GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

One of the first concepts I learned in a university course on statistics was not about regression analysis or significance of results but, rather, on the importance of doubt. Our professor drilled home the point that no matter how large our dataset and how clever our hypothesis, our results should always be presented using language such as “suggests” or “points toward” rather than “demonstrates” or “proves.”  This is because even the most comprehensive dataset and sophisticated analysis will always be missing some variables, and we cannot always be certain that the findings from our work were caused by the variables we chose to analyze versus other data elements that we may not have assessed.

The phenomenon of “big data” can tempt us to think that we can have unprecedented levels of certainty in our work today, so a reminder of the importance of doubt for innovators warrants consideration.

Injecting doubt into our work as innovation practitioners is important for two primary reasons.  First, doubt keeps our minds open to other possibilities that can explain a phenomenon. New thinking often comes from exploring concepts outside our comfort zones and if we have supreme confidence in the conclusions we reach at all times, we close the door to other ideas that might be worth exploring.

This concept matches Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions which postulates that scientific progress occurs in a series of fits and starts as scientists advocate for a dominant paradigm and gather evidence to support that paradigm.  However, a series of anomalies tend to emerge over time that challenge the paradigm in the form of incidents that cannot be explained by the leading theory. Once enough anomalies exist to overwhelm the paradigm, scientists begin work on a new paradigm that better explains the anomalies and subsequently move their support to a new paradigm that overtakes the old theory and sets up a new mode of thinking.  Kuhn refers to this phenomenon as a “paradigm shift.”

Leveraging doubt in our work keeps our minds attuned to the possibility of finding anomalies and doing the research required to find new paradigms that can account for these anomalies.

A second reason why doubt is important for innovation is that injecting a sense of doubt into what we present can help us maintain long-term credibility with colleagues and clients because it is inevitable that even the most perfectly prepared and seemingly impregnable innovation can fall flat on its face for unexpected reasons. Most innovators can recall a time when they worked long hours on a new approach, concept, product, or idea and thought that it would be a smashing success when presented to a colleague or client, only to conduct the meeting and find our ideas rejecting for some unanticipated objection.  It is said that even the best-laid plans can go to waste, and innovation is not immune to this possibility.

By presenting our findings with a small layer of doubt, we protect ourselves so that in the case of a failed initiative we can protect our credibility for future interactions.

I recently read Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and found excellent examples of the importance of doubt that can reinforce this message for innovators.  The first comes from Albert Einstein, perhaps the best-known scientist in history.  In one instance cited by Rovelli, Einstein demonstrated that light consists of particles of light (referred to nowadays as photons0. In an article he wrote on the subject, Einstein stated: “It seems to me that the observations associated with blackbody radiation, fluorescence, the production of cathode rays by ultraviolet light, and other related phenomena connected with the emission or transformation of light are more readily understood if one assumes the energy of light is discontinuously distributed in space.”  The statement above, Rovelli writes, represents “the real birth certificate of quantum theory.”  Yet Rovelli marvels at the seed of doubt that Einstein injects into such a monumental idea and relates it to other great thinkers and their use of self-doubt in language:

Note the wonderful initial ‘It seems to me …’, which recalls the ‘I think …’ with which Darwin introduces in his notebooks the great idea that species evolve, or the ‘hesitation’ spoken of by Faraday when introducing for the first time the revolutionary idea of magnetic fields.  Genius hesitates.  The work of Einstein was initially treated by colleagues as the nonsensical juvenilia of an exceptionally brilliant youth.  Subsequently, it was for the same work that he received the Nobel Prize.

Another case cited by Rovelli in which a brilliant mind demonstrated ongoing doubt was that of the physicist Neils Bohr. Bohr and Einstein, Rovelli notes, were “engaged in an extended contretemps in debating the old and new ideas of physics, in particular Heisenberg’s theories on probability.”  Heisenberg’s thesis was that “[i]t is not possible to predict where an electron will reappear, but only to calculate the probability that it will pop up here or there.”  Bohr tried repeatedly to explain this concept to Einstein, which led the latter to develop a mental experiment known as the “box of light” in an attempt to demonstrate the contradictory nature of the “new” physics of Bohr and Heisenberg.

Einstein asked Bohr to “[i]magine a box filled with light, from which we allow a single photon to escape for an instant.”  According to Rovelli, the dialog between Einstein and Bohr continued for years in the form of “lectures, letters, articles,” and over “the course of the exchange both great men needed to backtrack, to change their thinking.”  Einstein came to admit that the contradictions in the new ideas were not as omnipresent, as he originally thought, and Bohr acknowledged that the new ideas were not as “simple and clear” as he anticipated. When Einstein passed away, Rovelli observes, “his greatest rival Bohr found for him words of moving admiration.”  Bohr died a few years later, and someone took a picture of the chalkboard in Bohr’s study.  Amazingly, the board contained a drawing of the light-filled box from Einstein’s thought experiment. Rovelli opines that “[t]o the very last, [Bohr demonstrated] the desire to challenge oneself and understand more […a]nd to the very last: doubt.”

Sources:

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lesson on Physics (London: Allen Lane, 2014).

image credit: casayouth.com; commons.wikimedia.org

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Innovation practitioners sometimes complain about the interruptions of daily life that make our jobs of developing creative new ideas challenging.  We bemoan full inboxes of emails arriving daily or a calendar stacked with back-to-back meetings with no time available to think deep (and hopefully great) thoughts about whatever problems we are trying to solve.  We complain about the traffic jams in our daily commutes or the inconveniences of air travel to client meetings.  Yet I recently read a new book from a young Syrian architect that reminded me of the power of innovation in the human soul and showed that even in the most horrible of circumstances, there is a spark of creativity that shines above the chaos and confusion, even in a war zone.  The book is The Battle for Home by Marwa Al-Sabouni and it chronicles the experiences of Al-Sabouni as she struggles day-to-day to survive in Homs, Syria, while pursuing her PhD in Architecture.  Al-Sabouni proposes an astounding thesis that traces the roots of the Syrian civil war in her government’s architectural decisions made in the last half century.

Some of the challenges faced by Al-Sabouni as she pursued her PhD defense while raising two children included having to traverse a dangerous route to get from her home to the University (there was only one route), dealing with a committee and Department Head who did not want her to succeed and stalled her PhD defense for over two years, reading and writing by candlelight during extended electricity outages, lacking water and heat for a week at a time, and printing out materials in shops with only generator power and shortages of paper and ink.  Despite these trials, Al-Sabouni eventually completed her PhD defense during the war and currently runs a private architectural studio in Homs.  She also finds time to manage the only online media site dedicated to architectural news in Arabic (www.arch-news.net) and has told her story on a recent TED talk.

In The Battle for Home, Al-Sabouni leverages the powerful theme of the wisdom of the ancients in reminding her fellow Syrians of how the structure and function of the metropolis played a critical role in enabling diverse communities to live alongside each other without conflict.  Her analysis of the past provides a vision for the future in a war-torn land, and the fact that she is able to promulgate these ideas in the midst of chaos and destruction is, in and of itself, a sign of hope for the future of Syria.  As Roger Scruton, a prominent British philosopher and professor of aesthetics, notes, “[t]his book is the moving record of one person’s effort to stay loyal to her homeland, at a time of great suffering and personal distress [… and it is] the expression of a beautiful soul, who comes to us out of a confused and dreadful battle with a message of hope.”

Marwa Al-Sabouni began studying Islamic architecture at the age of 17.  During that period of her education, she faced professors of architecture who “wouldn’t accept any suggested functional solutions or zoning other than the settings they already had in mind [and a]ny attempt to break with these would be met with a failing grade.”  Thus from the outset, Al-Sabouni faced a direct challenge to innovative thought processes in her work, and she found that fellow students in this environment would simply “copy the outlines of celebrated international projects from magazines” then match the internal functions of the structure to the professor’s original assignment.  Al-Sabouni refused to follow this pattern and sought to develop her own creative solutions, though she noted that her workload was higher and grades lower as a result.  The lesson for the innovation practitioner here is in assigning tasks to colleagues as part of an ideation exercise, it is important not to put so many constraints on the participants that they become like the students who take an innovative but hollow shell and fill in the void with pre-defined components.  Allowing more freedom and creativity may lead to better results.  As Al-Sabouni observes, her fellow students who were copying other designs were not aware of “any engineering or other challenges that might have been overcome to reach the final result, let alone any criticism or theory behind the work.”

Before the Syrian civil war, Al-Sabouni observes, “Syrian communities were united by a shared approach to life [and …] were generally fairly tolerant and were historically used to variety, accommodating a wide range of beliefs, origins, customs, goods, even climates and food.”  One reason for this was the architecture of Syrian cities, and she states that “[t]here is an inescapable correspondence between the architecture of a place and the character of the community that has settled there.”  “Our architecture,” she continues, “tells the story of who we are.”  Some of the attributes that made buildings in her hometown of Homs, specifically in the old city area, more amenable to a cooperative social ethos include the “moderate heights” and “low wide doors [that] welcomed every visitor humbly into their warm and simple interiors [thus rendering them …] instruments of reconciliation between communities.”  Mosques and churches didn’t compete with each other in displays of grandiosity.  The front doors of mosques faced the front doors of churches, and minarets and church towers “raised their praying hands in unity above the rooftops.”

This side-by-side nature was perhaps best exemplified by the souks, or marketplaces, in the old town, where shops and services of all sorts had to co-exist in tight, narrow alleyways and spaces.  Professional offices and other stores congregated around the souk, but the soul of the city was that busy and vibrant commercial exchange that took place on a daily basis.  As Al-Sabouni notes, the souk “enhanced the old city’s micro-culture and was the artery of the life of Homs.”  This artery began to be cut with decisions by government officials to “upgrade” or “modernize” via urban planning and the replacement of historical structures with modern buildings (or even parking lots) that did not adhere to the aesthetic of the ancient city.  Al-Sabouni recognized that the vibrancy and tolerance facilitated by the old city began to fade away.  From an innovation standpoint, one should follow Al-Sabouni’s model and think about ways to derive new thinking from what many call the wisdom of the ancients.  There was an unseen or unwritten purpose to the way in which the old city and souk evolved, and that evolution met multiple needs of the community.  Although progress towards modernity is always important, the true innovation for architecture in Homs would have been to leverage this understanding of how the arteries of the old city functioned and to produce designs that made those arteries even stronger.

Al-Sabouni relays a fascinating story about the cohesive power of the souk in the city of Aleppo, location of what some consider to be the world’s first shopping mall (city market, or souk al madina):

“The merchants of Old Aleppo believed on religious grounds that you are blessed by being good to your neighbours, and that you earn your place in the community – such is what true belonging consists in.  This is exactly what was perpetuated by the architectural configuration: facing and adjoining shops, a shared route under one ceiling that united them, and one sky above them all.  The merchants had small chairs to sit on outside their shops once they opened in the morning.  When a merchant had sold his first item, he would bring his chair inside as a sign.  When another customer entered, he would then stretch his head out over his wooden counter to see if any chair remained outside.  If he saw one, he would direct the customer towards it, so as to benefit his less fortunate neighbor.”

For the innovator, this anecdote reminds us of the importance of informal processes in generating larger social outcomes.  Something as simple as a chair outside a vendor’s stall can have far-reaching implications on the cohesion of a city, and the innovator should strive to look for these types of examples to develop new thinking that leverages these experiences.

One of the tenets of Al-Sabouni’s thesis is that the building of “concrete blocks lacking the least aesthetic sense or architectural vision denies the city its character and deprives its citizens of a congenial environment.”  New arrivals to the city of Homs, she notes, “failed massively in social integration: indeed they enhanced social stagnation and introversion, since they created no shared identity or attachment to a place [a]nd this architectural failing helped to inflame civil war.”  She cites the example of the great cities that lined the ancient Silk Road and the fact that so many of these cities became “radiant centres of civilization.”  This was not due solely to their accumulation of wealth but, rather, “because of the openness that was taught by seeing new faces, talking different tongues, and knowing that there were others in the world around you, and that you were compelled by mutual interest to learn how to live with them, do business with them and to keep together in harmony.”  The innovator should understand how flows and interactions among individuals can lead to better outcomes even if those flows and interactions are not the basic intent of an entity.  That is, the cities on the Silk Road were commercial hubs, not deliverers of peaceful human interaction, but the net result of their functioning was often peaceful coexistence.

Moments of breakthrough thinking for famous innovators often come at unexpected times.  For Al-Sabouni, that moment was watching on television the demonstrations in Egypt against the Mubarak regime, with memorable images of people crowding Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011.  Al-Sabouni was particularly struck by the interactions between the crowds of angry protestors and the stern-faced riot police in their uniforms.  She wondered how the interactions might be different if the guards were not wearing their bullet-proof vests and helmets.  Her “Eureka” moment was a mapping of those interactions on the street to the way that architecture impacted individuals in the city as a whole.  In other words, Al-Sabouni realized that she “wanted to study the way in which people react towards Islamic architecture as those Egyptians reacted towards that guard.”  The people of Cairo saw the guard as “representative of a fixed idea,” which may not necessarily have been the case.  In the end, she notes, “the collective action was motivated automatically by the appearance of the guards,” just as would be the case with Islamic architecture driving interactions among the residents of a city.  Al-Sabouni took what could have been a source of intense anger and frustration – the experience of the rioters in Cairo – and channeled it into something productive – the thesis for her dissertation on Islamic architecture.  For the innovation practitioner, this is a great example of the value of leveraging emotional experiences to drive insights, channeling anger into creative thinking rather than simply succumbing to the frustrating aspects of the experience.

Another of the fundamental insights that flows from Al-Sabouni’s thesis is the well-known concept of the wisdom of the ancients – insights derived from thousands of years of human experience that manifest themselves even today.  Al-Sabouni mentions an old Syrian saying: “[o]ne who has no old has no new,” and observes that the evolution of architecture in pre-war Syria away from past “points of departure” meant that “we have no longer been able to ‘orient ourselves towards the world.’”  Architecture has a critical role to play in how we align with our past, present, and future.  The philosopher Roger Scruton writes that “[o]ne does not learn about medieval theology from Chartres [Cathedral]: but one does learn what it is like to believe in it, what it is like to see and feel the world as the people of Chartres once saw and felt it.”  Al-Soubani summarizes: “The perceiver has a key role in the architectural experience.  Aesthetic characteristics are latent in a building, and have to be activated through ‘imaginative perception.’”

There are two examples of the wisdom of the ancients that warrant exploration in parallel with Al-Soubani’s work.  The first comes from David Roberts, an author and historian who spent years exploring the thousand-year-old Anasazi cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde, Colorado.  In his book on the Anasazi, Roberts notes that the famous cliff dwellings demonstrated a superior understanding of the value of different aspects of terrain as they relate to the alignment of the sun across the seasons.  In addition to being easy to defend because they were perched on top of a 500-foot slope, the Anasazi dwellings were able to “gather the heat of the sun in winter, and in summer the overhand provided cooling shade.”  Roberts states that his father, himself an avid explorer of the region, designed a sunroom at his house in Boulder, Colorado to match precisely the angle of the rock overhang that sheltered the Anasazi cliff dwellings.  Much to the astonishment of visitors to the house, the “living room, with its floor-to-ceiling windows facing south, was full of sun in December, cool and shadowy in June.”  What the Anasazi found as part of nature and adapted their living space to leverage turns out to be something that the modern architect can use to solve current challenges of efficient climate control in a structure.  In fact, a home recently built in Utah leverages this precise concept.  Architects John Sparano and Anne Mooney built a computer model of lot and house and oriented the home to maximize solar alignment so that “in December, when the sun is lower at midday, the house is positioned to capture the maximum light and warmth [whereas in] summer, when the midday sun is higher, the rays are blocked by the 6-foot-wide roof overhang,” just like an Anasazi cliff dwelling.

A second example of the wisdom of the ancients comes from Jeff Iliff, Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University.  In a TED Talk, Iliff cites the work of a medical researcher named Galen from 2,000 years ago in which Galen proposed a theory of how the brain functions.  Galen postulated that while a person is awake, the brain’s “motive force” flows out in liquid form to the rest of the body, helping the person function through the day.  At night, during sleep, this liquid flows back into the brain to restore and rehydrate that important organ, resulting in a refreshed mind.  To the modern scientist, this sounds like an absurd explanation for how the brain operates, but in terms of the general human experience, we know that getting a good night’s sleep refreshes our mind, just as missing sleep leaves us in a cloudy state.  Iliff notes that recent research has started to bear out the possibility that Galen was on to something in his analysis.  Scientists have identified a large pool of “clean, clear fluid called cerebrospinal fluid [CSF]” that is present in the brain.  Waste materials that form inside the brain flow into the CSF and then into the blood to be processed.  The fascinating insight is that this process occurs only while a person is asleep.  In fact, brain cells shrink during sleep to clear more space for the CSF to flush out waste products, and the brain is the only organ in the body that clears its waste in this manner.  Iliff and his team of scientists have applied their findings to try to understand Alzheimer’s disease and have noticed that the waste product in the brain that is flushed by CSF, amyloid-beta, tends to build up and aggregate in the spaces between brain cells of patients with Alzheimer’s.  This buildup is an early step in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, so Iliff and his team are focusing their efforts on better understanding the process to see if they can figure out ways to slow the onset of the disease.  This example reminds the innovation practitioner that great ideas and new thinking can come from old thinking applied to solve modern problems.

Conclusion

The Syrian civil war continues unabated.  The city of Aleppo, one of the oldest in the world (dating back to 5,000 B.C.), is ground zero of the current conflict and suffers from non-stop fighting between the factions.  According to one journalist, “[a]erial footage shows pockets flattened and buildings so damaged they look like melted candles [and…t]he destruction has claimed large parts of the city’s ancient souk, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and severely damaged the 12^th-century Great Mosque and the 13^th-century citadel.”  Unfortunately, the damage being done is leveling the elements of the city that once engendered more peaceful coexistence and interactions.

Yet Al-Sabouni remains hopeful that emerging from the wreckage can be “a new way to build, which will also emerge from the old way, so that places like Syria regain what they have lost, which is cities that are homes to their people, and civilized environments where the communities live in peace.”  She posits that one can build cities for the Middle East “by making a livable home for both rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, owner and tenant, adult and child, in which parts, localities, functions and businesses are woven together in a continuous fabric, and in which a shared moral order emerges of its own accord.”  Her thesis can be the foundation of a new architectural approach that can be taught to future students.  “[I]f that happens,” she concludes, then “something good will have emerged from all our suffering.”  When we think about innovation in a time of war, those innovations tend to focus on more effective ways of causing death and destruction.  It is refreshing for the innovation practitioner to realize that innovation in warfare can also be focused on how to make things better for the inhabitants of a war-torn region once the fighting ends and our collective focus shifts towards restoring civilization.

Image credit: businessinsider.com.au

Sources:

Marwa Al-Sabouni, The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016)

David Roberts, In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

Raja Abdulrahim, “Death Toll Expected to Rise in Siege of Ancient City,” Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2016, A14.

Nancy Keates, “A Home with a Sunny Outlook,” Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2016, M5.

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

TED Talks:

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

This article focuses on a series of observations about Leonardo’s work and applies those to the challenges of the present-day innovator.

When one thinks of Leonardo da Vinci and innovation, the typical picture that emerges would be some of Leonardo’s amazing designs for flying machines, military equipment, or even the Vitruvian Man, perhaps the most famous drawing in history.  I recently read Ross King’s Leonardo and the Last Supper, which focuses on the life of Leonardo da Vinci as it relates to his astounding mural painting at the refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. The Last Supper painting is almost as famous as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, which is possibly the most famous painting in the history of the world. King observes that The Last Supper is a landmark in painting because it marks the beginning of the High Renaissance in art, demonstrating a “magnificent and intellectually sophisticated style emphasizing harmony, proportion, and movement.” King posits that Leonardo’s amazing work created “an entirely new moment in the history of art.”  In 1489, Pietro Perugino was considered the most famous painter in all of Italy. By 1505, after people had seen The Last Supper, Perugino unveiled his latest altarpiece but was “ridiculed for his lack of ability and want of originality” because, as King notes, by 1505 the world had seen the “staggering creative power of Leonardo.”

As I read the story of the making of The Last Supper, I thought about how a modern innovation practitioner could benefit from some of the thoughts around how Leonardo approached his art.

Sketchbook

According to King, “[p]erhaps no one in history ever drew so much as Leonardo, or felt such a compelling need to record on paper everything he saw.”  Leonardo carried a sketchbook with him wherever he went and was a keen observer of “people going about their daily business.”  He focused on “capturing their features and postures as accurately and realistically as possible.”  Leonardo himself wrote that aspiring painters should “go about, and constantly, as you go, observe, note and consider the circumstances and behavior of men in talking, quarreling or laughing or fighting together.” He thought it was wrong for a painter to copy the work or another artist, and recommended that artists work in the open air, observing live subjects in their natural settings.  For example, Leonardo catalogued ten different shapes of noses and used these to make the figures in his paintings more life-like.  For the modern innovator, this aspect of Leonardo’s approach suggests the importance of observation in terms of identifying new innovations. The innovator should leave his or her office and get out to other parts of one’s organization or even outside that organization or company. Because the human eye captures so much more information than the ears, it is critical for an innovator to use this sense to the fullest extent possible.  If one is trying to solve a problem, one should use one’s powers of observation to dive into the problem, including as much actual physical experience as possible.

If one is trying to solve a problem, one should use one’s powers of observation to dive into the problem, including as much actual physical experience as possible.

Studio Environment

Leonardo’s next piece of advice for painters focused on the size of the painter’s studio.  Leonardo wrote that while “[s]mall rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.”  However, King notes that, in fact, Leonardo often occupied some of the largest rooms in a castle when he worked on commissions for wealthy or powerful patrons.  Leonardo also believed that a studio should be “full of fine paintings,” “often filled with music, or the sound of different beautiful books being read, which are often heard with great pleasure.”  Finally, Leonardo recommended that a painter live an isolated life where possible, noting that “[w]hile you are alone you are entirely your own master, and if you have one companion you are but half your own.”  These seemingly disparate pieces of advice from Leonardo contain tidbits of wisdom for the modern innovator.  The setup of workspaces receives a great deal of attention in our offices today, with the increasing popularity of the open bullpen-type environment with low cubicle walls and the end of the single, closed-door offices of the past.  While opinions about the efficacy of the open office vary, the importance of ease of communications and camaraderie/team-building from such a setup can benefit the innovation practitioner.

With regard to Leonardo’s advice that a smaller workspace can “discipline the mind,” my experience has been that the silence and intense concentration afforded by a quiet, isolated room (although with the addition of natural light, which I’ve always thought was critical to clear thinking) can lead to a more effective process for driving out the details of an innovation stream.  A large room, though, might be better suited for brainstorming or collaborative work.  One example of an open, modern workplace intended to inspire creativity is that of the Chiat/Day agency (creators of the famous ad campaign introducing the Apple Mac), which in 1993 commissioned Frank Gehry to design an interior workspace that matched the creative vigor of the inhabitants of the building.  The result was a workspace with no cubicles, offices, or normal desks and where a four-story tall pair of binoculars and pods from old fairground rides defined the area.  Frank Duffy, a prominent office design architect, speaking of another similar project, noted that “its gravest weakness is that it is a place where ‘play’ is enforced on everyone, all the time.”

The lesson here is that workspace design sends a message to its inhabitants, and that message is incredibly important to the overall mission of those in the room. Leonardo’s thoughts from the 15^th century suggest that he understood this characteristic of the workplace.

Interestingly, Leonardo presages one of the features of the modern open workspace when he talks about a room being filled with music, though he did not anticipate the ubiquity of headphones in an open workspace with workers playing mp3s or streaming audio to overcome the cacophony of the office environment. Leonardo’s final recommendation about the importance of an isolated life for the artist is something that is challenging for an innovator in a modern enterprise, but the importance of thinking independently should not be underestimated.  If an innovator sits in a room with the same people all the time, the same ideas and thoughts will be bounced around over and over again and new thinking will be hard to find.

Red Chalk

Art historians have benefitted greatly by a number of chalk-based studies Leonardo created for The Last Supper, in which he worked on detailed designs of various attributes of the painting, such as hands, noses, and other attributes of the painting.  King writes that although “Leonardo used black chalk in a few surviving studies for The Last Supper, […] he seems to have favored – and even pioneered – the use of red chalk.”  Red chalk, consisting of a mixture of clay and iron oxide, dates from Roman times and appears in their wall paintings.  This is an example of where Leonardo purposely stepped away from the conventions followed by his fellow artists.  Charcoal prints, using familiar black chalk, were the typical way to sketch out designs before working in more permanent media such as paint or sculpture.  When an artist wanted to make an initial sketch, the answer was always black charcoal as the tool.  Leonardo started using red chalk because it had two attributes that were superior to black charcoal.  First, the red chalk gave rise to better depiction of the human form because the red tones could be used to mimic the color of flesh.  This was also true for other red-hued scenes, such as smoke or fire or sunlight.  This red coloration made Leonardo’s prints more life-like.  Second, the red chalk was harder than charcoal and could be sharpened to a finer point which allowed for more detailed drawings.

For the modern innovator, the lesson here is to not accept the conventional tools that colleagues or competitors have always used to solve problems. Finding a simple deviation from the common toolset can provide new capabilities.

Hatch Marks

In creating his study drawings in chalk, Leonardo followed a convention used by other artists of the time but with a slight deviation.  Typically, artists would create shading in their drawings through use of parallel strokes called hatching.  According to King, most artists “drew their parallel lines from the lower left to the upper right, ////, [whereas] Leonardo executed his from the lower right to the upper left, \\.”  King notes that the “reason for the individual style was simple: Leonardo was left-handed [… and a]s a mancino, or southpaw, it was easier and more natural for him to draw these backward-leaning hatch marks than to follow the more conventional method.”  From an innovation standpoint, the teaching here comes in the form of following one’s instincts and natural flow to drive innovation rather than trying to adhere to convention.  Leonardo could have tried to force himself to follow the standard hatch mark of lower left to upper right in order to be more like his fellow artists.  Indeed, in that era left-handedness was seen as a flaw and people sometimes took steps to try to force their children to become right-handed.

It is possible that had Leonardo resisted his natural inclination to left-handedness then he might not have achieved the heights of artistic achievement that he was able to attain.

Competition

One lesser-known fact about The Last Supper is that it was not the only painting work underway in the refectory in Santa Maria delle Grazie in 1495.  King states that the local painter “Giovanni Donato da Montorfano was hired – probably by Ludovico Sforza – to paint a Crucifixion scene on the wall opposite the one where Leonardo was to work.” There were two reasons for this pairing of artists in the refectory.  First, it was traditional at the time for refectories to contain representations of both the last supper and the Crucixion, which, King notes, “allowed the monks and nuns to identify with Christ’s sufferings and, as they were exhorted, to contemplate the mysteries of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.” A second reason for the inclusion of the second painting was that art patrons saw the value of pitting one artist against the other to try to elicit from each one his greatest work.  Few people today would consider remarkable the Crucifixion scene across from Leonardo’s work, even if the former has survived in better condition over the years than Leonardo’s masterpiece [see below for an explanation]. For the innovator, the lesson here is that a little competition can help inspire the efforts of individuals on a team.

When trying to solve a challenge, the innovation leader may want to set up two independent teams to pursue solutions to a problem so that the natural dynamics of competition will drive the participants to explore different ideas without being stuck following the same pathways.

Complementary Colors

When we think of brilliant colors on a Renaissance fresco painting we often arrive at a mental image of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling which, after an extensive cleaning and restoration that was completed in 1994, contained brilliant colors that had faded over the centuries.  Leonardo’s masterpiece, likewise, contains stunning colors because Leonardo leveraged a technique known to us today as color complementarity.  As King observes, Leonardo “wanted his mural to have the chromatic panache of an altarpiece painted in tempera or oil rather than this more limited range of tones necessitated by fresco.”  To accomplish this, King continues, Leonardo had to understand “the way colors interacted: how one color could affect, or was affected by, the one beside it.”  King cites Leonardo’s own writings as evidence of his knowledge of this aspect of color complementarity.  “The surface of any opaque body,” Leonardo stated, “is affected by the color of surrounding objects [… and colors can] change their intensity and hue depending on what colors surround them.”  An object painted in red, he continued, “appears more intense if placed next to a white or yellow rather than next to purple.”  King concludes that Leonardo had thus “discovered the law of complementary colors, observing that colors were the most intense if ‘surrounded by their strongest contrasts.’”

From an innovation standpoint, this suggests the importance for the practitioner to think about how some attribute of an innovation could be made stronger by the inclusion of a complementary aspect with it.

In other words, find something that can accompany one’s innovation so that the original item is strengthened by the addition of the second item, with the result adhering to the old adage of one plus one equals more than two.

Center Point

Perspective and symmetry were extremely important to Renaissance painters and this holds true for Leonardo’s masterpiece.  In fact, we can still see today a small nail hole in The Last Supper that marks the exact center point of the artwork, which presumably Leonardo used to position and align the various figures and components of his artwork.  The hole is located, King writes, at “the point on which all lines and all attention would converge: the face of Christ.”  Leonardo considered this to be “the ‘diminishing point’: the location on which all lines of sight ‘tend and converge.’”  Utilizing the “laws of linear perspective,” King notes, fifteenth century “[a]rtists learned to create spatially realistic scenes by making lines perpendicular to the picture plane (known as orthogonals) converge on a vanishing point, and by calculating the graduated scale at which horizontal lines (or transversals) recede into the distance.”  Although the explanation of this characteristic of the artwork sounds complex when explained words, the visual representation of this grid of lines radiating out from the center point of the work is much easier to understand.  From an innovation standpoint, this concept could be useful in terms of representing spatially the set of ideas captured during an ideation session.  The original topic of the ideation session could be considered the center point of the effort, then each new idea captured during the session could be mapped in grid form around the center point idea, using various attributes of those ideas as a means of presenting them on a diagram to show relationships and derive new insights about the original idea.

This could also show areas where we have a surplus of complementary ideas as opposed to areas where we need to invest more ideation time.

Work Pattern

Leonardo took several years to complete The Last Supper, with a start date of 1495 and a completion in 1498.  His working patterns on the painting were of particular interest to his sponsor, Ludovico Sforza, and Leonardo took much longer to complete his work than did Giovanni Donato da Montorfano, who worked on the Crucifixion scene at the other end of the refectory.  According to Matteo Nandello, the nephew of the prior of the refectory, Leonardo’s work ethic was somewhat erratic.  Matteo stated that on some days he had “seen Leonardo go to work early in the morning and climb on the scaffolding [and work] from sunrise to the dusk of evening, never laying down the brush, but continuing to paint without remembering to eat or drink.”  However, Matteo continued, “[o]n other days, Leonardo arrived early for work, though much less painting got done [because] he studied the mural for hours on end without touching his brushes, ‘considering and examining it, criticizing the figures to himself.’”  Some days Leonardo would arrive for work at noon, paint a couple of small areas, then disappear to his other work on an enormous clay sculpture of a horse (which he never actually completed).  When he was actively painting The Last Supper, King suggests that he likely did not follow the typical pattern of a fresco artist of the era by working “systematically across a wall or vault, painting adjacent patches of plaster on consecutive days.”  Rather, according to King, “his style was to work slowly and deliberately, layer by layer, touching and retouching, carefully contemplating the effects as he progressed.”  “When the time came to paint,” King notes, “he proceeded at a pace that was sometimes leisurely, sometimes frantic, and he no doubt worked on several areas of the mural at once, ranging from one end of his scaffold to another in the course of a single day.”

For the innovation practitioner, the lesson here is that the work of true genius and new thinking does not always follow a set pattern; and it’s important to vary one’s intensity of focus, from the micro to the macro, on a frequent basis to adhere to the larger objective of the overall project.

This also reminds us that it is not always possible for ourselves or our colleagues to “be innovative” during a set time, such as a meeting on innovation scheduled for an hour each week. Time spent is sheer contemplation, even without immediate signs of progress, can represent progress in and of itself.

Other Projects

Although we know now that Leonardo was one of the greatest painters of all time, during his lifetime his focus was scattered amongst other areas, including sculpture.  One area of particular interest to Leonardo was that of military equipment, as we can see in many of his famous designs for tanks, catapults, crossbows, and other implements of warfare.  During the period when he was working on The Last Supper, Leonardo happily took a break from his work in Milan and headed to Genoa to review the harbor’s fortifications.  Leonardo conducted testing to determine how projectiles could breach the walls with an eye towards improving the defenses of the city.  As King states, Leonardo’s “dreams of designing cannons, catapults, and giant crossbows, dormant these past few years, quickly revived as the swords began rattling on Milanese borders.”  Unfortunately, Leonardo would soon be let down.  King writes that “[i]f Leonardo hoped his talent and ingenuity were to be used for the defense of the realm, he must have been, as always, sorely disappointed: soon he was back at work on interior decorations.” The lesson here for the innovator is that although we are always told that passion is a critical part to driving our innovation work, it does not necessarily mean that we can only develop innovations in areas where were have our greatest passion for work.

Sometimes the work that seems more mundane can, in fact, lead to great developments that interest us less than those areas where we have a more intense desire to succeed.

Encryption

Leonardo is famous for his handwriting style which he wrote in mirror script. Writing left-handed, he reversed his text so that the reader could only make out the message by viewing the document via a mirror or through the semi-transparent paper itself.  King posits that Leonardo did this not to hide his writings from posterity but, rather, for the simple reason that it was easier to write left-handed from right to left across the page to avoid smearing his hand in ink. King concludes, though, that this “reinforces the image of Leonardo as eccentric and unique: someone who inverted the accepted rules and conventions in order to pursue his own individual path.”  This use of mirror script led to an inadvertently comical episode in which Leonardo attempted to write in code as invaders from France were approaching Milan. Leonardo’s coded message instructed the recipient to “[f]ind Ingil and tell him that you [will] wait for him at Amor and will go with him to Ilopan.”  “The code,” King notes, “is disappointingly easy to crack, since Leonardo simply reversed the order of the letters: [Ingil is Ligni,] Amor is Roma and Ilopan is Napoli.” Furthermore, the fact that Leonardo wrote in mirror script meant that the encoded words in reverse order were actually easier to read than the regular text, which defeated the purpose of the encryption.

The lesson here is that even a sheer genius can sometimes benefit from the input of someone far removed from the day to day workings of the operation.

Whether this is a peer review or even a review by a complete outsider, one would think that the average person scanning over Leonardo’s coded letter would quickly spot the inadvertent disclosure of the coded words in the mirror scripting.

Deterioration

A final observation about Leonardo’s masterpiece is the unfortunate condition of the work after centuries of trials and tribulations.  As King states, “[i]f Leonardo’s style was superlative, his technique, sadly, was not.”  Although considered a fresco, Leonardo in fact did not paint in the standard fresco style.  “[T]he pigments,” King observes, “were not permanently bonded to the plaster, which meant they began flaking within a matter of a few years.”  Just across the refectory from Leonardo’s masterpiece sits Montorfano’s Crucifixion, which remains in an excellent state because it was done with the standard fresco technique of the era.  Leonardo’s work began falling to pieces within two decades after it was completed and has undergone a series of failed restorations, experienced challenges with humidity, suffered from kitchen smoke and flooding, was used by Napoleon’s forces as a horse stable, had doors cut into it by the friars at the refectory, was bombed by the Allies in World War II, and now sits in a state where perhaps 20 percent of the painting is original from Leonardo’s time and 80 percent is the work of the restorers. King notes that the painting is similar to the “ship of Theseus, the vessel carefully preserved by the Athenians, who eventually replaced every one of its rotting timbers and thereby caused philosophical disputes about whether or not it was still the same ship.” For the modern innovator, a possible lesson is that although innovation is important in methods, there are some things that represent the best way of accomplishing a goal that may not be innovative but work at a fundamental level.

The genius in Leonardo’s work was in the details in his subject matter, his use of perspective and structure in his design, his use of complementary colors, but not in his basic fresco technique.

Had he adhered to the same method used by Montorfano, perhaps the work would look very different from how it appears today.

Conclusion

Circling back to the consternation that his sponsor Ludovico Sforza certainly must have felt with the delays incurred by Leonardo in completing his masterpiece, we should remind ourselves that the creative process is not always something that can be encapsulated into a typical 9 to 5 workday.  Indeed, as King states, Leonardo “believed that originality and creativity were more important than economics or square feet.”  Leonardo told his sponsor that “‘men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least,’ adding that they are ‘thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect ideas which they subsequently express and reproduce with their hands.’”  Although metrics are important in managing innovation work, it is important for us not to forget that there is as much art as science in what we do.

Sources:

Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper (New York: Walker and Company, 2012).

Maria Konnikova, “Make a Mess of It: The Power of Ignoring Rules and Being Flexible Even When You Don’t Want To,” New York Times Book Review (October 16, 2016).

Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo_da_Vinci)

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

image credit: quotesgram

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

One of the activities I undertake to force my brain to step outside of any regular patterns is to listen to an internet stream of an all-news French radio station, known as FranceInfo. I lived in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 1991 and FranceInfo was my favorite local station. I recently heard an interview with a French government official discussing an upcoming “jour sans voiture” on a Sunday in Paris across a large portion of the city. Cars would be banned from huge parts of the city and citizens would have to rely on public transportation, biking, or walking to get from place to place. The official was talking excitedly about the lack of pollution and reduction in noise that he expected on that day and the freedom that pedestrians and bicyclists would feel not having to worry about being run over by a car.

I did further research and found that the City of Paris has challenged its citizens to abandon their cars from September 19^th through the 25th (“une semaine sans voiture”).  The City of Paris would provide free access to public transport and bikes for anyone taking this challenge. Although we in America profess to have a love affair with the automobile, the French are perhaps even more attached to their cars, so this program is indeed a major step for its residents.

The objectives of the week without cars are as follows:

(1) Teach Parisians that single-occupancy vehicles can be replaced with other forms of transports for the majority of daily trips

(2) Begin a movement that will progressively reduce the use of single-occupancy vehicles

(3) Analyze the results of the 7 days to see what the effects are on pollution reduction and assess any problems that people have with finding alternative transportation so those problems can be addressed in future political discussions

As I thought about this program from an innovation standpoint, it struck me that something like this would be useful for the innovation practitioner. Think about a Parisian who is used to getting into a car 7 days a week for work and other activities. The scenery in commuting to work is largely the same: same roads, same traffic jams, same fight for parking, same noise, same stress. The scenery for other trips is largely the same as well: same shops, stores, restaurants, gyms, etc. Breaking this bind with the car would immediately and fundamentally alter all of these previous patterns. One would wake up earlier, plot a walking path to the nearest public transit, notice different things in the neighborhood that one would not notice from a car. Smells, sounds, temperatures, and numerous other sensations would be quite different from one’s normal behavior patterns. One would go to different shops, perhaps the closest neighborhood grocery store rather than the larger store that is easier to get to in the car.

I have to believe that these new sets of experiences would open one up to fresh thinking about whatever problem one is trying to solve and that this new thinking would be beneficial to the innovation practitioner.

Although an innovator could try to follow the French model and leave one’s car behind for a week, other accouterments of daily life or work life could be abandoned for a similar period of time to stimulate these new thoughts. One could put away a cell phone for a week (I know many are shuddering at the very thought of that). One could also shut down email for a week, or not do any conference calls.  Rather than sending an email, perhaps walking down the hall to speak to a colleague might result in a conversation that solves a problem. There could be dozens of things that one encounters on a daily basis that could be replaced for a week with something quite different to free one’s mind from the constraints that we find ourselves in on a daily basis. Think of something you do every day the same way and do it differently. Instead of drinking coffee try tea. Instead of taking a break at the coffee shop go somewhere new. Try a different restaurant for lunch. Go for a walk in a different direction than normal. Stepping outside one’s boundaries and forcing a change in one’s patterns could be a good source of new thinking and innovation.

Sources:

https://www.paris.fr/actualites/une-semaine-sans-voiture-cap-ou-pas-cap-3946

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.lepoint.fr/2062233

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

This is the second in a series of articles based on Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927, which takes a whirlwind tour through a series of major events that occurred in the summer of 1927.  Bryson relays the story of the architect Harvey W. Corbett, whose ambitions were larger than physics would permit.  Corbett, Bryson notes, “predicted that skyscrapers would rise hundreds of stories into the clouds and that people living on the upper levels would get their meals by radio, without explaining exactly how he imagined that would work.”  While Corbett can be lauded for dreaming big, the fact that in 2016 we are still not close to achieving his goals suggests that perhaps he aimed too high.  An innovator should think about the future with an open mind but should find ways to stay grounded so that the goals he or she sets remain attainable.

An alternative to the “dream big” approach is evident in a more recent innovation related to sports.  Many fans of college football are familiar with the “Smurf turf” at Boise State University in Idaho.  The artificial surface used for football and other sports at Albertsons Stadium at Boise State is a deep blue that has confounded television viewers since 1986 by making them wonder if their color settings were out of whack when they stumbled across a Boise State game on a sports channel.  The turf is actually trademarked by the university and any organization seeking to install an artificial playing surface in a color other than green has to obtain permission to do so from Boise State.  The innovation lesson from this field comes from the story of how the university became the first to install such a field in 1986.  Sam Fortier, writing in the New York Times, notes that the school’s Athletic Director, Gene Bleymaier, was frustrated by the high price tag of a new field in 1986 (some $600,000 at the time).  Bleymaier wanted to know why the new field was so important, especially since no one would notice the difference between the old field and the new field.  On a whim, Bleymaier decided to install a field in deep blue to match the school’s colors (blue and orange), and a legend was born.  This innovation was the result of asking a simple question of why does the field have to be green, and sometimes simple questions challenging orthodoxy can result in dramatic changes.

Returning to 1927 and keeping with the sports theme, another interesting lesson from that year for innovators concerns the legendary Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees.  Ruth had a great season in 1926 with 47 home runs, 146 RBIs, and a batting average of .372.  In the 9^th inning of the final game of the World Series, Ruth made an ill-advised attempt to steal second base and was thrown out by 10 feet, which gave the series to the St. Louis Cardinals and ended the season.  Ruth’s poor decision-making in the final game of the World Series overshadowed all the hard work he had done for over 100 games in 1926.  Ruth could have retreated into a shell and focused on his failure on such a large stage, but he refocused himself on the upcoming season and went on in 1927 to have the greatest single season in the history of baseball in terms of his output.  The lesson for the innovator here is to remain resilient in the face of failure, which we all know is a frequent companion in the innovation field.  Just as even the greatest baseball hitter fails 2 out of 3 times, so, too, should an innovator not fear a lack of success in one’s efforts.

Another important name from the summer of 1927 is Graham McNamee, who became one of the most famous sports broadcasters in the history of radio.  He got his start by walking off the street into the offices of radio station WEAF on Broadway in NYC and asked for an audition.  McNamee got the job of doing promos and found his way onto the play-by-play for baseball games as an assistant to the sports reporter W. O. McGeehan.  In their first game together, McGeehan decided he wasn’t cut out for the role of a broadcaster and left the studio, which meant that McNamee had to figure out how to finish the broadcast by himself.  According to Bryson, McNamee was not a baseball expert.  However, Bryson writes, he was “a born broadcaster.  McNamee described the crowds, the weather, the air of excitement that was rippling through the park.  He picked out celebrities.  He made the listeners feel present and welcome, like old friends.  People loved his broadcasts even if he didn’t always entirely grasp what was happening on the field.  Sports columnist and author Ring Lardner wrote on one occasion: “I don’t know which game to write about, the one I saw today or the one I heard Graham McNamee announce as I sat next to him at the Polo Grounds.”

There are two innovation lessons from the story of Graham McNamee.  First, there is no substitute for walking in the door with confidence.  Despite the attention placed on the importance of innovation these days, an innovation practitioner still has to find ways to get time from colleagues, executives, and customers to work on projects and facilitate discussions.  Had McNamee not stepped into the radio studios and boldly asked for an audition, he might have never become one of the most famous broadcasters in the country.  Secondly, McNamee’s improvisation when he was thrust into the job of broadcasting a game by himself is an example of the type of thinking on one’s feet that is required of the innovation leader.  McNamee didn’t have all the details of the sport at hand in his early broadcasts, but he found a way to make the broadcast enjoyable for the audience.  The innovator should take this lesson to heart when leading a discussion and make sure that even if he or she doesn’t know all the details of a topic, at least make sure the discussion flows well and the participants come away from the meeting feeling as though their time was well-spent.

1927 was a big year for Henry Ford as well.  Although the most frequently cited innovation by Henry Ford is the assembly line for mass production of complex items, namely the famous Model T automobile.  A less well-known innovation from Ford has to do with the placement of the driver’s seat in the car.  According to Bryson, before the Model T, “nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, curb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out onto a grassy verge or dry sidewalk rather than into the mud of an unpaved road.”  Ford’s instincts told him that it would be better to allow the primary passenger in the vehicle, often the lady of the house, to enjoy this feature, so he switched positions and put the driver on the left and the passenger on the curb side.  Ford noticed that this positioning also gave the driver a better view of the road and for drivers to communicate with each other (presumably in a friendlier manner than the road rage of the modern driver).  As Bryson notes, “Ford was no great thinker, but he did understand human nature.”  The driver side switch for the Model T soon became standard on all cars, at least in countries where cars drove on the right side of the road.  The lesson here for the innovator is that something very simple, such as changing positions in a vehicle, can result in benefits beyond the immediate problem that is being solved.  Likewise, changing one’s mindset to focus on something other than the primary entity in a problem (the driver), can lead to innovation.

The summer of 1927 saw massive popularity of movies, with huge demand on the part of the population for new content (sound familiar?).  This led to challenges on the part of the content producers and as Bryson notes, “[s]tudios were churning out as many as four new films a week, a rate that was clearly incompatible with quality.”  In one example, MGM filmed a beach scene in Paris, despite the lack of a beach or coastline in Paris (although the modern “Paris Plage” today has created a beach on the Seine with the installation of sand and umbrellas each summer).  MGM CEO Irving Thalberg, when confronted with the question of how he could film a beach scene in Paris, stated that “[w]e can’t cater to a handful of people who know Paris.”  The innovation lesson here is that it may sometimes be necessary to cater to a broader audience and be creative in developing new thinking rather than always aligning with a subset of the population that may have a different knowledge set than others.  In other words, new thinking and innovation may require a suspension of disbelief and creativity.

Television came to America in this period as well.  Its forgotten inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth, was plowing the field on his father’s farm in Idaho at age 15 and had a scientific breakthrough.  According to Bryson, Farnsworth “had been reading Einstein’s theory on electrons and the photoelectric effect, and now it occurred to him that beams of electrons could be scanned onto a screen in a back-and-forth pattern exactly as he was plowing his father’s field, one line at a time in alternating directions.”  For the innovator, the lesson here is the importance of engaging in new thinking in parallel with other activities.  Presumably the extended period of time that Farnsworth spent in his tractor going back and forth allowed his mind to wander and think of connections between his actions and the problem he was trying to solve in terms of the photoelectric effect.  While this doesn’t mean that innovators should all head out to their tractors, one can presume that Farnsworth might not have come up with the same conclusion had he spent all his time hunched over a desk reading the same scientific books over and over again.

While television was coming into existence in this period, radio was already in a position of prominence, but faced the chicken and egg problem that has challenged so many innovators over the years.  This was the problem that David Sarnoff, founder of NBC, had to address.  Bryson writes that “[c]ompanies that made radios didn’t care what people listened to, or whether they listened at all, once the radios were bought.  David Sarnoff, remarkably, seems to have been alone in seeing that if there wasn’t anything worth listening to, people wouldn’t buy radios.”  Sarnoff thus focused his efforts on creating content for radio, such as live broadcasts of sporting events, as a way to make sure there was sufficient demand to sell the radios he was producing.  The lesson for the innovator is that in a chicken and egg scenario, the important this is to pick one and act rather than interminably waiting for the problem to solve itself.

Sources:

Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927 (New York: Anchor Books, 2014).

Sam Fortier, “A Paper Defense of the Home Turf,” New York Times (September 11, 2016).

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

As the summer of 2016 draws to a close after Labor Day weekend, I’d like to reflect back on an amazing summer nearly 90 years ago. Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927 takes a whirlwind tour through a series of major events that occurred in the summer of 1927 which saw events ranging from Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic Ocean to the coming of age of radio broadcasting to the launch of television. As Bryson takes us through that eventful summer, I was struck by how many lessons could be derived for the modern innovator from these stories from nearly a century ago. This first part focuses on Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. Future articles will focus on sports and other technologies from the summer of 1927.

Anyone who has walked through the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC and has seen the Spirit of St. Louis hanging from the ceiling has marveled at how a small, single-engine plane with no front windshield was able to make it successfully across the vast Atlantic Ocean where so many others had failed.  Bryson summarized the challenges facing Lindbergh in the paragraph below:

He was clearly just a boy. He had no relevant experience. His plane had no radio and a single engine – Byrd insisted on having three – and had been built by a company no one had ever heard of.  Lindbergh planned to carry no lifeboat and almost no backup supplies.  Above all, he proposed to go alone, which meant flying a difficult and unstable plane for a day and a half through storm and cloud and darkness while intricately balancing the flow of fuel through five tanks governed by fourteen valves, and navigating his way across a void without landmarks. When he needed to check his position or log a note, he would have to spread his work out on his lap and hold the stick between his knees; if it was nighttime he would have to grip a small flashlight between his teeth. Taken together, these were jobs that would test a crew of three.  Anyone who knew flying knew that this was more than any one person could do.  It was madness.  Several newspapermen tried to talk Lindbergh out of his suicidal ambition, but to no avail.

Lindbergh did have an advantage, though, that was not readily apparent at the time. Bryson notes:

The American fliers also had an advantage over their European competitors that nobody yet understood: they all used aviation fuel from California, which burned more cleanly and gave better mileage.  No one knew what made it superior because no one yet understood octane ratings – that would not come until the 1930s – but it was what got most American planes across the ocean while others were lost at sea.

So why did Lindbergh succeed where so many others had failed?  High octane fuel was clearly a technological edge that he enjoyed.  For the innovator, the lesson here is to examine every aspect of a challenge, especially vis-à-vis one’s competitors, to search for any possible edge one might have, even if that edge is not readily apparent.  Aviators attempting to fly from Europe to America focused on the prevailing headwinds that made their flights more difficult though, in fact, their disadvantage stemmed from their fuel as well as the winds.  An innovator should dig deeply into a challenge and make sure all possible angles are examined in looking for an advantage.

Another reason Lindbergh succeeded stemmed from the simplicity of his operation. At a time when other aviators were building larger planes with multiple engines, multiple radios, 3-person crews, and lots of emergency supplies, Lindbergh kept his plane light and simple. Lindbergh supposedly even trimmed the edges off his maps to reduce any and all extra weight before his flight. Simple, laser-like focus on an objective and avoidance of distractions can be an advantage for a modern innovator as well.

In addition, as Alex Spencer of the National Air and Space Museum notes, “Lindbergh didn’t want an innovative plane […h]e wanted nothing but tried and tested technology.” Lindbergh was going to be the first to cross the Atlantic, but he didn’t want to rely on “first” or cutting-edge technology to do so. Although his air-cooled Pratt & Whitney engine was a new design, other aspects of his aircraft and mission stuck to simple, tried-and-true technologies and methods.  For the modern innovation practitioner, one should think about how to achieve innovative goals using basic technology and approaches. We’re often tempted to try to solve problems with the latest and greatest technology, but that sometimes creates more problems that can distract from the larger objective.

After completing his successful flight, Lindbergh became an international sensation and, albeit reluctantly, started a multi-city tour across the U.S., finding huge crowds wherever he went. Although Lindbergh quickly grew tired of his fame and the crush of attention he was receiving, the impact of his tour was greater than anyone could imagine, which Bryson describes as follows:

His tour, however, was having a much greater effect than he probably realized.  Papers everywhere lovingly recorded his flying times between cities: Grand Rapids to Chicago, 2 hours 15 minutes; Madison to Minneapolis, 4 hours; St. Louis to Kansas City, 3 hours 45 minutes.  For anyone who had ever traveled between any such pairs of places, these were magical times.  Moreover, Lindbergh repeated these feats day after day, safely, punctually, routinely, without fuss or sweat, as if dropping in by air were the most natural and sensible way in the world to arrive at a place.  The cumulative effect on people’s perceptions was profound.  By the end of the summer, American was a nation ready to fly.

For the innovator, the lesson here is to think about the broader context when one is engaged in presenting an innovation to a broader audience.  Although on the surface Lindbergh’s tour was all about his past innovation (the trans-Atlantic crossing), the actual effect of the tour was to show the ease of air travel. In other words, there was a secondary impact from the initial innovation that was even more consequential to the future than the initial effort.

Source: Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927 (New York: Anchor Books, 2014).

image credit: thepandorasociety.com

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Anyone who has enjoyed a long walk through the pleasant streets of Greenwich Village in New York may have Jane Jacobs to thank.  Among the most brilliant thinkers in the area of city planning and architecture, Jacobs in 1961 wrote the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  Jacobs wrote that the Modernist movement, which had called for the demolition of old neighborhoods, replacing them with soulless, giant concrete buildings, was making cities worse rather than better.  Traditional cities with their narrow streets, wide sidewalks, and mixed-use sets of buildings provided a sense of community and facilitated interactions between residents in a way that improved the lives of everyone in the area.  Jacobs called for planners “to foster lively and interesting streets” which would create “a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal and neighborhood need.”

These ideas about how cities can self-organize ran counter to the prevailing orthodoxy of the Urban Renewal movement and had a profound impact on city planning, new development, and architecture.  Among those who were influenced by Jane Jacobs were the architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.  Their architectural firm, DPZ, developed the famous Seaside community in Florida that set the standard for how to escape the typical cul-de-sac suburban development while leveraging the aspects of a city that prove most valuable.  DPZ developed a set of six principles for city design based on their observations of various successful towns but perhaps best demonstrated by Alexandria, Virginia and referred to as the “Alexandria rules.”  For the student of innovation, these six rules can be analyzed to show how just as community interactions in proper cities improve overall outcomes, so, too, can the right innovation program parameters lead to better performance in developing new ideas.

Rule 1 – “[T]he community [must have] a ‘clear center,’ where the ‘civilized activity’ of ‘commerce, culture, and governance’ takes place.”

In this rule, DPZ is focusing on the importance of having a well-defined central location for a community.  This can be of interest to the innovation practitioner because of the increasing challenge of mobile workers and dispersed corporate locations.  Although some companies continue to follow the old model of a traditional corporate headquarters, this may be the exception rather than the rule and it is important that we not lose sight of the need for a central location in which employees can interact to exchange ideas and develop new thinking to overcome challenges that their companies face.  Even a centralized research and development (R&D) group may suffer from the fact that it is remote from the rest of the company, which creates gaps in communication.  Centralization is important and should not be overlooked in innovation.

Rule 2 – “[A]ll ‘the ordinary needs of daily life’ lie within a five-minute walk from people’s homes, mostly or completely eliminating the need to drive.”

DPZ here is focused on how a walkable community has advantages over ones that require driving a car to get to places providing the needs of daily life (grocery stores, restaurants, etc.).  For the innovation practitioner, one could think about how to integrate innovation discussions into the needs of daily life as they relate to a corporate setting, such as innovation-themed brown bag lunches, communications material in public spaces such as coffee shops, kitchen areas, break rooms, elevators, cafeterias or credit unions, or even innovation events in places where people tend to congregate.  Getting people to think about innovation in a non-obtrusive way as they make their way through their workday can help foster new thinking and creative ideas.  Likewise, just as walking in a community is a good means of exercise, so, too, could walking from a workplace to lunch (a daily need) engender communications between different employees, particularly if the innovation practitioner takes the time to facilitate these discussions.

Rule 3 – “[T]he community has a street network of small blocks—a ‘continuous web’ making walking easy.”

This rule focuses on the design of the community to ensure that the proper pathways are in place to ensure free movement of people throughout an area.  Although building architects might not be too keen to welcome input from an innovation leader concerning campus design, an innovator could nonetheless spend time thinking about how people are interacting across a corporation to find areas where innovation-themed discussions can take place.  Investing time to observe where people congregate, how they arrive to and from their cars (or mass transit), which groups tend to congregate at social or other activities, can all be useful when trying to find ways to leverage the collective knowledge of the organization in trying to solve problems.

Rule 4 – “[I]t has ‘narrow, versatile’ streets, with wide sidewalks, parallel parking, and active storefronts, providing for slow car speeds and a rich pedestrian life.”

For this rule, DPZ is reversing a trend that had become prominent in cities in which the space allocated to automobiles (streets and parking) grew larger and larger, effectively displacing the pedestrians from the community.  The innovation leader can use this example as a tool of thought when attacking an innovation challenge by reversing the priority 180 degrees to see if focusing on a completely different aspect of the problem leads to new thinking about how to deliver innovative solutions.  Just as DPZ concluded that the car should adapt to the community (not the other way around), so, too, can the innovation practitioner flip a scenario on its head to see what novel solutions may appear.

Rule 5 – “[I]t is mixed use, and yet is ‘not a design free for all,’ as types of buildings, and their implied uses, tend to cluster together—but it is the building type, not the use, that determines the clustering.”

DPZ here focuses on the importance of balancing the advantages of mixed use while still adhering to a design aesthetic of having similar-looking buildings in the same area.  For the innovation practitioner, this balance could be struck between getting messaging out to diverse groups in order to obtain a diversity of opinions while not doing so in a way that seems ill-organized or disjointed.  For instance, a problem that needs to be solved in the accounting area that needs innovation applied to come up with possible solutions may not be well-suited to the sales group, although we can sometimes be surprised when a person from a completely different group recognizes a common theme and applies a solution from his or her area to solve a problem in a completely unrelated area.

Rule 6 – “[I]t sets aside ‘special sites for special buildings’ such as churches and civic buildings ‘that represent the collective identity and aspirations of the community.”

This final rule from DPZ yields insights concerning an often overlooked aspect of innovation.  DPZ notes that building a purely utilitarian community focused on commerce and residences alone would leave the community lacking in the areas of spirituality and civic duty.  The parallel for the corporate innovator is the challenge of ensuring that there is a common mission or purpose aligned with one’s efforts, whether this is a corporate transformational program (typically with a future date and vision) or a charismatic leader who inspires his or her employees to do great things beyond simple marginal improvements to the bottom line.  The goal could be, as articulated by the architect Charles Mulford Robinson and referenced in Wade Graham’s Dream Cities, to develop “happier people of the rising City Beautiful [who] will grow in love for it, in pride in it [… and who] will be better citizens, because [they are] better instructed, more artistic, and filled with civic pride.”

Modern Street with Wide Sidewalks in Jerusalem

Ancient Roman Street in Jerash with Sidewalk

Sources:

Photographs Courtesy of the Author

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992)

Wade Graham, Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World (New York: Harper Collins, 2016).

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

I recently wrote about innovation lessons from the Inca citadel at Machu Picchu in Peru.  This article focuses on other Incan innovations from Machu Picchu and elsewhere in Peru. 

As mentioned in the previous article, some scholars believe that the purpose of the site at Machu Picchu was to serve as a research station for the Incas as they expanded their empire from the mountainous region around their capital at Cusco into the jungles of the Amazon.  As part of their research, the Incas developed techniques to observe the stars at Machu Picchu to aid in their analysis of the seasons.  While touring the site recently I noticed a rock carved in the distinct shape of the Southern Cross, a well-known celestial navigational aide in the Southern hemisphere.  I had just seen the actual Southern Cross in the sky earlier in the trip, so I was excited to see this rendered in rock form at the site. 

Our local guide then led us to two small rock circles carved into the ground in one part of the site.  The circles had small rims and were filled with perhaps a centimeter of water.  Standing over the circles, one could see the reflection of the sky very clearly.  According to our guide, the Incas used the reflecting pools to observe the stars, as craning one’s neck to stare upwards at the sky for long periods of time proved to be a less than effective means of making celestial observations.  For the innovation practitioner, the lesson here is that sometimes it is necessary to look down in order to look up.  In other words, staring directly at a problem might not be the most effective way to analyze it.  Sometimes inverting what we are observing may be a more effective means of analyzing a problem. 

Another striking aspect of the Machu Picchu site is the use of existing rocks and features of the mountain for the structure of the buildings at the citadel.  Although in many places the Incas developed complex terracing to serve as the foundations of their site and prevent erosion (including some terraces that are breathtaking in their seeming ability to hang on the sides of cliffs above drop-offs of hundreds of feet), much of the citadel is integrated into the mountain.  The Temple of the Condor seems to rise from the mountain itself, and the stonework ties in almost seamlessly with the existing mountain.  For the innovation practitioner, this can serve as a reminder of the importance of leveraging what is already in place when creating a new innovation.  The combination of old and new can make the overall innovation even more striking than if someone had created the innovation completely from scratch.

In addition to using the natural features of a site, the Incas also made extensive use of stone terracing in their buildings.  Each terrace would consist of a stacked stone wall, sometimes 8-10 feet in height, and filled in with layers of rock and dirt to allow for proper drainage.  This served as the foundation for construction, prevented erosion in mountainous terrain, and could provide level surfaces for agriculture to prevent runoff and allow for cultivation of crops in steep terrain.  The Incas often built dozens of terraces in a stair-step fashion up the side of a mountain, and because of the height of the walls, the Incas had to come up with an innovative way to allow workers to move from one terrace to another.  The solution to this challenge was a series of steps consisting of stones jutting out from the wall, each separated from the next step by about 2 feet horizontally and vertically. 

At the heavily terraced site at Moray, modern visitors are able to try out these steps.  I am over 6 feet tall and found that walking up the steps was quite a challenge due to the distance between the steps.  Knowing that the average height of the Incans was relatively short, I was puzzled by how the workers would be able to use these steps which seemed more like rock ladders than stairs.  Our local guide said that the stone steps were designed for a worker to run up and down rather than walk, and recommended that I try it again at a brisk pace.  The steps proved perfectly spaced for running and my ascent and descent was much easier.  This had the advantage for the Incas of requiring half as much stone for construction as would be required for normal steps that were spaced one foot apart.  For the student of innovation, the finding here is that sometimes speed is an important variable in considering an innovation.  Something that might not work well at normal speed could have a completely different experience at a higher speed.

One of the most amazing engineering feats of the Incas concerns the ability of so many of their structures to survive the earthquakes that have struck Peru over the centuries since the Inca Empire thrived.  In several locations, the Spanish built structures over Inca structures and after an earthquake, the newer Spanish structures collapsed and the Inca stonework survived, usually unscathed.  Techniques used by the Incas to earthquake-proof their buildings included using different sized stones (avoiding symmetry to better dissipate earthquake forces), fitting their stones together without mortar (to avoid the weakness and cracking of mortar), offsetting the base of the walls from the top (building at an angle), and using innovative stone ball-bearings embedded between layers of a wall (which allowed the stones to move in response to the motion of the earthquake).

One of the best examples of earthquake-proofing by the Incas can be seen at the Qurikancha site in Cusco.  This site was originally the Inti Kancha (Sun House) of the Incas, but was destroyed by the Spanish (other than its foundation walls).  The Inti Kancha was perhaps the most important temple for the Incan Empire and, in addition to its large and impressive walls, was filled with gold.  The Spanish built their Church of Santo Domingo on the site but that church was damaged and destroyed by earthquakes on several occasions.  The “modern” (at the time) Spanish masonry could not withstand the movement of the ground but the “ancient” Inca foundational walls survived.  The lesson for the innovator here is to not focus exclusively on what seems to be the newest approach to a topic.  One should consider past approaches to solving problems when working to come up with an innovation.

A final innovation of the Incas worth exploring is a salt production facility that continues to be in use today.  In the town of Maras, a small spring has produced water with a high salt content since before the time of the Incas.  This spring feeds into a series of hundreds of terraces where the local residents allow the water to evaporate in the intense Peruvian sun and produce salt.  The current users of the site work cooperatively to divert the water flow to whatever terrace needs to be replenished, using small stones and hundreds of channels so the water reaches its intended destination.  The salt is sold for food and health and beauty purposes. 

Looking at the site from a modern perspective, the question I posed to our local guide was whether the Peruvians had a detailed scientific understanding of what created the spring and why it was so unique.  The guide noted that researchers had used ground penetrating radar to try to gather more information about the spring but the locals refused their request to use excavating machinery to dig around the site, as they feared that the work might disrupt the spring and ruin something that had been working fine for hundreds of years (if not longer).  The lesson for the innovator here is that sometimes we may spend too much time questioning the source of a new idea to the point where we take actions that interrupt the flow of the innovation.  It may be better to focus our attention downstream to translate the innovation into useful products, rather than focusing too much on understanding the original source.

Sources:

Pictures Courtesy of the Author

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_%28Inca_ruin%29

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maras,_Peru

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

This is the first in a series of two articles on innovation of the Inca civilization.  One of the best-known Inca sites is the mountaintop citadel of Machu Picchu.  The site is breathtaking in its location, with steep slopes rising from the Urubamba River and huge mountain peaks all around.  Some visitors consider it a highly spiritual place, sensing energy in the rocks, while others see it as an incredible feat of engineering for a civilization from the 15th century that lacked modern tools and technology.  Building something like Machu Picchu today with modern equipment would be a huge challenge even for the most gifted architect.  For the student of innovation, Machu Picchu could be considered a Mecca of new thinking, though the brilliance of the Inca civilization is not limited to this citadel.  After a brief exploration of Machu Picchu, this article will explore other worthy sites of Incan innovation in Peru.

Situated at nearly 8,000 feet above sea level and 450 feet above the Urubamba River, the citadel of Machu Picchu consists of hundreds of stone terraces and amazing stone structures.  The stonework of the Incas is world renowned, with rocks sculpted and fitted together so precisely that one cannot put the blade of a knife between the stones hundreds of years later.  The most popular view of the site is from what is known as the Guard House, looking down on the site, with soaring mountain peaks all around.  Built by the Incan Emperor Pacachutec in the 15^th century, the site was abandoned in the 16^th century and was popularized by the American explorer Hiram Bingham, who traveled to the location in 1911 and published articles and books on what he found there.  Theories abound as to the purpose of the site, ranging from a country estate to a fortress to a sort of university. 

Our first innovation lesson from the Incas concerns the theory of Machu Picchu as a university.  The Inca civilization’s capital was situated in Cuzco, a mountainous area of Peru some 50 miles to the southeast of Machu Picchu.  Cuzco’s elevation is over 11,000 feet above sea level and is situated in a drier region.  Machu Picchu represents a transition from the mountainous areas of the Incan Empire to the jungle region of the interior or Peru, towards the Amazon.  The Incas were comfortable living in the areas around Cuzco, but as their Empire expanded they needed to learn how to survive and thrive in a more jungle-oriented area.  Machu Picchu represented a middle point between the mountainous areas of comfort and the new jungle areas where the Incas would encounter new peoples and a different climate.  The Incas would feel safe in the citadel and the terracing and stone construction would remind them of other parts of their Empire, while the location would be at the edge of the jungle where they needed to learn how to survive and expand. 

One piece of evidence to support this theory of Machu Picchu as a university is the discovery of a series of plants and seeds in what could be considered scientific growing areas in the citadel, where the Incas could see how their familiar crops grew in a more humid and temperate climate.  The site also contained jungle plants that the Incas were cultivating on one of their terraces as well.  Other evidence includes the various astronomical and solar measurement devices at the site, such as the famous “hitching post of the sun” device which has been validated by modern scientific methods as being extremely accurate. 

The features of Machu Picchu that were considered by previous scientists as representative of a “fortress,” such as the famous Guard House (which was a storage room), and a stone wall and moat (which was a water channel for agriculture and household use), suggest that the site had other uses.  The Sun Gate, where hikers completing the Inca Trail first see the amazing site and often break down into tears after the arduous trip, is not much of a fortification.  Rather, it aligns precisely with the position of the sun at the solstice.  One of the other roads leading to the site, the Inca Bridge, did provide a sort of drawbridge for access to the site (a wooden platform against a sheer rock wall with a drop-off of hundreds of feet), but this is the exception rather than the rule for the site. 

The Inca site of Moray, near Cuzco, is a great example of the use by Incas of an agricultural research station.  Moray consists of several large depressions (the largest is 98 feet deep) in the Earth in which the Incas built dozens of huge circular terraces.  Each terrace represented a micro-climate and modern scientists have determined that there is a difference of as much as 27 degrees Fahrenheit in temperature from the top terrace to the lowest terrace.  Different levels of moisture also exist across the site, and researchers believe that the Incas used these terraces to study the effects of different hybridizations of plants to see which ones would thrive in different climates.  The placement of the site, at 11,500 feet above sea level, also leverages different breezes coming from the surrounding mountains and valleys thus adding other variables to the agricultural research. 

For the modern innovation practitioner, the lesson here is the importance of partial immersion as a means of developing new thinking.  Rather than making a few exploratory trips into the jungle and bringing back and analyzing their findings, the Incas decide to co-locate themselves with the jungle but they did so in a way that afforded them some protection from the threats of the jungle.  They also established a location that shared some of the characteristics of their more familiar setting (the mountains) so that they had a context for analysis of what they found in the jungle areas. 

An innovator seeking to leverage this approach might want to take ideas from innovation within one business unit or product and leverage it in searching for new ideas about how to improve another business unit or product.  Rather than diving completely into the new organization, the innovator could set up a sort of halfway house where he or she could bridge the old and new thinking.  This runs counter to the blue ocean theory, but there may be occasions where keeping a toehold in the old, familiar world has advantages over a brand new approach.  The terracing of the agricultural research station at Moray also presents an opportunity for the modern innovator, as he or she could think about how to structure analysis with a set of specific variations in order to develop new thinking and test out new ideas to determine which is best suited to one’s overall objectives.

Photographs Courtesy of the Author:

Top Left –  Overview of Machu Picchu Site

Top Right – The Inca Bridge

Middle Left – Hitching Post of the Sun

Middle Right – Moray Agricultural Research Terraces

Bottom Left – Sun Gate

Bottom Right – Site Overview from Wayna Picchu 

Other Sources:

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_%28Inca_ruin%29

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Modern travelers in Rome sometimes notice the abbreviation “SPQR” in various places throughout the city, such as manhole covers.  Students of Latin know that this stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus, which translates to “The Senate and the Roman People.”  This phrase represents the government of the ancient Roman Empire and continues to this day to serve as a symbol of the Italian municipality of Rome.  When we think of ancient Rome from an innovation standpoint, our thoughts typically turn to the familiar large-scale engineering feats of the Romans, such as incredible aqueducts (the Pont du Gard in France), enormous edifices (the Coliseum in Rome), or roadways that have survived for thousands of years (the Appian Way in Italy).  Although these creations are worthy of innovation-related examination in and of themselves, the purpose of this article is to examine other, lesser-known examples of Roman innovation.  The innovations we will explore in this writing are the breakwater at Caesarea in Judea (Israel), the water collection system for the mountaintop fortress at Masada (Israel), the location of amphitheaters in Roman cities and, finally, the political innovations of the Roman tribune Gaius Sempronius Gracchus.

Located to the south of the present-day Israeli city of Haifa, the ancient city of Caesarea Maritima was a port city built by Herod the Great, the King of Judea as appointed by the Romans, from 22 to 10 BC.  Although the city was provided fresh water by an impressive aqueduct that delivered water from natural springs that were over 10 miles away, the most interesting innovation at Caesarea was in the construction technique used by the Roman engineers to create a breakwater and port on the Mediterranean Sea.  At this location on the Mediterranean coast, there is a flow of water from south to north that carries sediment coming far away from the Nile River in Egypt.  Lacking the modern tools that make maritime construction less challenging (massive barges, divers, caissons, cranes), the Romans built initial portions of the seawall in a way that took advantage of the natural flow of the sea at this location.  With initial assistance from workers depositing rocks and concrete blocks, the sea essentially built the breakwater by itself over time.  Rather than working against the sea, the Romans chose to let the sea work for them.  This resulted in the creation of one of the most spacious harbors in the world at that time.  According to the ancient historian Josephus Flavius, Caesarea’s port compared favorably to the Greek port of Piraeus near Athens, and Caesarea became a hub for shipping and supplies for the inland city of ancient Samaria and hosted the Herodian Navy.  Modern visitors to the site today can see the enormity of the site and can grasp the challenges faced by the Romans who sought to transform such a desolate location into a functioning port city.

For innovation practitioner, the lesson of Caesarea is to find pathways to developing new ideas that mirror existing flows of ideas within an organization.  Rather than trying to create an innovation program from scratch and pulling colleagues away from their regular work to focus on innovation, the practitioner may be better suited to study existing pathways of communication and, with a little facilitation, redirect those efforts towards an innovative outcome, just as the Romans took the existing flow of sediment from the sea and redirected it to constructive purposes.

Another Roman innovation lesson can be derived from the hilltop citadel of Masada, located in modern-day Israel adjacent to the Dead Sea.  King Herod, who was quite busy as a builder in his lifetime, built Masada as a fortress palace south of Jerusalem to provide himself with a place of refuge to escape any possible revolts in his kingdom.  Masada is located at the edge of the Judean desert and is an extremely arid location, receiving a tiny amount of rainfall per year (less than 2 inches).  Masada is also built on top of a mountain that ranges from 400 to 1,300 feet high, so getting water to the living areas on the citadel is extremely challenging.  However, when rains do strike the area, they can come in large amounts quickly (sometimes as flash floods) and are channeled naturally by the surrounding mountains, draining towards the Dead Sea.  To adapt to this climate, the Romans dug giant cisterns into the stone in the fortress and cut multiple water canals (mini-aqueducts) leading from the mountains all around the fortress and directed those canals into their cisterns.  When the small amount of rainfall occurred during the rare storms, the Romans efficient gathered this water and channeled it into their storage tanks, located part of the way up the mountain.  Workers then carried smaller cylinders of water up the rest of the way and filled in larger cisterns on the top of the mountain.

For the modern innovator, the water challenge at Masada points to the importance of thinking about innovation as something that, rather than being a constant stream, is often a burst of intense and valuable activity that needs to be captured carefully and is frequently used at a later date.  Having the mechanisms in place to capture this flow when it occurs is important, as is the need for a longer-term storage for ideas that, while they may not be useful immediately, could be of benefit to another effort in the future.  The job of the innovation practitioner is to design the channels that funnel the ideas into a collection mechanism, curate the collection of ideas, then, at the appropriate time, move the ideas into a prominent location when they are needed.

A third innovation lesson from ancient Rome concerns the location of amphitheaters.  On a recent trip to the Roman city of Jerash in present-day Jordan, our guide raised the question of why Roman amphitheaters are usually situated next to temples.  One hypothesis was that because a temple was the site of greatest importance for a city and numerous people would congregate at the temple, a need developed over time to provide entertainment to pass the time for those waiting to get into the temple to see a priest or to make a sacrifice.  People with spare time on their hands often seek entertainment, thus the amphitheater became a location to service this need of the townspeople and other visitors.

For the innovation practitioner, the notion of spaces where colleagues congregate with spare time is an important one from the standpoint of looking for opportunities to interact and guide innovation discussions.  In our increasingly dispersed workplaces with more and more remote employees, this is becoming more challenging, but that may be why many building architects are designing spaces where workers must encounter people from other workgroups or divisions throughout the day.  These encounters can result in the exchange of ideas that lead to new ways of thinking for all involved.  Apart from assisting any facilities planning to ensure these opportunities for encounters exist, the innovation practitioner may also want to lead efforts to drive these interactions and make it easier for people to escape their workspaces and normal patterns to imbue greater creative thinking.

A final Roman innovation comes from the government official Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, who served as a tribune from 123 to 122 BC.  Gaius is thought of as one of the most innovative Roman officials and his new thinking includes creation of an early form of food stamps, public purchasing of grain, distribution facilities for food, identity checking (to ensure only appropriate citizens are receiving government benefits), pre-emptive measures to avoid famine with the variability of Mediterranean harvests, giving the accused the right of appeal for death penalty sentences, outlawing of bribery, land distribution to the poor, exporting citizens to overseas areas to expand the empire, creating rules for Roman officials operating abroad, and providing citizens with redress for abuses by these officials.  Each of these political innovations is worthy of investigation in its own right, but one anecdote from Gaius’s life is particularly interesting.  According to his biographer, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, Gaius made a memorable gesture when he was addressing the Roman Senate.  The configuration of the Senate hall had the Senators seated together on one side and, directly opposite, the common people of the city had gathered in an open plaza in the Forum to hear the speakers.  Those speaking before Gaius chose to face the Senators while speaking with their backs turned to the people.  Gaius made the decision to face the open plaza and the people while giving his speech, effectively turning his back on the Senators.  According to Plutarchus, this made a “revolutionary” point and linked Gaius to the people and away from the oversight of the Senators.

For the modern innovation practitioner, the lesson of Gaius Gracchus is to think about one’s audience at all times and direct discussions to the appropriate audience.  When presented on an innovation topic in front of a client or colleagues, we often focus on the Senior Executives in the room, often at the expense of the other participants in the meeting who are sometimes just as influential in terms of making a proposed innovation program a success.  We either literally turn our backs on the non-Executives in the room by focusing our attention only on certain people, or figuratively do so by concentrating only on these individuals.  The lesson from Gaius Gracchus is to focus on the larger audience as well as the leadership to ensure that our message is delivered as broadly as possible.

Sources:

Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2015)

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

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

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

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

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.