I’m very similar to average people.

In fact I might be THE average person. How do I know? Simple self-observation. Recently I was in Florence, looking for a genuine experience not spoiled by any other tourist, just as every tourist does. Of course I knew about the impossibility of such an endeavor but still there was this nagging desire that urged me to look for this “light-bulb” moment of the real Italy.

Some thirty minutes later I was convinced that the only tourist-free zone was the little piece of ground I was occupying, deliberately ignoring the fact that I was a tourist too. This made my wife and I decide to give our acing feet a rest and we went up to a small rooftop restaurant. Most likely this restaurant was one of those secret insider places that everybody knows about. In any case it was croweded – with tourists, of course.

We managed to get a table in the most western corner promising a bit of seclusion only to discover that everyone with a camera who entered the restaurant came over to take photos. Now you may assume that these people didn’t take photos of our table, and unfortunately you are right. My popularity in Italy and all the other countries they came from is low. I have to admit that I have to work on this. They came over because this corner of the restaurant offered a direct view of the cupola of the Florence Dome.

Personally I don’t consider this cupola that beautiful or impressive but this is looking through 21th century eyes. When Brunelleschi constructed it in the 15th century it was a miracle. Nobody had ever built a self-supporting cupola of such a size. There were examples like the Pantheon in Rome but they were much smaller. And size does matter.

At that time there was no common knowledge of statistics or structural analysis for self-supporting cupolas of this size. Brunelleschi had to invent it and that meant taking a considerable risk. At the end of the Middle Ages, Europe’s history was full of collapsed cathedrals. Master builders tried to copy huge structures  they saw in other cities, but didn’t have the necessary knowledge to be successful. Their buildings collapsed, sometimes twice, before they finally decided on a more modest and smaller solution.

Not so Brunelleschi. He took the risk and succeeded. The result was a miracle in his time. It is not that he lacked the needed knowledge and just got lucky. Brunelleschi was so aware of his ground-breaking innovation that he lived in constant fear that somebody would steal it. He didn’t leave any notes on his calculations. Even today scientists are not able to completely reconstruct how he did it.

This opens an interesting perspective on the meaning of being “evidence-based”. I often run into academics who try to convince me that in consulting one should only take approaches that have scientific back-up, and this being rooted in science was considered evidence-based. Companies bring in consultants for many different reasons and sometimes they bring them in to solve new problems or because they are looking for new approaches. In these situations, scientifically backed solutions don’t exist. It is all about innovation. It is about taking risks and therefore also about possible failure.

One shouldn’t do anything that contradicts scientific insight – that’s certainly true, but professionalism is being able to manage calculated risks without doing harm to your client.

How would the world look without people like Brunelleschi? Certainly much poorer. Which does not imply all consultants can compare themselves to Brunelleschi and are able to develop ground-breaking innovations. Certainly not THE average consultant. Still everybody can be innovative and everybody should take pride in it.

I wonder what an academic at the very same table at the very same roof-top restaurant would have thought. Perhaps she might have had a similar nagging feeling …. or simply turned her back on the cupola.