Sermon Illustrations on innovation
Background
The CEO of Gallup on The Next Center of Major Innovation
Jim Clifton, CEO and Chairman of Gallup, points to the shrunken GDP (gross domestic product) of the United States and the vast shortfall in new job creation. What is the solution? He writes,
If you were to ask me, “From all the data you have studied so far, where will the next breakthrough, such as Internet-based everything, come from?” my answer would be: from the combination of the forces within big cities, great universities, and [their] powerful local leaders….The cornerstone of these three is cities…[as] goes the leadership of the top 100 American cities, so goes the country’s economic future.
Embracing Failure
A common trait of human beings is a fear of failure. Most of us find ways of coping with it, but whenever failure rears its ugly head, it’s difficult not to experience the sting of feeling like we are not good enough. Recently, a Canadian woman has attempted to make failing less private, less shameful, thereby enabling folks to develop more resilience. Ashley Good started her professional career with Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) in Ghana, where I imagine she probably experienced her fair share of “failures.” Her response to the often demoralizing experience of regular failure: start a report called admittingfailure.com.
From this auspicious start in the failure world, she founded Fail Forward, a consultancy with the mission to help organizations develop cultures that encourage the risk taking, creativity, and continuous adaptation required for innovation. In her own words, “Fail Forward was created with the belief that dealing with failure intelligently will be the driver we need to improve the way we learn, innovate, and find the agility to stay relevant and competitive. In many ways, our relationship with failure either unlocks our full potential, or keeps us from ever realizing it.”
As the keynote speaker at FailCon Oslo (Yes, not only is there a FailCon, but there are many different iterations), Good asked the audience what words they associated with the word failure. The words spoken were unsurprising: fear, shame, sadness, desperation, panic, and heartbreak. Next she held up the EWB failure report, which included fourteen failures over the past year.
Then she asked the very same audience which words they would use to describe the report and the people who submitted the stories. On this occasion, very different words were used: generous, helping, brave, knowledgeable and courageous. The point was clear: the words we use to describe our failures are very different from the words others, viewing us from the outside, would describe them. For the individuals and organizations that were strong enough to share their failures, it led to a paradoxical effect: people actually trusted them more.
Stuart Strachan Jr.
First Hating, then Loving, Coffee
When the Venetian botanist Prospero Alpini introduced the use of coffee to Europe from Egypt, the Vatican advocated against its infernal influence. That is, until Pope Clement VIII tried the foreign brew, loved it, and gave coffee his blessing. (In the end, the Italians turned out to be pretty big fans.)
If you have a wild idea and a burning desire to make it a reality, never expect a warm welcome. Change of any kind threatens the establishment, and the greater the change, the greater the resistance.
So think ahead: Who are the key players? Who stands to lose if you gain? The impact of a new product can be hard to predict. It can lead to unexpected, far-reaching consequences. Before you take a single step, map the battlefield thoroughly. Make sure you really understand the size of the fight you’re about to start.
Limits Fuel Creativity
We often think of limits as means of restriction, but the truth is far more complex. In certain situations, limitations actually fuel creativity. Consider this short excerpt on the creative writing process:
Limits — that is, form — challenge the mind, forcing creativity. Let’s say I wish to express romantic love. I could write a sloppy, gushy love note, but my effort would be better spent if I wrote a love sonnet.
As soon as I decide to produce a sonnet, I’m restricted to 14 lines, a specific rhyme scheme and meter. In the process of trying to fit my feelings and ideas into this form, I’ll end up exploring avenues and notions that would never have emerged from a simple, undemanding note…. The more you limit yourself, the more you set yourself Free.
Peter Leschak & Marshall Cook, “The Five-Step Creativity Workout”, Writer’s Digest, (November 1991)
Keeping Time
Did you know that the first group of people to use clocks were Christian monks? Monks desired the ability to pray around a rigorous and exact prayer schedule. Benedict of Nursia, the great architect of monastic orders, required his followers to hold seven prayer services at specific times throughout the day. The Cistercians, who rose in prominence about 600 years later, required timeliness and order similar to that of the Benedictines. Their days were regimented into a sequence of activities, tardiness was considered a sin. Innovation being the mother of invention, it was in fact within the monastery that the first mechanical clocks were developed, directed by the swinging of weights.
The Bells in the church tower first sounded the hours to let monks know it was time to pray or move on to their next activity. Eventually, as David Landes has described it in his book Revolution in Time, a history of timekeeping, “Bells sounded for start of work, meal breaks, end of work, closing of gates, start of market, close of market, assembly, emergencies, council meetings, end of drink service, time for street cleaning, curfew, and so on through an extraordinary variety of special peals in individual towns and cities.”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Just another Consumer Product?
One of the many technological transformations of the twentieth century took place right on our dinner plates. Because of its cheapness and convenience, most Americans quickly accepted new ways of eating food. This commodification of food is described by Paul Roberts, in his book The End of Food:
Raw materials such as No. 2 yellow corn or BSCB (boneless, skinless chicken breasts) are now handled like any other commodity: produced wherever costs are lowest, shipped to wherever demand is highest, and managed via the same contracts, futures, and other instruments used for timber, or tin, or iron ore.
Food-processing companies employ the same technologies and business models of other high-volume manufacturers. The continuous advances in technology and the ever larger scales of production that drive down costs in cars and home electronics are now also standard in the food business, as is the relentless product innovation one finds in clothing and cosmetics.…To an important degree, the success of the modern food sector has been its ability to make food behave like any other consumer product.
Paul Roberts, The End of Food (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), xiv.
Stories
Innovation or Heresy?
It’s funny how sometimes members of the church can associate anything new with “heresy.” We often make the mistake of confusing technological innovations or scientific discoveries for changes to the gospel. The most famous case of this is probably the prolonged dispute between Galileo and the Catholic church over heliocentrism, that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. The mistake made by the medieval church was to allow assumptions about the world (and really most people at the time) to crystallize into doctrine, assumptions that were formed not by scripture, but by culture and tradition.
This same scenario repeated itself in the late 19th century, when at an annual church conference in Westfield, Illinois, a college president proclaimed, “We are approaching a time of great inventions. For example, I believe the day is not far off when men will fly through the air like birds.” A bishop then accused the president of heresy, “The Bible tells us that flight is reserved for the angels! Ironically, the last name of that bishop was Wright. His two sons, Orville and Wilbur, were the first to record a successful powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.
Today we look back at those two scenarios and our first reaction is to scoff: how could they be so foolish? But we do the same thing all the time in the church today. People argue you can’t have coffee in a sanctuary. Others argue you can’t have guitars in worship. Whatever “it” is, we often make the mistake of assuming just because it is new, it can’t possibly be good. Whenever anything new comes along, and knocks on the door of the church, we ought not simply reject it out of hand, but rather engage in a thoughtful, engaging dialogue from a Biblical basis as to whether or not this new element is heretical, or simply something new that we have to get used to.
Stuart Strachan Jr.
What Hath God Wrought
In the crypt of the Capitol, there hangs a bronze plaque commemorating the inventor of telegraphy, Samuel Morse…In 1825, Morse returned to Washington to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, the leading French supporter of the American Revolution. While Morse was painting, a horse messenger delivered a one-line letter form his father:
“Your dear wife is convalescent.” By the time Morse arrived in New Haven, Connecticut, his wife had already been buried. Heartbroken by the fact that he was unaware of his wife’s failing health and lonely death for more than a week, Morse stopped painting and started pursuing a means of rapid long-distance communication.
The painter-turned-inventor actually set up shop in the Capitol. Morse tested his telegraph prototype by sending messages between the House and Senate wings. According to the Senate doorkeeper, Isaac Bassett, many senators were skeptical, but Morse was able to secure a $30,000 congressional appropriation to build a thirty-eight-mile telegraph line along the Baltimore and Ohio Railway from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore.
On May 24, 1844, a large crowd gathered inside the capitol to witness Morse tap a message in the language he created, Morse Code. The message itself was chosen by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the US Patent Commissioner Henry Leavitt Ellsworth. And while many can recall those infamous [sic] words from a high school history class, few know that is a sacred verse of Scripture. Annie aptly chose Numbers 23:23 in the King James Version, and it did not return null and void. Moments after the four-word message was received at a railroad depot near Baltimore, the same message was relayed back to the Capitol: “What Hath God wrought?”
Analogies
Becoming a Tiller of Soil
One of my favorite sections of Home Depot is the power garden tool department. Even though I have all the tools I need, I still like browsing through Home Depot’s collection of power mowers, chainsaws, and string trimmers (better known as “weed whackers”). Among all of those machines you can find some power tillers. These tools look rather like lawnmowers, but in place of horizontal blades that cut grass they have vertical blades that cut and turn up the soil. In a word, they till.
According to the NRSV, God put the man in the garden “to till it and keep it.” “Till” is a reasonable translation of the Hebrew verb ‘avad in this context…“To till” means to break up, plow, or turn up the soil before planting. Tilling enables hard ground to accept seeds. It aerates soil that has been tamped down. It can help fertilizer to be absorbed into the dirt prior to planting. Tilling isn’t planting seeds, caring for young plants, or harvesting. Rather, it is preparing the soil for fruitfulness that is to come.
There is an element of metaphorical tilling in work beyond farming. Teachers till when they prepare a learning environment. Managers till by seeing that the environments, systems, and relationships in their care will allow those they supervise to work well. Leaders till by shaping corporate cultures, defining core values, and lifting up compelling vision. Often, we have to break up old assumptions and practices for the seeds of innovation to be planted and grow.
Of course, so much more could be said about how our work is a form of tilling. Preparing, planning, and prioritizing could all be forms of tilling. Tilling describes work that prepares the soil, so to speak. It gets things ready for new life and for ultimate fruitfulness. Tilling is a central task of our lives, one that God has entrusted to us so that we might fulfill his intentions for our work.
Humor
Innovation or Heresy?
It’s funny how sometimes members of the church can associate anything new with “heresy.” We often make the mistake of confusing technological innovations or scientific discoveries for changes to the gospel. The most famous case of this is probably the prolonged dispute between Galileo and the Catholic church over heliocentrism, that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. The mistake made by the medieval church was to allow assumptions about the world (and really most people at the time) to crystallize into doctrine, assumptions that were formed not by scripture, but by culture and tradition.
This same scenario repeated itself in the late 19th century, when at an annual church conference in Westfield, Illinois, a college president proclaimed, “We are approaching a time of great inventions. For example, I believe the day is not far off when men will fly through the air like birds.” A bishop then accused the president of heresy, “The Bible tells us that flight is reserved for the angels! Ironically, the last name of that bishop was Wright. His two sons, Orville and Wilbur, were the first to record a successful powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.
Today we look back at those two scenarios and our first reaction is to scoff: how could they be so foolish? But we do the same thing all the time in the church today. People argue you can’t have coffee in a sanctuary. Others argue you can’t have guitars in worship. Whatever “it” is, we often make the mistake of assuming just because it is new, it can’t possibly be good. Whenever anything new comes along, and knocks on the door of the church, we ought not simply reject it out of hand, but rather engage in a thoughtful, engaging dialogue from a Biblical basis as to whether or not this new element is heretical, or simply something new that we have to get used to.
Stuart Strachan Jr.
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