IEX 186: How To Overcome Religious Thinking
Anything that we take as immutable is an act of religious thinking. Innovation requires us to think differently.
Greetings from Amsterdam, a city of art, bold architecture, and total football. I’m here for a brief visit, and unfortunately can’t take in an Ajax football game or the Van Gogh museum.
Could somebody be murdered for mathematics? Hippasus of Metapontum (500 BCE) was a disciple of Pythagorus, who is sometimes credited with the discovery of irrational numbers. It was a discovery that quite shocked the Pythagorean world. Why? Because they believed in the absolute rationality of numbers. So when they came across a right angled isosceles triangle with each of 2 sides of one unit length, it turned out they could not calculate the exact length of the hypotenuse. And they could not express it as a ratio of 2 whole numbers. This really bothered them. So much so, that it allegedly led to Hippasus's assassination, for disclosing their dirty little secret. His crime was to bring truth to light, something the world around him wasn't ready for. (The record says he was drowned at sea, and the rest, to be fair is legend).
Two thousand years later, Galileo was put into house arrest for what would be the rest of his life. His offence also was to profess what we know to be true today, but what was heresy at the time - the Heliocentric theory of the solar system. As you might know, it was a view earlier proposed by Copernicus, who also did so in secret for fear of ridicule or reprimand. Through the ages, there have been numerous instances of new thought being stifled by powerful orthodoxy. Entire movements, such as the illuminati of the 18th century, have been created around the need to fight the battle for truth, and against superstition and ignorance. You could argue that the fight for progressive thought has been one of the most consistent themes of human history.
Consider the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, the doctor at Vienna General in the mid 19th century. He believed that the cause of high percentage of childbirth related deaths was related to doctors not washing their hands before delivering babies. He didn't know exactly why but by running experiments with doctors who were persuaded to wash their hands, he brought the death rate down from 18% to 2%. Semmelweiss's contemporaries, though, collectively rejected his findings, and insisted that there could be nothing wrong with the doctors' hands that would benefit from washing before delivering babies. His mental health declined, and he was incarcerated in an asylum, where he was beaten and died, while the death rate at childbirth at the Vienna General went up by 6x as doctors stopped washing their hands. Religious thinking won that around as well.
This is the baggage we bring into our organisations and institutions today. The fight between progressive and religious thinking. Let me explain these 2 terms. Religious thinking in this context is not about god, or any organised religion. It is simply the act of accepting without questioning a theory, a credo, a framework, or a plan. Progressive thinking, on the other hand is the idea that anything can be questioned objectively, prior to its adoption. This can apply to everything from a dress code to an intellectual framework. Talking about dress code, when I was in Kolkata in December, I was told I had to wear a formal shirt and trousers to enter a club (which I refused to do) but it did strike me as odd that while the world was still reeling with the tragedy and economic disruption of the pandemic, there were still people who were concerned with what should be worn while drinking or dining with friends. But if you work in a large organisation, you probably see the living examples of religious thinking in your policies and practices.
It's not that the existing policy or the framework in companies is bad, or is specifically wrong. But that a critical analysis of the same is discouraged, or simply absent. And it is also not right to correlate religious thinking with legacy practices. If your organisation has a 3 horizon model for investing for the future, or follows a specific type of agile practice, or a type of costing or financial modelling for innovation, which are seen as unquestionable, then you already suffer from religious thinking. And it's likely to be true of most organisations in some shape or form.
Why do we care about religious thinking? Because it is the enemy of innovation. Innovation thrives when people can openly ask 'why?' and 'why not?'. When emergent scenarios and situations can throw up new information, and data, which the old model should be tested against and adapted, or replaced. And any form of religious thinking or mindset strangles this questioning. This is often more prevalent in high power-distance cultures, but very few businesses are truly immune to this. In fact even the latest most cutting edge thinking instantly becomes the new bible when it tastes success and its creators, champions, and followers start to treat it as the bible. It's the reason they say that every general fights the previous war, because that's what worked for them when they were soldiers.
So look around you and even within yourself. What are the things you take for granted? What do you consider immutable? And ask yourself the why, and why not question. You don't have to debunk it. In fact, most of the time, you won't. But creating the space to ask the question often is in fact critical to any idea evolving and adapting and withstanding obsolescence. Make a habit of identifying one thing every day that you take for granted - about your products, your customers, or your organisation and challenge it. I guarantee you it'll make your innovation muscles stronger.
Acknowledgements to:
Euclid’s Window - by Leonard Mlodinow, for the Hippasus example
How To Fly A Horse - Kevin Ashton for the Ignaz Semmelweis example
Reading This Week
Reinvention: What do you do when your market vanishes? BEI, a defence contractor faced this at the end of the cold war. Here's the fascinating story of how they reinvented their product, their business, and created a 20 year global growth cycle in automotives, along the way saving countless lives and enabling the Mars Rover. (IEEE Spectrum)
Streaming: What to make of Netflix? Is this a blip? Or a point of inflexion for Netflix? Losing $54bn of value seems to over-exaggerate the loss of 200k clients. But Netflix needs to show it can beat a suddenly crowded market. (Bloomberg Business Week)
SpaceTech: Space-suits need an overhaul. Here's a look at the race to create the next generation of space suits for the proposed moon-landing in the next 3 years. (Economist)
Future Fuel: "Engineered microbes, light, and carbon dioxide" - the unlikely ingredients for the next aviation fuel? (MIT Technology Review)
Longevity: Preparing yourself for anti-ageing technology but also with a longevity mindset. (Fast Company)
Autonomous Vehicles: Before we get to AV technology on the roads, there are a number of ways that AI can dramatically improve road safety. Here's a look at the options (New York Times)