Unexpected events can be painful — but they are also instructive.

Following the trauma and disorientation of unexpected events, we go into learning mode. We study the unexpected event, explaining how it happened, cataloging its characteristics, identifying the early signs that the unexpected was about to happen.

Now we know how to expect the unexpected. We stay alert and vigilant and ready to respond.

*

Innovation is a kind of unexpected event, and learning from innovation follows a similar pattern.

We usually find innovations a little implausible or unrealistic at first. Being new and unprecedented they don’t yet belong to reality as we’ve known it. (Think about everyone’s favorite example of radical innovation — how much ridicule was heaped upon it by precisely those who now celebrate its success.)

The innovations we admire most are the “disruptive” ones — the deep innovations that disorient and reorient our perceptions of what is realistic.

These deep innovations are the most instructive ones. Though at first glance disruptive innovations seem to burst into the world whole in flashes of intuition, closer scrutiny reveals that they generally owe their success to readily-discernible principles that had eluded us in the past — probably because we’d become engrained in the established ways of doing things.

These principles can be distilled into best practices and leveraged to create fresh new innovations.

And because these new innovations are founded on proven, well-established principles, we can justify them to sensible people who reject the squishy and subjective mythology of intuition and insight, and who demand a more objective, systematic and responsible approach to innovation.

*

From the liner notes of the first Coolies album, which consisted entirely of Paul Simon covers:

Q: “Don’t the Coolies perform any original songs?”

A: “We do! Just ask Paul Simon — he wrote most of them.