Innovation is ancient.

Innovation is the story of humanity itself. This story is everywhere.

Consider a story with three characters. A Mother. A Father. A Hero. Each represent a different feature of the human experience and each exhibit both beneficial and harmful characteristics.

The strong association between birth and the creative powers of those natural processes observed by humanity will use a feminine character to represent the environment. The Great Mother. Mother Nature herself. This character is the source of all the natural bounty which has sustained humanity for all of our history.

The physical environment is ambivalent to the survival of humans and has inflicted all manner of flood, fire, plague, pestilence and famine upon us throughout the ages. The environment is not only a source of riches but also the terror in the dark and the unpleasant end at the hands of a terrible beast or threatening stranger. The malevolent aspect of nature is represented by a predator, the Dragon of Chaos against which humanity has battled throughout the ages. Dragons are often found resting upon a huge pile of gold. This repose reflects the contradictory aspects of the predatory environment by simultaneously offering both alluring bounty and utter peril.

Against this darkness, humanity is protected by the structures of our society and culture. Only a few meals lie between us no longer feeding ourselves but instead feeding terrible dark creatures. Ancient stories may represent the protective structures of society with a masculine character, the Great Father. The Great Father imposes rules and laws and order to structure society and puts every function in its proper place to keep the wolf from the door.

Once more a character has two contradictory aspects. A rule of law too rigid and a society too inflexible to respond to change can become tyrannical. Under these circumstances, the protective Great Father becomes the Tyrannical King. A King both heavy-handed and arbitrary in his proclamations who is unable to cope with changes to the evolving situation.

Enter the Hero, who resides in a world encompassed by this Mother and Father. The revolutionary hero of antiquity begins the journey protected by culture and by training. The Hero lives peacefully. Perhaps the story casts this hero as the offspring of a great warrior or King. This Hero lives a happy life in a world built upon the Father’s heroic exploits. Perhaps the hero is provided training at arms or diplomacy or politics, and will one day take the place of the Father to rule for many years over a happy, peaceful nation. The Hero draws knowledge and strength from the protective structures of the Great Father that nurtured the Hero’s skills. As long as society is well adapted to the environment everyone is safe the Hero is at rest.

Introduce an anomaly and our story begins.

The Hero recognises a threatening anomaly against which the Great Father is unprepared to resolve. This new anomaly threatens all that the hero holds dear. The threat may be a terrible famine, a flood, or a virulent disease. It may be a horrifying beast or an overwhelming army of terrible foes. In this story, the Father becomes afflicted in some way. Perhaps this threat renders the old King infirm, or blind to the threat, or kidnapped, lost, melancholic, mad or tyrannical. Take your pick, as you’ve seen this story a thousand times in some guise. This affliction transforms the Great Father into the Tyrannical King who becomes intent upon imposing order at all costs.

The Hero’s quest is clear. The anomaly against which the Tyrannical King is unprepared could plunge everyone back into their base state. Thrown back into the tooth and claw of a raw, unsympathetic environment to starve, suffer or be torn apart. The Hero does not simply build upon the Father’s work but returns to first principles by confronting the raw environment that threatens to consume humanity. The Hero rises to the challenge and descends into battle to face the Dragon of Chaos.

Identifying this threat against all opposition to the contrary is the first step in this revolutionary, or innovative, journey. The Hero is often the only one who can see the threat. This descent to face battle is perhaps impeded by the Hero’s negative aspect — the Adversary. Perhaps the hero must debate the presence of this threat with sceptical peers, older siblings, or jealous rivals. The ambitious and corrupt peers. The Cain to the Hero’s Able. The dark, cowardly aspect of the Hero who begs to run from the terrible dragon and the horrors of a harsh world. The Hero’s own internal fears and cowardice may create an obstacle, for even this heroic character possesses a malevolent counterpart.

The Hero must leave the protective home to face nature in the raw. The Hero is laid bare against the elements to determine the solution to this threat to home and hearth. The Hero must fight the unforgiving elements, the beast in the dark, the terrible foe.

The terrors of the unknown also contain great promise and advantage. After all, the Dragon sleeps upon a huge pile of gold. Successful combat with the Dragon of Chaos recovers new bounty from the Dragon’s benevolent alter ego, the Great Mother. From Nature herself, new knowledge, new materials or new adaptive strategies are discovered to defeat the anomaly that threatens the Hero’s home.

The Hero returns from this trial replete with new riches from the Great Mother. The Hero does not withhold this bounty from others. This is the critical heroic act. The Hero shares these riches with his community. The Hero offers a solution to the threatening anomaly to save the Father from his tyrannical indisposition. This bounty might be a magic amulet, charm, sword or other assorted tools, but this is just a metaphor.

Cut to titles. Fade to black.

Is this a familiar story? I would expect so, as it seems to be the plot of just about every movie I’ve ever seen. But this is not a modern narrative. This story is old. This story is very old. For example, this narrative offers a framework for the oldest written story humanity has to offer, the Babylonian epic of creation the Enuma Elish.

Tiamat, the primordial goddess of the sea, a dragon-like symbol of chaos and creation, joins with her husband Apsu to create a lineage of gods. Tiamat is slain by her descendent Marduk for waging war upon the other gods for the murder of her husband. From Tiamat’s remains Marduk creates the world.

The Hero’s story commences when an anomaly is detected that presents a threat. This anomaly has never before been encountered and requires a return to first principles to resolve. The Hero is an innovator. Considering the age of these stories, perhaps the Hero of antiquity is the first innovator.

The Hero doesn’t simply pick up the reins from where the old King dropped them. This Hero deconstructs the assumptions upon which an earlier maladapted strategy rests to develop a new strategy to respond to the new threat. The Tyrannical King may very well recoil at this disassembly of the gains that he made in his youth, hard-won from when he too played the Hero.

However, the Hero does not sweep aside the old order to implement a new strategy. This Hero builds upon the skills provided by society and culture through a long apprenticeship, building upon that foundation to respond to the new situation. Humanity has been doing this for centuries and the better we were at achieving this the more likely we were to pass these skills on to our offspring. Onto you and to me. Innovation is a trait selected for by evolution itself. Innovation is built into every one of us.

Each of us starts life with millennia of practice.

In this ancient story not only do we see why we are motivated to innovate, but also see how we should build upon the innovation of others. We learn how we should employ this innovation once it has been wrestled from the problem. In this ancient story, we see why the old order may recoil at this effort, as the world that they built for us was itself once a hard-won adaptation to an earlier threat. This older solution has protected the community well up to this point, and people may be reluctant to concede their winning strategy to a new approach. The conflict between conservation and creation wrestles on throughout history. The story of the innovator is the oldest story of humankind.

Innovation is ancient.

The balance between chaos and order is older still. Consider the journey of life itself. Consider what is required to grow a complex biological structure. You need enough variation to allow the ebb and flow of information to present new and useful functions. You need enough rigidity to hold those structures together long enough to consolidate them into some greater whole. Life itself clings to a cliff face high above a boiling, crashing sea. Off shore, information is fluid, unstructured, but plentiful. On shore, the land is fixed. Information is immobile, but is secure. For millions of years life has thrived on the interface between this chaos and order. Life harvests just enough information to adapt. Life retains just enough structure to grow. Life itself adapts. Life evolves.

Life is innovation itself.

This passage is taken from my book on innovation Dragon Egg

Much of this narrative is inspired by the 1992 book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson

The cliff face metaphore for life was inspired by the 1992 book Artificial Life by Steven Levy

If you would like to learn how to solve difficult problems with clever ideas, this channel or could help.