The Groove Issue 16 - To Innovate is Human
Welcome to the sixteenth issue of The Groove.
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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
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TO INNOVATE IS HUMAN
Avoiding Repetition Suppression
We humans are wired to create and to seek innovation. There’s a phenomenon that neuroscientists call “repetition suppression” and it means that the more your brain is exposed to the same thing, the less it will resonate each time. Neuroscientist David Eagleman and music composer Anthony Brandt, wrote about repetition suppression in their book “The Runaway Species”.
This is a scan of a brain that has been exposed to the same thing 24 times. The neural activity basically decreases to almost zero by the phenomenon of repetition suppression. Source: Eagleman/Brandt “The Human Species”.
Were you impressed the first time you FaceTimed someone who was thousands of miles away? Maybe you were, like I was, but now, like with Zoom, it is so commonplace that we take it for granted.
We like predictability, we like our paths and routines - in fact we need them - but it isn’t enough. We still crave novelty and surprise. That’s why a movie isn’t that amazing after you’ve watched it five times, and why we keep adopting new technologies when they come out. If our businesses and practices, regardless of what we do, aren’t continually updated, tweaked, and refreshed, we lose relevancy and our clients tune out.
Creativity is paramount to human development, and it is understood not as arts and crafts and preschoolers cutting papers, but as the unique human ability to use what already exists to come up with something better in any field. Innovation is a second step, a byproduct of creativity, and it is the introduction of that novelty into the world. Anyone is capable of being creative and innovative, those aren’t qualities reserved to just a handful of chosen ones.
Giotto, The First Innovator of the Renaissance
Madonna Enthroned, also known as the Ognissanti Madonna, is a 1310 tempera on panel painting by the Italian artist Giotto di Bondone, housed in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, Italy. The innovations made by Giotto in this large-scale painting (128 × 80 inches) of the Madonna and Child are made particularly apparent through comparing the work with those of Giotto's older teachers Duccio and Cimabue (images below). There is a masterful use of architectural perspective and a clear sense of anatomical realism that wasn’t present in the art created by Giotto’s predecessors.
The desire to innovate is one of the reasons why Giotto di Bondone, a young Italian man working in Florence in the mid-1200s, became the first widely famous artist in his lifetime since Ancient Greece. He thought that the Byzantine and Medieval figures painted on wood and frescoes looked flat, lacked expression, and transmitted no emotion. He started studying the classics of 1500 years before and use highlights and shades to create a new illusion of depth. He added more roundness in the human figures, he painted and hired models to be able to look closely at their faces and understand how to convey drama through art.
In Giotto’s work, architectural elements also became 3-D, aided by the illusion of perspective. He was innovating what existed in ways not known before. Giotto was unanimously considered by his contemporaries as the best in his craft, and later baptized as the first artist of the Renaissance. Giotto influenced Donatello, Masaccio, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and all of them agreed that without his advances in art, the Renaissance wouldn’t have been the same.
Right: Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna ca. 1290–1300. Left: The Castelfiorentino Madonna is a tempera and gold on panel painting attributed to Cimabue, ca.1283-1284
The Ability to Innovate as The Most Sought-After Skill
Creativity and innovation are needed not just in the arts, but also in companies that depend on brilliant out-of-the-box thinkers for their leadership and success. Last October, The World Economic Forum released its 2020 Future of Jobs report (fully updated to account for the pandemic) and the number one skill that all employers are looking for across the board and in every country is to have employees with the ability to innovate. In lower ranks, creativity also appears consistently.
This is the skill that will future-proof any job and it also applies to any entrepreneur and business owner. Why? Because we know that humans want newness, that novelty is what captures people’s attention, and that we need to keep innovating our old ways if we want to thrive in this world we live in.
LinkedIn also reached the same conclusion when it scanned the information shared in the network by roughly 660 million professionals, searching for the skills that were most in-demand in relationship to its supply. The number one most in-demand skill was creativity, the absolutely necessary precursor for the innovator.
If creativity is so important, then why don’t people innovate more? Because we aren’t taught how to, because we are indoctrinated by school systems that are obsolete and by corporate manuals that don’t allow for expansion. Most people have lost their ability to be a critical thinker and just take whatever they find on social media as the truth.
And so, with the entire 2021 ahead, why not look for ways to challenge the status quo, or look at old things, methods, services and add a twist that upgrades them to serve the needs of today? To innovate, one must take risks and be willing to make mistakes. It is by trial and error, but above everything, by having the intense desire to bring something new of value to our society, that innovation jells.
Thank you for reading this far. Please feel free to drop me a line and let me know your thoughts about The Groove.