Buck Convention
Aristotle said of his revered teacher & mentor, “Plato is my friend, but truth is my greater friend.” Isaac Newton, borrowing in order to build, went a step farther: “Plato and Aristotle are my friends, but truth is my greater friend.” In so saying, he both reinforced his admiration and also reestablished the scientific creed that nothing is more sacred than the truth, ushering in the Scientific Age.
A love of the truth is a vanishing phenomenon in organizational life. As an example, Perry and I once hosted a webinar for ~5,000 folks involved with Stanford’s Creativity and Design Thinking Certificate. We were telling the story of our friend Bill Pacheco, and of his willingness to persist in the face of opposition. Not to give too much of the story away, but Bill encountered unexpected resistance to a groundbreaking innovation from a legend in his field, a leader with scores of patents to his name. Despite the organizational opposition, Bill made a prototype that created critical data that helped the team make a better decision.
One of the attendees of the session took to the chat to express incredulously, “He kept trying even though his boss said it was a bad idea???” In so saying, he gave voice to a widespread phenomenon in modern organizational life: Newton’s spirit of reverent dissent is all but abandoned.
I went on to describe a couple of points in response (1) the power of empathy to breed conviction to serve a need and 2) the power of experimentation to reinforce conviction, or change course; but it struck me as I considered Newton’s & Plato’s mindset over the weekend: there’s something incredibly powerful about the scientist’s adherence to truth in the innovator’s toolkit.
Innovators need a healthy skepticism of authority, and of conventional wisdom. After all, Lord Kelvin declared physics to be an all-but-dead-field at the annual gathering of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900. Mind you, this was five years before Einstein’s “Year of Miracles” reinvented the entire field and ushered in the atomic age, quantum theory, and you know, lots of other stuff (clearly beyond my pay grade!).
It is this love for the truth, this sense that “things could be better,” even when faced with resistance, that inspires and fuels the innovator. And sometimes, it requires dissent. At the very least, it requires a willingness to call the truth a greater friend than your boss, or the thought leader in the field.
Who knows, you might be on the brink of ushering in an entirely new era.
Related: Beware Conventional Wisdom
Related: Embracing the Outsider’s Perspective
Related: The Value of Being An Outsider
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One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.