A Call to Sacred Innovation

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

I met an entrepreneur recently who was wrestling with the question of what it means to do meaningful work in the world. He struck me as a deeply intelligent and heartfelt human being. But the noise and hype of startup culture had left him unmoored. It felt like everyone and everything was telling him to dive in and start iterating, but what he really wanted was to slow down and understand how he was uniquely suited to enrich the world. The tension between conventional wisdom and his disposition was producing inner stress, uncertainty, and self-doubt.

As we explored together how to thread this needle, he came upon an insight: the thing he actually wanted to disrupt was the very mantra that had become gospel in a start-up culture obsessed with disruption.

“Move fast and break things.”

This phrase was first coined by Mark Zuckerberg (oh, Zuck…) as Facebook’s motto for product development. They actually stopped using it back in 2014, but the genie was already out of the bottle. It has become so well-known in entrepreneurial circles that it’s a cliché. And it’s not without merit. It’s a useful shorthand for an approach to product development that emphasizes short release cycles, regular iterations, and the agility to pivot in a different direction if your original idea comes up short.

Anyone who’s ever done anything creative will recognize its utility. It assumes you’re going to fail, and it makes the fact of failure a feature, not a bug. In this framework, repeated failure and revision is the path towards making something impactful.

A famous example of this is Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms. Whether you think Hemingway was a literary genius or a drunken boor, A Farewell to Arms is one of the most well-known novels in modern literature. It was Hemingway’s first best-seller, and it put him on the map as a ‘serious’ author.

But the book is as infamous as it is famous. Why? Because Hemingway purportedly wrote at least thirty-nine different endings for the novel.

Thirty-nine!

There’s a separate conversation we could have about how much revision is too much, but the point here is that if you assume your first idea is your best one, you’re probably not going to get far with creative work. You have to be willing to come back to the drawing board, try out new ideas, and keep working until — as Bucky Fuller said — something beautiful emerges.

‘Move fast and break things’ is one entrepreneur’s attempt to distill that ethos into a single mantra. Its very simplicity is its genius. You read it, you get it, and then you get to work.

But to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And ‘move fast and break things’ is one hell of a hammer.

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

Do you know how Facebook started? It was officially founded by Zuck and his college roommates in 2004, and it was basically an online version of the printed ‘face books’ that Harvard produced each year as a way to introduce students to each other. These young guys turned a ‘get to know your neighbors’ initiative into an exclusive online club that only Harvard students could join. A Myspace for the Ivy elite.

But actually, before there was TheFacebook (original name), there was FaceMash. It was a ‘hot or not’ website that automatically placed pictures of two female Harvard students side-by-side and invited you to pick the one you found most attractive. Zuck coded it himself on a Tuesday night in his dorm room.

That’s right. The global website used by billions started as a place for horny college dudes to objectify their female classmates.

It took him less than 24 hours to make, and within four hours of going up online, hundreds of his female classmates had been publicly embarrassed, humiliated, and shamed.

Move fast and break things indeed.

“Success, like happiness, can’t be pursued; it must ensue. And it only does so as the unintended consequence of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than one’s self.”

— Viktor Frankl

Facebook has come a long way since Zuck’s Harvard dorm room days. But if we apply Bucky Fuller’s litmus test of beauty, it falls well short. The vestigal genes of FaceMash’s weaponized gossip are still embedded in its DNA. It’s still a place where we can go to peer into each other’s lives and make judgments about one another; how we look, where we live, what we believe.

The fact that the person on the other end can look right back and make the same judgments about you doesn’t change the objectifying nature of the medium. Actually, it amplifies it. We know people are looking, so we feel pressured to put our sexiest, happiest, most successful, most abundant foot forward. When someone else’s curated version of their reality outshines our own, the emotional fallout can be rough. Just do a quick online search for the words ‘social media and depression’ or ‘social media and envy’ to get a taste of what I mean.

It gets worse than that, though. Wander into certain corners of Facebook and you’ll discover remarkably ugly spaces where aggressive shaming and humiliation are the fundamental currency of engagement. Spaces where extremism, racism, and violence are flourishing, all of it amplified by the wicked feedback loops baked into Facebook’s newsfeed algorithms.

Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Even the simplest piece of software has the potential to influence how we think, how we act, and what we believe. And when that technology intensifies and amplifies real-world behaviors that are negative or destructive, the collateral damage can be massive.

The ‘move fast and break things’ ethos has the potential to produce beauty, but only when it’s contained inside a larger, more robust creative process. One that makes room for depth, struggle, and patient persistence. One that aims to enrich the lives of both the creator and the recipients of that creation. One that is rooted in a commitment to make the world a more just and beautiful place.

Some things aren’t meant to be broken.

Some things only work when we finally understand how to make them whole.

“If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self alone, what am I? And if not now, when?”

— Hillel the Elder

Look around you right now.

Really pay attention.

To your environment.

To your life.

What do you see?

Every single artifact — every piece of furniture, every potted plant, every work of art, every glowing screen, every political slogan, every article of clothing — is an expression of humanity’s singular capacity to shape our world.

Unfortunately, most of us take almost all of it for granted.

Perhaps we’re so busy with whatever’s ahead of us that we rarely stop to wonder about everything that came before us.

Or perhaps we’re so loyal to life as we know it that any question becomes a threat to our very identity.

Or perhaps it’s just never occurred to us that we made it all up.

It only takes a moment’s pause to realize that the world didn’t always look the way it does today. Our ancient ancestors were nomads who roamed the Earth in small tribes, living off whatever they could hunt or forage. Eventually, they gathered together in larger communities to cultivate the earth, fostering a communal life in line with the rhythm of the seasons. Living together brought its benefits — food, shelter, and companionship — but those benefits came with complications — gossip, status-seeking, population density, malnourishment, and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle.

The most successful and well-positioned of these communities became cities. And in those cities all of the benefits and burdens of communal living were amplified. Those who accrued great wealth and power did so because they had certain skills, mindsets, and personal connections that helped them thrive in the emerging social complexity. But their success came mainly at the expense of those who did not have those advantages.

Poverty. Class. Slavery. These concepts didn’t really exist before civilization. But by the time the industrial revolution came along, they were deeply entrenched norms. In a world where it was assumed that most people should trade their time and their lives for meager recompense, it seemed only logical for the powerful to utilize those with less power as cogs in their grand machinations.

These legacies are with us today. We have much work to do to reckon with them. Just as Facebook bears the DNA of FaceMash, so to do our global societies carry the DNA of civilizations built atop the objectification of natural life for the profit of a small few.

As modern life accelerates, the ramifications of those legacies are being amplified. We were nomads for hundreds of thousands of years. We were farmers for ten thousand. The industrial revolution was a mere 260 years ago. With the current computational revolution, massive change emerges on the order of decades. Without knowing exactly when or how, the future is going to be both more wondrous and more strange than we can possibly predict... assuming we live long enough to get there.

This acceleration brings with it an intense psychological pressure. A sense that we must keep pace. The world is moving faster, so we better move faster too, right? This increasing pace has led us to consume the Earth rather than live within it. We are clearcutting our rainforests, the lungs of our planet. We are spoiling our waterways, the lifeblood of our communities. We are tearing holes in the ozone, the skin that keeps us safe from the sun’s radiation.

‘Move fast and break things’ is a mantra born of these times.

But it doesn’t take a Harvard dropout turned billionaire to follow this mantra to its bitter, logical conclusion:

A world where everything we once took for granted is in desperate need of repair.

“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

Innovation — which we generally take to mean the introduction of a new idea, invention, or solution — is a relatively recent word. For most of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, not many people knew or used it. Then, in the 1950s, in the wake of World War II, it took hold, making its way into professional sectors.

Fast forward to now, and the word is everywhere. For starters, try visiting the website of any Fortune 500 company and counting how many times they mention innovation. From fast food to retail to technology to real estate, it’s the name of the game. As the word proliferates, a commensurate social pressure to be innovative has emerged with it. If you’re not inventing some new way to brew coffee or gamify habits or turn on the lights in your house, then what the heck are you doing with your time?

But the word actually has an ancient lineage. Its traceable back to the Middle Ages, well before capitalism, modern economics, and the era of invention we live in now. It stems from the Latin innovare which means ‘to renew or change.’

To renew is to revive. To regenerate. To revitalize. To replenish.

To breathe new life.

To change is to adapt. To reshape. To refine. To transform.

To evolve.

Oh shit.

We mostly aren’t being innovative at all. We aren’t breathing new life into the world. We aren’t adapting or evolving.

We’re just running around making stuff and breaking stuff.

“The key is what is within the artist. The artist can only paint what she or he is about.”

— Lee Krasner

Hemingway went through thirty-eight drafts of A Farewell to Arms to make the thirty-ninth ending we read today. As a result, he had the best story he was capable of writing, and that story become an artifact that lasts. It’s not designed to be discarded and replaced. And it continues to add value to the lives of many others, long after the end of his own life. Because he took the time he needed to get it right.

I’m working with another client — a brilliant woman and incredibly effective social-impact consultant who carries a deep commitment to fostering meaningful connections as part of her work — and she coined a term for this wider, deeper, more expansive creative process:

She calls it Sacred Innovation.

We’re still unearthing the depth and scope of this powerful idea, but one thing I’m excited about is the fact that it is wide enough to include the ‘move fast and break things’ ethos without being defined by it. It permits you to experiment — to tinker, to test, to revise, to discard, to begin again — but it also invites you to get in touch with an underpinning reverence for the creative force that animates the universe. To ask questions like:

• who or what do we stand for?
• what purpose does this serve?
• who else should have a seat at the table?
• what else, besides profitability, will tell us we’ve succeeded?
• what are our fundamental assumptions?
• how do we know if those assumptions are actually true?
• who will have to live with our mistakes?
• why this?
• why now?
• if not now, when?

We need only look around at the world to see that every solution produces new problems. Many of these problems are unanticipated. But the worst of them come when we willfully ignore the signs that tell us to proceed with caution. When we blaze ahead even as some part of us knows that we are destroying beautiful futures for the sake of some marginal gain in the present.

The sacred innovator lives into this problem/solution paradox. She finds it hiding at the heart of all innovation. She actively seeks it out. And she does her best to move only after she has reckoned with the realities of consequence.

Yes, we will make mistakes, she says. Yes, we will fail. Yes, it is likely that there is another way. A better way.

But we will go the only way we can, with the people who are right here, right now.

We will challenge ourselves by holding to the standard that the world should be substantively improved by our efforts.

And we will not finish until what we’ve made is as good as we’re capable of making it.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant but has forgotten the gift.”

— Albert Einstein

Most of us don’t know how to operate like this anymore. We don’t know how to do work that will add lasting value for generations. We’ve become obsessed with the next quick fix. We design things that are planned to be obsolete within a few years. We willfully ignore the human beings who toil in terrible conditions so we can easily replace our old stuff with shiny new stuff. We gobble up Earth’s gifts, leaving oceans of plastic and mountains of garbage as the true final product.

We’ve traded the possibility for genuine change and renewal for an illusory life of luxury and convenience; an unending series of micro-improvements that make things a little bit nicer, or faster, or easier. We are desperately trying to maintain a lifestyle that is no longer tenable. The ‘move fast and break things’ mantra has been weaponized to perpetuate this unreality for as long as possible, giving some companies license to profit as much as they can at the expense of all our futures.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to simply keep repeating our past. We can learn from it too. Perhaps the most important lesson we can learn is that change is inevitable. For all that we try to control the flow of life, we can be pretty damn certain that the world we currently take for granted won’t be the world our children or our grandchildren live in.

If we want genuine change and renewal to emerge from this flow of life - if we want to be the architects of our future instead of its victims - it’s time to return to the truth of innovation. To embrace and embody the natural processes of change and renewal that have shaped our planet for billions of years.

We can begin by simply slowing down. We’ve been trying to keep pace with this treadmill we made for ourselves, constantly cranking up the speed for fear we’re not going fast enough. At some point, the treadmill will get too fast, and we will fall. Some would argue we already are.

It’s time to grab the railings, lift our feet away from the speeding track, and step off. To see this self-imposed pressure to move faster and faster for what it is: a machine of our own making, designed to serve its own endless economic ends at the expense of our very lives.

We can do this by connecting to a deeper purpose. By learning how to cultivate a reverence for life and for this solitary planet that is our only home. We can test our implicit assumptions through dialogue and self-reflection, looking as far ahead as we can with a commitment to enrich future generations, and opening ourselves to all the possibilities we haven’t yet seen.

So I’d like to propose a new mantra. A mantra that speaks for this series of interior moves, all of which come before the external one. One that invites us back to a sacred process of creativity, discovery, and ongoing evolution. A mantra for the future that is in our hands to make:

Move with purpose and make beautiful things.

In beauty I walk

With beauty before me I walk

With beauty behind me I walk

With beauty above and about me I walk

It is finished in beauty

It is finished in beauty

— Navaho Indian Night Chant (in Rothenberg 1968:81)

Continued Reading

R. Buckminster Fuller

Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms

Lee Krasner

Viktor Frankl

Hillel the Elder

The roots of the word “Innovation” and its usage

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