Innovating Christianity(?!)

Organizations, including churches, corporations, and universities, continually face the challenge of new and unsettling ideas. The preservation of longstanding corporate values, ideals, and principles is the sine qua non as new ideas are considered. Personal and group alignment with the “main thing” helps guarantee organizational perseverance, and the organization doesn’t want to fall prey to every new idea. As we learned in Ephesians 4, the faithful are enjoined “that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting…”

And yet, without fresh ideas and innovation, an organization quickly stagnates and dies. IDEO CEO Tom Kelley noted that leadership plays an important role in ushering new ideas into the organization: “You are not just in charge of today’s operations. You are responsible for making sure there is a tomorrow. You must constantly juggle the balls necessary to make new projects happen, to replace a just-finished innovation with a fresh exploration of another opportunity.”

This begs some important questions. Are there definable differences between new and untried ideas, doctrine, and dogma? How do we separate what is cultural baggage from essential biblical truth? When are orthodoxy, tradition, and best practices essential foundations, and when do they become unnecessary weighty impediments? What is the connection between personal and organizational revelation? In the crucible of idea consideration, can the process of discernment be speeded up or improved? What roles do leaders play in organizational acceptance of new information, and what roles do employees play in vetting new ideas prior to the leader’s acceptance of them? These important questions lie at the nexus of change management, the life of ideas, values transmission, and ideals preservation. These are dark woods that many fear and consciously avoid. It is an area that we must nonetheless choose to explore with an open mind and committed heart.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship

Keywords

Innovation, values, corporate history, doctrine, dogma, leadership

References

Kelley, T. (2005). The Ten Faces of Innovation. New York: Currency Doubleday.

Hazy Memories of Innovation

It was Henry Ford who asserted, "History is more or less bunk” to a newspaperman from the Chicago Tribune in 1916. Ford was urging people to live in the present and not to be hobbled by tradition or orthodoxy. Mr. Ford also unintentionally focused on another issue: our historical record of innovation is accidently hazy at best, and intentionally distorted at worst. In brief, the guys who “won,” e.g. created the most successful innovation, were often those who helped write the revisionist history of their innovation efforts. As Scott Berkun noted, “Just because dominant designs developed before we were born, or in fields so far from our own that we’re ignorant of their struggles, doesn’t mean their arrival was predictable, orderly, or even in our best interest. Yet, the dominant designs, the victors of any innovative pursuit, are the ones that get most of history’s positive attention.” Looking in the rear-view mirror can distort historical reality: “Much of the literature of the history of technology is colored by post hoc kinds of explanations—that is, explanations that account for the emergence of a technology based on the final effects that the technology has” (Friedel, 2007). James Utterback similarly discussed historical distortion: “The emergence of a dominant design is not necessarily predetermined, but is the result of the interplay between technical and market choices at any one time.” That history doesn’t have to be too lengthy to be blurred. As Steve Wozniak, inventor of the personal computer for Apple said, “That’s what’s been bothering me—the fact that no one has gotten the story straight about how I built the first computers at Apple and how I designed them, and what happened afterward.” The lesson to be learned is that, to be of value, tales of innovation should come from primary sources, be consistent with other verifiable historical records, and always be considered with a measure of doubt. As my grandmother used to say, “Don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see.”

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, historical record, innovation history, technological change

References

Berkun, S. (2007). The myths of innovation. Cambridge: O’Reilly.
Friedel, R. (2007). A culture of improvement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Utterback, J. (1996). Mastering the dynamics of innovation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Wozniak, S. (2006). iWoz: Computer geek to cult icon. New York: Norton & Company.