One old joke goes that the opposite of ‘innovation’ is ‘innovation consultant’. I can see a fair amount of truth in this assertion. Especially if we qualify the statement as ‘innovation consultant who thinks the problem to be solved is lack of creativity’.

More pragmatically, it seems there is no antonym for the word. A bit like when Nassim Nicholas Taleb struggled to find an opposite for fragile. He ended up with ‘anti-fragile’, but I’m not sure the same prefix does the job in innovation-land. ‘Anti-innovation’ somehow sounds more like a protest than the proactive act of not innovating.

In any event, I’ve always kind of struggled with these kinds of opposite ends of a spectrum question anyway. Mainly because I think, rather than forming the two ends of a straight line, the two ends somehow bend themselves around to form an almost complete circle. The two ends, in other words, become effectively the same thing.

Love and hate for example. It’s a thin line between love and hate, so says the song, the implication being that you can love someone or something so much, you’re a tiny mis-step away from falling off a cliff and hating them or it. Or vice-versa. Which is pretty much the premise of nearly every Hollywood romcom ever made come to think of it: Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back again.

Put love and hate at two ends of a spectrum, curve the line into a circle and the actual opposite of love becomes the halfway point along the spectrum. The opposite of love, in other words, is indifference.

The other classic two-ends-of-a-spectrum-are-the-same can be seen in left versus right wing politics. Go far enough in either direction and the end result looks pretty much the same as far as citizens are concerned. The political opposite of left or right is thus in reality something along the lines of laissez-faire liberalism.

For a long time, I’ve assumed that love/hate and left/right are the only cases where the two ends of a spectrum are to all intents and purposes identical. Now I’ve come to think the model generalizes to pretty much any kind of supposed spectrum of extremes. If I define any two spectrum extremes as ‘A’ and ‘-A’, and draw circle such that they meet, the other side of the circle – their actual opposite – is the mean, μ, or, if the distribution isn’t skewed, zero.

Can that be true?

Is extreme Fragility the same as extreme Anti-Fragility?

Is extreme Freedom the same as extreme Responsibility?

Is extreme Fight the same as extreme Flight?

Is extremely expensive the same as extremely cheap?

In each case, I think the answer is they are: either the outcome is the same, or, as with love/hate, they are separated by a very thin line forming the edge of a cliff.

Once I accept that A is the same as –A, the real opposite of each pair becomes ‘μ’. It’s zero. It’s apathy. It’s doing what everyone else at the middle of the normal curve is doing.

In which case we might think of ‘Anti-Innovation’ as ‘proactively staying the same, irrespective of what’s happening in the external environment’. And that in turn means the meaningful opposite opposite of Innovation is not ‘Anti-Innovation’ it’s ‘Continuous Improvement’.