Don’t hold your breath…
…waiting for the next creative leap.
A great idea is conceived in a nanosecond. But which nanosecond?
Sometimes you must wait for the right nanosecond. The perfect opportunity.
Such is the case with what many experts believe is the greatest leap in the field of archeology. We had to wait nearly 1800 years for it.
I’ve always felt that the biggest ideas, the freshest thinking happens under the most extreme conditions; war, disease, pestilence. (How many ideas can you name that were conceived thanks to pestilence? Well, a few of the great Super Bowl TV spots happened thanks to advertisers pestering the ad agency guys. Okay, we’ll keep pestilence in the mix.)
So, if big problems encourage big thinking, why are there so many ordinary ideas in business? Is it that most of the time our problems aren’t big enough?
Bringing it back to our discussion of archeology, for years I’d seen the amazing photographs of the huddled figures at Pompeii, covering their faces until the dust settled. The volcanic dust… 20 feet of volcanic dust.
Recently I visited the ruins of this ancient city and saw first hand this crystal clear window to the past. I’ve since read a good deal about the devastation. I’ve read some accounts of the amazing resurrection. It got me thinking of creativity in business. (Hey, I’m a little warped, okay.)
Mt. Vesuvius blew in late August 79 AD. Hundreds and hundreds of years later, after engineers digging a tunnel to supply water to a nearby village found the first signs of the amazing time capsule that was Pompeii, the enormity of the find set up the great leap in archeology.
This cache was just too magnificent to get it wrong. A city rich in arts and science, very advanced for it’s day, frozen in time. The opportunity to get an amazing snapshot of the past was simply much too great. In the early 1860’s, archeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, put in charge of the monumental dig, felt the old ways had to be totally rethought. Then, bam! Almost as quickly as Vesuvius had covered this great city, a whole new school of archeology emerged; more thorough, more scholastic, yielding a truer picture of the past.
Could some of the new techniques that emerged from this cataclysmic leap have been discovered earlier? Absolutely. Few if any of the improved practices were reliant on any new technology or materials of the time. It’s just that there had not been as great an incentive to rethink and refine the best practices of this field. As I say, big problems, big thinking.
In Italy alone, there had been ancient ruins to preserve and restore for hundreds of years. Many that could have benefited greatly from the kind of advancements that only emerged with the uncovering of Pompeii. Just up the road a couple of hours, the Forum in Rome, a site of architectural wonders even greater than Pompeii, had been poorly managed, actually plundered by the authorities, because it was all out in the open. The “problem” had not been identified before it was too late.
What might your business’ Pompeii be? What would have to happen to cause you to rethink everything? Do you want to wait for catastrophe to strike, for the ash cloud to block out the sun to force you to make great advancements, or do you want to just make things better while the skies are still clear?
Do you want to wait to uncover an immense problem under years of ignorance? Or do you want to unleash your creative powers proactively to make the same kinds of advancements?
Could things be better? Why not?
Pompeii could afford to wait 1800 years, I suppose. Can you?
© 2006 Tom Monahan, all rights reserved.
