnants of the dirt removed for the tunnels.

Engineers form the dirt remnants into mounds with access shafts to enable future maintenance on the water tunnels, while the access shafts are built in a way to prevent rainwater runoff from reaching the fresh water below ground.  Stein observes that “[t]he work of plotting the course of the channel is traditionally the domain of an expert.”  The exact location of a khettara, she continues, “depends entirely on field experience and the ability to distinguish subtle changes in vegetation that indicate the presence of water.” Teams of artisans, she notes, travel from place to place working on khettara, following the demands of various communities as their water systems would need to be maintained based on falling water tables or storm damage.

Khettara Mounds Indicating Water Tunnels Underneath

Innovation Lesson – The concept of the specialist is sometimes a difficult one for the innovator to manage.  The innovator is torn between leveraging the expertise of a person who knows a great deal about a process or technology and trying to move beyond the past ways of operating a process or technology.

For example, if an innovator is asked to redesign a process to improve its efficiency, the innovator will have to rely on people experienced in operating that process in order to learn more about how it functions today (the ‘as-is process’). Yet by relying on input from these experts, the innovator will necessarily receive information that is biased in support of the status quo, based on the way in which the process had always operated. Likewise, if the innovator ignores the status quo, then he or she might miss some key elements of the process that must remain in the future, re-engineered process (the ‘to-be process’).  The lesson of the khettara is that specialists are critical to the success of a project even if one is trying to do something entirely new.

Khettara Water Wheel

Synthesize by Combining the Old and the New

Another specialist who put his thumbprint on Morocco was the French architect Theodore Cornut, hired by sultan Sidi Muhammad ben Abdellah in 1760 to build a seaside city from scratch at the intersection of maritime and Saharan trading routes.  The result was the creation of the city of Essaouria, which is about 115 miles from Marrakesh via a relatively straight and level road heading towards the coast.  The sultan envisioned the city to be a trading post for caravans so when they completed their treks from the desert interior they could trade goods with ships that would arrive on the Atlantic Coast.  Cornut designed the city to be fortified from coastal attack (he was in the French Navy), but he also included Moroccan cultural touches found in the medinas in other cities.  The result was a combination of the labyrinthine and narrow streets of some Moroccan medinas with broad, more ordered French city structure.  As such, the old town of Essaouira is a gem in terms of its construction and has the unique ability to make a French citizen feel at home just as it would make a Moroccan feel at home.  Walking in Essaouira’s medina, one moves from broad, open, straight roads to tight, narrow alleyways in short order, which is a unique experience in Morocco.

Essaouira Medina – French Style

 

Essaouira Medina – French Style

 

Essaouira Medina – Moroccan Style

Innovation Lesson – The lesson here for the modern innovator is a reminder of the power of combining old and new to develop a completely novel approach to solving a problem.  The sultan could have hired a local architect to design his city with the result being something that probably resembled Marrakesh or Fez or other Moroccan cities.  Instead, he sought out expertise from another culture but that expert found a way to bring new thinking to solve the problem while still adhering to some of the foundational elements of the native region.  Cornut did not make Essaouira into just another French port city, but he also did not make it into just another Moroccan city.

This combination of the modern French design and the old Moroccan urban design appears in other cities in the area as well, though typically they are physically separate instead of being combined into the same location. For instance, the town of Fez has an old Fez, with its traditional medina, and a new Fez, with some of the sweeping boulevards reminiscent of what one would see in France today.  The same is true for other cities, such as Marrakesh and Ouarzazate, though less so in the latter than the former.  Indeed, the lesson of Morocco as a whole for the innovator is the power of combining the old and the new to create a completely new and innovative experience that is unique.

Always Have a Center

I have always been fascinated by the concept of a central courtyard in a home.  It might have stemmed from visits to Roman ruins in my younger years in which I was struck by the appearance of a design element so different from what how we live today in the West, but at any rate I consider the interior courtyard to be the epitome of great design, with the ability of an architect to provide the inhabitant of a dwelling with a little taste of the outside world within the confines of his or her own habitation.

The inner courtyard is a staple of Moroccan constructions for residences, businesses, and religious structures.  Stein writes that according to some historians, “the origins of the house with its central courtyard are to be found in the ancient Middle East.”  As mentioned above, one of the most amazing experiences in Morocco is to walk down a non-descript, narrow street, and pass through a door to see a magnificent, huge courtyard open up with natural light and elaborate decorations in the midst of the medina.

Stein states that the central courtyard reflects the notion of the “sacred center,” which is a key element in Islam.  The Islamic religion is centered on the holy city of Mecca and Muslims anywhere in the world will point to Mecca when they pray several times each day.  When they undertake the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), Muslims will walk around the kaaba in circles as part of their actions.  As Stein notes, “[t]he first element of a residence to be designed is the patio or interior courtyard (wust ed-dar) [which is] the main area of the home [and i]t is from there that the other rooms radiate and it alone provides the source of light.”  In the courtyard itself, there will be a fountain in the center, with the design elements of the courtyard focused towards this central point to enhance its prominence. Colors, plants, and water will flow to and from this central locus, as a constant reminder of the sacred center.

Sacred Center – Note Octagon Shape Sacred Center – Note Octagon Shape

Innovation Lesson – The lesson here for innovators is the importance of finding and acknowledging the sacred center of one’s work.  It is easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day details of a work effort as one pursues tangents in search of true innovation, but one needs to maintain awareness of the overall objective at hand in a project.  A center can be a mission statement or a vision provided to the team that allows everyone involved to stay focused on the overall goal of the work effort.  The center can also provide a sense of balance as a measuring stick to determine how far one is straying from the original goal.

In other words, as one assesses new ideas or approaches to solving a problem, the innovator can measure those against the “center” of the project to ensure that the team does not stray too far from its intended work, no matter how promising any of those tangents may appear.

Sources:

Corinne Verner, The Villas & Riads of Morocco (New York: Abrams, 2005).

Achva Benzinberg Stein, Morocco: Courtyards and Gardens (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2007).

Julie V. Iovine, “Ancient Lessons in Modern Forms,” The Wall Street Journal (March 27, 2017), A12.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essaouira

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Cornut

Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer, “Creating Shared Value,” Harvard Business Review (January-February 2011).

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/353571-a-foolish-consistency-is-the-hobgoblin-of-little-minds-adored

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decumanus_Maximus

Author’s Discussion of Medina Complexity on Chad McAllister’s Everyday Innovator Podcast (https://theeverydayinnovator.com/133)

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

I wrote recently about innovation lessons from the Roman Empire (SPQR Innovation) and in the course of my travels and research, I have uncovered additional Roman examples that are worth investigating.  I also would like to share an insight that occurred to me concerning a characteristic of tourism and how it relates to the challenges faced by innovation practitioners.

Roman Maritime Concrete

The first Roman example appeared in a local paper and has ties to a local university where I live, so I assume that this information has not reached a broader audience.  As I mentioned in my previous article, the Roman Empire spanned hundreds of years and left a lasting imprint on the planet.  One can see ancient Roman ruins all around the Mediterranean even today, with some ruins in such great shape that it is possible to imagine oneself actually walking down a Roman road.  Although it makes sense that land-based structures have survived over the ages, particularly in dry climates, one puzzle that has perplexed researchers is how Roman maritime edifices have proven almost equally viable over centuries.

University of Utah Research Associate Professor of Geology & Geophysics, Marie D. Jackson, wondered how numerous Roman piers, breakwaters, and seawalls have withstood exposure to the harsh ocean climate for thousands of years.  This contrasts with modern concrete, which typically deteriorates after just a few decades when exposed to seawater.  Jackson recently discovered that the Romans achieved their success in maritime construction through the use of a certain type of volcanic ash in their ocean concrete.  She observes that the Roman mixture of volcanic ash and lime becomes stronger when exposed to seawater, as the saltwater “partially dissolves the ash and lime cocktail and new interlocking crystals and minerals form, preventing cracks and making the structures stronger.”

Roman Breakwater at Caesarea, Israel

In other words, the ancient Romans found a way to make their maritime concrete stronger by adding a material to the mix that behaves differently in seawater than it would in dry air.  The results can be seen today in many seaside locations in the Mediterranean, and Professor Jackson is leading a team that is trying to re-create the exact formula used by the Romans for use by modern concrete makers.

Roman Breakwater at Caesarea, Israel (Foundation of Herod’s Palace)

Roman Mosaics

The second example of building to last comes at the site of the ancient Roman city of Volubilis, located near Meknes, Morocco.  Volubilis was the westernmost city of the Roman Empire, and is situated in a fertile valley about 100 miles from the Atlantic Coast.  The city was occupied by the Romans from 44 AD to 285 AD, and its prosperity derived from nearby olive trees and other agricultural products.  Several families built large homes in the city, and the most remarkable remnants of these homes are a series of large floor mosaics that were decorative elements of these fine homes.  Excavated by the French in the late 1800s and protected today as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stepping into the scattered remains of Volubilis can transport the visitor back to Roman times.

The floor mosaics are extremely well-preserved, which is partly due to the nature of their construction.  Unlike tile, which is colored via enamel paint, mosaics are made using naturally-colored stone.  In other words, when a mosaic artist needs to add a certain color to his or her work of art, he or she has to find a rock that occurs in nature with that exact color.

Roman Mosaic at Volubilis, Morocco

As a result, mosaics tend to have a limited range of colors, but they are also exceptionally durable.  Just as a rock sitting in a field can reside in that location for thousands of years, so, too, can a mosaic withstand the test of time.

Indeed, many of the mosaics today at Volubilis are in incredibly good shape, given that they have been either covered in dirt or sitting out in the sun for hundreds of years.  The persistence of the Roman mosaics, which one finds throughout the locations occupied by the Romans during their centuries of rule (in present-day Italy, Jordan, Israel, and elsewhere), reminds us that by using the right techniques (colored stone instead of paint), one can create something that will last for generations.

Roman Mosaic at Volubilis, Morocco

Think Like a Tourist to Innovate

I spend a great deal of time traveling and generally feel as though I am highly aware of how I am interacting with my surroundings yet something occurred to me recently as I had the tables turned and was able to view travel from a different perspective.  I live permanently in a place where other people tend to go on their vacations, and on a hike the other day I was struck by the fact that people had stopped to take a picture and absorb a panoramic view that I passed by every day without notice.  When I first moved here to the Wasatch Mountains in northern Utah, I was struck by the beauty of the distant mountains on each and every hike, noticing different colors in the sky depending on the time of day or enjoying the flora and fauna, and sometimes the whiteness and silence of deep snowfall.

While I still appreciate these things from time to time, I do not notice them nearly as much as I used to on my hikes.  As I pondered the tourists taking photographs as I walked by, I was transported mentally to the souks (marketplaces) of Morocco where I realized that I was the same tourist taking photos of the amazing array of spices or other goods from around the world, while locals standing nearby were wondering why such a view was worth capturing, since it was so commonplace to them.

Souk at Fez, Morocco Souk at Marrakesh, Morocco

The realization that struck me is that the innovator needs to look at the world as both the tourist and the local, leveraging insights from each one, in order to be successful in developing new ideas about solving problems.

The innovator needs to be like a local in order to recognize the foundational elements and details of a particular topic.  For example, the locals at the souk would know each and every nearby shopkeeper, which ones had the best products, what prices were good, who was away at prayer (indicated by a metal rod drawn across the shop entrance), what time of day it was (based on the flow of traffic), and who was passing by the area.

On a hike, I know the time of day, the weather relative to how it normally is at that time of year, whether storms are brewing in the distant mountains, how windy it is versus normal, the humidity, how much foot, bike, and animal traffic has been on the trail recently, the haziness of the horizon based on air quality or nearby wildfires, the shapes of the clouds indicating high pressure dominating the region, how dense the foliage is growing, the appearance of wildflowers, where deer or elk or even moose might appear, and where I will see bikes pass by or where I will hike in relative solitude.  These are the types of detailed observations made by a local.

Utah Mountain View

From a tourist’s standpoint, the experience is completely new, and he or she will often see things that the local will miss, such as the contrast of colors in a scene, a scent that the local ignores because it is always there, or even a distant noise that the local chooses to ignore because it is so repetitive.  The tourist looks at each scene with fresh eyes and a sense of wonder that eludes the local.  The challenge for the innovator is to figure out how to combine the two when trying to solve a problem.  The innovator needs to dive deeply enough into researching the problem so that he or she understands all the intricacies of the challenge (so as not to come up with a potential solution that is a false positive), while simultaneously looking at the problem with a clear enough mind so as not to miss obvious potential solutions that can be generated through considering the problem with a fresh perspective.

My recommendation for innovators is to make sure you are wearing both hats the next time you are diving into a problem, and to remember to step back on a regular basis and look at the problem with a fresh set of eyes, just like a tourist in a new land.

Sources:

images courtesy of the author

Rich Kane, “Researcher Discovers Why Roman Concrete Structure Are So Durable,” Salt Lake Tribune (July 9, 2017), p. B7.

https://volcanictuff-ancientconcrete.cmes.utah.edu/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volubilis

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