Here are some random notes on innovation I wrote for a friend who asked me to think about the topic.
Innovation. The new. It’s a matter of scale. Of course, everything is constantly new.
But to Make it new. Is it necessary to make it new, if the new is constantly making itself?
If I just stand still (if only that were possible), the new assembles around me. And I become new even as I attempt to stand still. Oh, I just noticed, becoming new is the same as becoming old.
To become new is to become old. To become old is to become new.
One of the main aspects of innovation is that the term is subjective. What is new for one person may be old hat for another. But there’s also the broader innovation, to make something that no one’s made before. But is that possible? We all know the feeling of something being new. Because the thing in some way is actually new. The new comes along, comes forth, when someone notices something about how things work and decides to try something.
What is the difference between innovation and mere novelty? It’s a distinction worth exploring. The innovation perhaps serves others and transparently becomes part of their lives, improves their lives, whereas what is novel points back at the maker to point out the cleverness of the maker.
I’m more interested in constancy these days than innovation.
Because that in itself is an innovation, for me at least, just to stay with something. The relentless leaning into innovation can be a distraction sometimes from the untapped reserves of what is already there, which I most often just rush past.
Repetition could be said to be the reverse of innovation, doing the same thing again. But I’m more interested in the spiral quality of repetition, the microinnovations, when something feels like a repetition but it’s slightly changed. Repetition allows you to grow in subtle ways.
Circumstance is changing constantly, so sometimes the most innovative thing feels like pausing long enough to apprehend what’s happening.
So innovation might be just pausing to look around and notice what you already have.
Innovation is a kind of sufficiency that says this is a good enough place to start.
Perfectionism is the enemy of innovation. It warns you not to try something new.
You have to enjoy so-called failure to venture anything new.
Perfectionism thwarts innovation.
To try new things you have to look at your relationship to judgment. Try something and let it unspool its possibilities because it’s not all about you, the whole circumstance of life is innovating right along with you. And if you think it’s all your doing, no wonder you feel demoralized at a tiny so-called failure.
Stand back and watch the process for long enough for something to happen with you. Innovation is not only about the solitary genius coming up with the unprecented doodad. It’s about creating/allowing/cultivating conditions that allow things to take shape.
It has to take some shape in order for you to see it.
I like how things sneak in from the past and feel like innovation. A thought I’ve had 10 years ago strikes me today as something I’m thinking for the first time.
What’s innovative for you at this moment might be the same thing as what is it you need to come through the next situation in a way that is in accord with your ethics.
Some words/phrases that constellate with innovation:
- Consistency
- Continuity
- Completion
- Trust, in the weird or as yet unseen
- Lostness
- Routine as freedom: “If you want to control your sheep, give it a large pasture.” (Suzuki roshi)
- Containment: routine that seems to be the opposite of innovation, but it’s actually the gound of innovation. From that stability something new can arise.
If you want to know where your next innovation might be waiting, look to what bores you.
Sustaining feels important.
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Seamus Heaney, from “Feeling into Words”
“The crucial action is pre-verbal, to be able to allow the first alertness or come-hither, sensed in a blurred or incomplete way, to dilate and approach as a thought or a theme or a phrase. ”
The first alertness. I love that, and it’s happening all day long. Pausing long enough to give credence to the first alertness and to follow it into language is I think a crucial part of innovation.
Another major aspect of innovation, in my experience, is need, or even I could go as far as to say desperation. Many of the things that people have told me were clever were just things I was doing to survive. I wasn’t trying something fancy, just trying to come up with a form that would help me say what I needed to say in order to live. And by to live, I mean, to be true.