Published on April 16, 2017
No inspiration from above
As much religious a country is as less innovative. Correlation does not mean causality but Galileo Galilei biography suggests causality rather than a mere correlation. The Economist gave us some data.
Innovation vs Religion: A prayer a day keeps inventors at bay
−Source: Economist.com
Impaired paradigms
Simplicity and lateral thinking are two fundamentals for innovation, critical thinking is fundamental for science and technology.
These three ways of thinking result impaired by social and religious biases that impose overcomplicated constrains to creativity because as humans, we tend to keep coherent with previous beliefs and knowledge.
Patterns similarity
A patterns similarity between the Belief in a God versus the average Intelligence Quotient and the Importance of Religion versus the Global Innovation Index is shown here in the picture below with an explanation of data sets sources and axis scales:
In those countries in which the atheism ratio goes above 10% into the population, it may indicate a good degree of freedom about religion adoption or dis-adoption in adulthood. Moreover, for every country above this ratio, it seems almost granted an average I.Q. above 90.
Instead, about Innovation the condition of separation between low and high scoring groups is that less than 60% of population answer YES at the question "is the religion important in your daily life?" which is equivalent to 20% of atheists into population [¹].
Belief in a God and average Intelligence Quotient from Lynn, Harvey & Nyborg
- blu x: atheism into population (percent)
- blu y: average IQ into population
Importance of religion by Country
- red x: religiosity [YES] (percent, logarithmic, inverted axis)
Global Innovation Index by Country, analysis 2016
- red y: innovation index (logarithmic)
Note about groups separation with pattern recognition
[¹] The sum of frequencies F{yes}+F{no}<100% about daily praying habit indicates that answers are in {yes, no, n/a} and those people are in {atheism} group accounted for the {no} group. The equivalent trigger level of atheism in religiosity is the condition for which the F{yes}<80%. Thus merging the two trigger levels into the religiosity scale we have that [F{no}>10% AND F{yes}<80%] is an enabling condition for having a not-adverse cultural environment due to a strongly religion biased environment. The group separation in the innovation index may indicate that favourable conditions starts at [F{no}>20% AND F{yes}<60%].
How to drive Innovation
To break free of these limitations, it could be useful to adopt an incremental precision by recursion experimental oriented approach. The initial vague statement as working hypothesis does not immediately conflict with beliefs and all the effort later used to refine the final idea, even in a different direction than initially supposed, will help to make the right conclusion acceptable by the same mental mechanism related to coherence.
This is similar to Montessori educational model seeded and driven by proper team leadership. The distance or divergence between the first initial seeding idea and the final conclusion may vary and sometimes it could be contrary and opposite to the final conclusion. This is a well known method named demonstration by absurd.
The jump over the edge
For these reasons, innovation is often related to leadership − a way to inspire others to break some common sense rules and in order to achieve knowledge or results outside such the box. Leadership is often related to creativity and communication because to attract others people attention, something original should presented and communication plays a central role in order to avoid a general refuse.
Innovative acceptance evolution
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win − Gandhi
This quote well describe the evolution for acceptance of an innovative idea. This idea − whatever related of − as a peculiarity: it is break with the past in some ways. For these reason, it needs to go trough several steps:
- to be noticed, the opposite is to ignore;
- to be understood, the opposite is to laugh at;
- to be accepted, the opposite is to fight.
The most interesting aspect is that − everything related to the innovative idea − is charged to the persona. This clearly means that it is a social obstacle that the idea need to jump over in order to win the trust of people. If social and emotional issues were not involved, people will discuss about the idea itself and not about the persona.
Every change is a loss
Social and emotional issues are leveraged by those fear to have something to loose related to the innovative idea widespread acceptance. An innovative idea breaks some rules and therefore it changes the rules. This change the equilibrium of those who will win and those will loose from the {rules set} change. It does not matter if loosing is a real or imaginary issues, it is about the fear of not about the balance change by itself.
Every change is a gain
Every change that changes the rules may have three different out-comings:
- overall improvement
- changes the rules but overall zero balance
- a side wins but overall negative balance
The overall balance does not matter as long as the change will affect negatively the decision makers and thus to the major stockholders. This is the main reason because some innovation requires to involve politics or wide social changes. It needed to change the decision makers opinions in order to influence the balance against the major shareholders. This does not mean that they would have loose anything but usually they did because this later change.
The cost of fear
The fear of the change and the following effort in fighting it, is the primary and major source of loss. The Church lost its credibility as scientific authority after the Galileo Galilei controversial affair. So, a minor change − from the faith and religion doctrine points of views − in the description of solar system lead to a major change in which science and religion were definitely split in two independent fields of human knowledge. The main issue were that a better and simpler solar system model were going to affect the perception of reality not only its perspective or its description.
Today, it is easier to accept that teaching the "Moral Truth" using allegories and parables does not imply the necessity of delivering scientific facts. However, looking at the graph above and at the correlation or causal relationship, they did not reunite back, yet.
Conclusion
Almost of all of us born to be creative and fast-learning geniuses but society starts pretty immediately to implant in our mind well-established ideas, notions and thinking behaviours. Later, after 20 years or more, we are asked to return imaginative, creative, flexible, open-minded but remain entangled within processes and hierarchy constrains.
Obviously, all this will have an impact on our capabilities to drive innovation. Any kind of innovation will change the social perception of who {persona or group} is the leader. This remains the biggest obstacle of accepting any change and the primary source of conflicts and costs about innovation.
When starting up a new spin-off company nor changing the decision makers nor change the major stack-holders opinions are not a viable ways of driving innovation then it is required to change the organisations structure and the decisions making model in such a way that innovation would find an fast and easier path to demonstrate its benefits.
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(C) 2017, Roberto A. Foglietta, licensed under Creative Common Attribution, Non Commercial, Share Alike, International terms v.4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).