“Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I’m on the pollen path.”

I finally got a chance to read Joseph Campbell’s last book, ‘The Inner Reaches Of Outer Space’ while on a trans-Atlantic flight this month. If there are two kinds of people in life – lumpers and splitters – Campbell, like TRIZ-founder, Genrich Altshuller was one of my favourite someone-somewhere-already-solved-your-problem, ‘lumpers’.

Campbell’s major pattern-finding contribution was the Hero’s Journey – the result of a lifetime spent studying and revealing the underlying patterns of successful literature. As far as I can tell, he never understood the concept of s-curves and discontinuous change as we now know them in the innovation world, but the Hero’s Journey described the precise steps that discontinuous change requires.

The Inner Reaches Of Outer Space explores the underlying patterns between a different kind of discontinuous change, life transitions. And especially things like rites-of-passage transition into adulthood. These too, Campbell shows, are also Hero’s Journeys.

My favourite part of the book was the Pollen Path. And particularly Campbell’s description of how the Navajo elders mapped out the initiation journey of their young adults. Again, neither Campbell nor the Navajo elders knew about S-curves. Except, as we can see in the depiction of the Pollen Path, they absolutely did.

To the point that, just maybe, they add a few clues to the nature of discontinuous change process:

Firstly, the Pollen Path itself, which is all about the period in the Journey before you jump off your current s-curve and start the search for the next. Before you jump, make sure you prepare yourself with some growth-sparking, high-density nutrition.

Then, when you’re in the ‘Special World’ no-mans land between your old s-curve and the next – the place where, along the Pollen Path, you’ll find rainbows and lightning you’ll also need:

   * Food along the way (the corn ears hidden along the path in the painting)

   * Both male and female traits (the black and yellow characters on either side of the path)

   *  To stick to the middle ground and recognise that the cul-de-sac detours are precisely that (the go-nowhere offshoots from the path)

Sure enough. Nothing new under the sun.