The Ancient Roots of Innovation
Today’s article is the first of a two-part series on innovation.
I gave a talk at the Outcomes Conference in Chicago titled “WHERE INNOVATION GOES WRONG: Four Misconceptions Around Leading Sustainable Innovation.”
In part two, I’ll share these four misconceptions leaders have around innovation and how to avoid them.
Today, I want to rewind the clock about 500 years and share three lessons we can learn from ancient history to apply to our leadership.
You see, I used to believe that innovation was about brand-new ideas. Original thinking. New concepts. Blue ocean strategies.
Then I spent a decade and a half leading innovation in one form or another. Starting new things. Building teams. After thousands of hours of leading and learning, I realized that many of my early assumptions about the nature of innovation were wrong.
One assumption I had made was that innovation was only about things that had never been done before. If it had been done, or if it was built on the work of someone else, was it really innovative?
I now believe that innovation is ancient.
Innovation is not new – it is based on ancient truths and principles. Our task as leaders is to translate and apply those truths to a modern context.
Innovation is ancient.
As the writer of Ecclesiastes sagely notes, there is nothing new under the sun:
“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9
This got me thinking – I wonder what we could learn about innovation from ancient history?
I began to look for patterns of innovation in history. The more I looked, the more I noticed innovation everywhere in ancient times.
Take the Duomo in Florence, Italy, for example.
Above: A photo of the Duomo di Firenze captured in 2017 in Florence, Italy. The Duomo is a case study in innovation.
The Duomo is famously capped by a dome designed and built by Filippo Brunelleschi in the early 1400s. At a staggering height of 376 feet tall, Brunelleschi devised an ingenious method to construct the entire dome without wooden scaffolding or supports. The techniques that Brunelleschi developed were centuries ahead of their time.
The Duomo is a physical manifestation of the process of innovation – a group of individuals putting their God-given gifts to work to devise and build something that had never been done before.
I’ll write more in a future article about Brunelleschi’s Dome. But if you’d like to learn more in the meantime, I highly recommend Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture.
Today, let’s consider three lessons we can learn about innovation from another leader during the Renaissance. This leader rose to prominence nearly a century after Filippo Brunelleschi built his dome in Florence –the man Martin Luther.
Martin Luther and lessons from an historic innovator
If I asked you to think of the most innovative people in history, Martin Luther probably would not be the first person that comes to mind. He might not even crack the top ten. But let’s consider the case for Martin Luther-as-innovator, and the Protestant Reformation as a significant time of innovation:
He challenged the commonly-held beliefs of his day. Like many innovators before and since, Martin didn’t conform to the consensus. He used critical thinking skills that led him to breakthrough insights that were very much outside the norm of his day.
He leveraged new technology to achieve unprecedented scale and reach. Luther is perhaps most well-known for using the relatively new technology of the printing press in unique ways. This caused the message of the Reformation to spread like wildfire in ways that traditional publishing approaches of his day could have never accomplished.
He developed unconventional approaches to getting his message across. Beyond technology alone, Luther innovated in many ways that were wildly different from his contemporaries, such as using woodcut illustrations. He also used simple non-academic language and published in the common language of German rather than the language of academic debate, Latin.
He (and others) created a new system that would change the lives of tens of millions of people throughout history. Perhaps the best case for Luther as an innovator is the influence that his work has had over the past 500 years. Luther’s approaches to bringing the Bible to people in their common language, encouraging them to read it for themselves, and challenging church authority has changed the world throughout history.
Here are lessons from the life and times of Martin Luther that I hope will inspire you in your leadership and your call to innovate.
Lesson One: Start with Purpose
Luther was a man driven by purpose. A highly conscientious man, throughout his early life, Luther became convinced that the church of his day had buried the truths of the scripture underneath layers of church doctrine and tradition. He’s perhaps most famous for his Ninety-five Theses on church indulgences, but when he penned those, he had no interest in splitting the church as he knew it, but rather calling out a practice that he felt was unbiblical and wrong.
Eventually, however, through a series of increasingly profound experiences, he became wholly driven by a purpose to reform the church, restore the centrality of the Bible to the Christian life, and what we now know as the Protestant Reformation was born.
All effective innovation begins with and is driven by a compelling purpose.
Without a purpose, Luther would have had no reason to innovate. But he did have a purpose, which gave him the drive to challenge the status quo, think creatively about how to use the technology of his day to spread his message, and ultimately risk his life for his cause.
💡 Takeaway: All innovation should start with the question why are we doing this? To what end do we need a breakthrough? Why must we find new and better ways to accomplish our mission? What is our end goal – our purpose?
Lesson Two: Leverage your Context
We’ve already talked a bit about who Luther was. But Luther’s context was just as important – where he was born, when he was born, and his life experiences created the fertile soil in which he was able to make an impact. Here’s just a short list of things that shaped the world Luther grew up in:
Luther’s family shaped him. His mother was a pious, intelligent woman, and his father was a strong, easily angered, combative man who was clever and ambitious in business.
The Catholic Church represented the dominant religion and power structure of his day. Luther came to believe that it had added layers of rules and tradition that distracted from the truths at the core of the faith.
The Humanist Movement shaped the way intellectuals engaged with knowledge. For instance, humanists believed in reading original texts rather than summaries or translations. This informed Luther’s belief that everyday people should be able to read the Bible for themselves, in their own language.
Luther was born in a time of technological change and innovation. The breakthrough communications technology of his day - the printing press was introduced nearly 65 years before Luther wrote his Ninety-five Theses, but it had yet to be used in the way Luther and his contemporaries would eventually use it to spread their message.
It was also a time of entrepreneurial opportunity – entrepreneurial endeavors surrounded Luther because of the geopolitical and economic context he was born into. It’s not a secret that the prosperity of the publishing industry was a key driver in spreading his and other Reformers’ ideas.
Luther’s life experiences and education shaped him. He studied law and then philosophy before committing himself to the monastic life. Luther became faculty and was promoted to higher roles, ultimately becoming chair of theology at the University of Wittenberg.
Luther was shaped by his friends and contemporaries. He was surrounded by people living out their own giftings and context in a way that made the Reformation possible - more on that in the next lesson.
We all are a product of two things – 1) who we were created to be, and 2) the context in which we are placed.
The better we understand who we are, our strengths and weaknesses, and how to live that in the context we are placed, the more effectively we can innovate.
💡 Takeaway: What are your unique strengths? How about your weaknesses? Where have you been placed in this season? How can you best live out who you are in that intersection?
Lesson Three: Innovation Requires Collaboration
Despite popular belief, the idea of the lone innovator is a myth. Instead, innovation takes a village – many individuals using their gifts and talents, coming together in a shared context.
Luther gets an undue amount of credit for his role in the Reformation. He was an important figure, but he was also surrounded by contemporaries using their talents and gifts to contribute to furthering the movement.
Looking just at Luther’s immediate circle of collaborators, here are just three examples:
Lucas Cranach was an artist and entrepreneur, and friend of Luther. He was a court painter and ran a thriving Wittenberg art studio and production shop. He innovated and mastered creating woodcuts depicting vivid imagery and emotion. Cranach was also savvy in business, investing in paper mills and print production. His business savvy ultimately helped make the small town of Wittenberg a publishing powerhouse in Europe. Both of these innovations would prove to be vital for spreading the message of the Reformation.
Frederick the Wise was the local authority and patron to both Luther and Cranach. A devout Catholic himself, he nonetheless protected Luther. When Rome demanded that Luther be handed over to the church authorities, Frederick politically maneuvered and never gave him up. At one point, Frederick hid Luther away in his castle in Wartburg. During this time of isolation, Luther undertook arguably the most innovative and impactful work of his life — translating the Bible into German.
Philip Melanchthon was a theologian and follower of Martin Luther and, ultimately, his closest colleague. Described by Luther as a “towering intellectual force,” Philip was also described as “shy, stammering… and frail.” Unlike Luther, he had a cautious personality and was timid and reluctant to assert himself. But Luther saw him as his intellectual superior and looked to Philip to correct and improve his own work. Melanchthon took Luther’s ideas and built on them.
Luther may have helped to clear the way, but he was surrounded by collaborators that used their gifts to ensure the innovation of the Reformation was sustainable.
Effective innovation requires deep collaboration.
💡 Takeaway: Who are you surrounding yourself with? Do you have people in your life who bring different perspectives, gifts, and lived experiences to the table? Innovation takes a village – many individuals using their talents, coming together in a shared context.
If you’d like to learn more, one of the best books I’ve read that offers insights into the life of Martin Luther is Brand Luther, by Andrew Pettegree (Penguin, October 2015).
This week’s article is adapted from an article I wrote for Outcomes Magazine called “Innovation’s Roots.”
Soon, I’ll share four common misconceptions about innovation among leaders and how to avoid them.
Until next week… Surfs Up! 🌊
- Dave
About the Author | Dave Raley
Consultant, speaker, and writer Dave Raley is the founder of Imago Consulting, a firm that helps non-profits and businesses create profitable growth through sustainable innovation. He’s the author of a weekly trendspotting report called The Wave Report, and the co-founder of the Purpose & Profit Podcast — a show about the ideas at the intersection of nonprofit causes and for-profit brands.
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