Inventing an unprecedented technology or strategy demands fearlessness. But if everyone is afraid to look silly, who creates the breakthroughs?
Habit and Mimicry
As human beings, we observe and follow behavioral codes. According to sociologist Gabriel Tarde, almost all our behavior is due to either habit or mimicry.
Mimicry gives us license to do the things that aren’t habits. But it also delimits what we are willing to do. And that’s what makes it so hard to create the unprecedented.
Even if you are creative enough to come up with an outlandish but high-potential idea, fear of embarrassment may keep you from sharing it.
But mimicry does allow incremental change.
We see someone with a new piece of technology, and we are curious. We see 10 people with it, and we wonder where to buy it.
Still, that’s hardly the stuff of business breakthroughs.
If mimicry and habit make up most behavior, how do we ever advance the crazy idea that no one else can see yet?
The history of technology is rife with examples of ridicule; the same ridicule that makes us stay quiet in product stand-ups.
Historic Ridicule
When Lister first suggested that disinfecting surgical equipment might reduce deaths, it didn’t make sense to his peers. They knew that disease spread through miasmas in the air.
But Lister had read Pasteur’s work. From that, he imagined a similar mechanism spreading infections from wounds.
Everyone laughed. The idea of tiny infectious agents—germs—seemed fantastical. So small they couldn’t be seen? Not even with a magnifying glass? Ridiculous!
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In 1999, only 40% of people in the U.S. had EVER been online. Connections were primarily dial-up, and Yahoo had only just launched.
https://www.statista.com/chart/19058/number-of-websites-online/
5 years earlier, I was consulting to an advertising agency. The CEO believed that his clients would be left behind without investing in their own websites.
But in 1994 nobody had a website (other than CERN).
Why would a business need a website? There were fewer than 4000 websites in the world.
Plus, unlike brochures, you couldn’t give them to a client, mail them to a prospect or even hand them out at a trade show. Spending thousands (yes, thousands) on a website seemed insane.
While I didn’t ridicule my client, I did wonder about his sanity.
Greeks: Drunk and Sober
According to Herodotus, when the elders of ancient Greece were trying to make decisions, the rules were quite strict. All decisions had to be unanimous both while sober and while drunk.
Often, decisions made while the group was drunk would fail under sober scrutiny. But the same thing happened in reverse too. Sober decisions got nixed during a bacchanalia.
When they were drunk, there was more room for imagination, creativity and fearlessness. Requiring drunken agreement was a hedge against complacency.
The fear of being ridiculed is always at play—as much now as in ancient times. At work, organizational politics and performance comparisons reinforce our drive to be well thought-of. Which is to say, we are risk-averse, worried about looking silly and subject to groupthink.
Given the pressure to innovate and solve problems, the last thing any leader wants is a team that’s driven to conform and avoid risk.
Protean Play and Protection
In my garden I watch a butterfly flutter past me. It does what looks like a random set of turns, dives and loops before alighting on the next flower.
When a fox is being chased by a pack of dogs, it does something similar. It zigs, zags, circles back, climbs and burrows—in no pattern or order.
These are called Protean behaviors—disordered or random paths. Some scientists speculate that they confuse predators, allowing prey to escape.
But butterflies zig and zag even when they are not being chased. They seem to be playing, wafting on the breeze, taunting the gigantic unwinged biped, and flirting with their buddies.
Young otters often lie on their backs, juggling a single stone in their paws for hours. It looks pointless. (Seriously. Watch the video at this link.)
Maybe they are developing the dexterity to handle the rock-like mollusks that they must ultimately crack open to eat. Evolution would have favored the best fed otters for survival. So, in essence, the best stone jugglers were the fittest?!
When you watch the young otters juggling they are as focused and enraptured as a teenager in a Fortnite binge. They are clearly playing. And they don’t mind at all how ridiculous they look.
Otters and bumblebees delight in playing, however silly and pointless.
But humans do not keep their playfulness into adulthood. Shortly before puberty, we become more interested in avoiding embarrassment than in frolicking, silly games or making funny faces.
Pub Trivia
Being silly, obnoxious or argumentative may be your M.O. at pub trivia or the tailgate—but at work? Probably not.
Playing and drunkenness provide access to options other than habit and mimicry. They trick our brains into forgetting about the social limits and taboos. They give license for our crazy, silly, impossible thoughts and actions.
The ancient Greeks were more like us than they were like otters. And so, wine was their solution to the buttoned-up public image.
Since workplace drunkenness is frowned upon, we can only access that uninhibited realm through play.
Forced Fun
After receiving a speeding citation I went to required driving school. The instructor was committed to “making learning fun”. It was cringe.
No doubt, you’ve met HR leaders (or consultants) with the same goal. They host happy hours and mini-golf events, trying to get everyone to relax and have fun.
Neither of those will persuade professionals to play.
Organizing games doesn’t work. But instead of actual play—maybe something like play could help?
Fun and Focus
What is it about playing that makes us lose our inhibitions?
There are two sides to the equation: Fun and Focus. The surest place to see people in a state of flow is while they are playing. Whether Fortnite, tennis or Wordle, we lose ourselves and become fully engrossed in the game.
That combination of focus and fun transcends our fear of looking silly—and it unleashes our creativity.
But how can we, as leaders, set the right conditions for the fun and focus that we see in play?
Well, we can provide the tools and settings for play. That may mean outdoor workspaces, Legos™ in a breakroom or encouraging people to work in diverse settings, times of day and teams. That’s the suggestion of Playful Work Design.
Copasetic Culture
But Legos and a treehouse won’t be enough if the culture makes us worry about how we look and whether we’re being judged. So, we might aim to
– Reduce judgment
– Increase freedom
– Remove shaming
– Increase silliness
– De-value being right
– Increase imagination
When organizations try to create competition or play, it is usually a manipulation. Everyone can sense that, and so it never increases fun or focus—just cut-throat competition.
But gamification can be untethered from survival and promotion. Then, it’s playful and fun. That can increase not just innovation but also engagement.
The greatest harbinger of doom for any enterprise is an environment that makes it hard—or even dangerous—to be silly or wrong. No organizations is immune.
A client of mine was a data scientist at a FAANG company. He came to me because he had been struggling to meet their performance metrics. It turned out that the metrics were based on the percentage of “successful” data experiments he did. So, every time his newest idea failed, he was penalized. And he was shamed for those failures.
I was flabbergasted. Ultimately, there was only one way for him to succeed there: Stop innovating and only do experiments that he knew would work. In other words, don’t experiment.
He resigned and now leads the data team at a competitor of theirs.
Suppressing silliness and risk-taking is costly.
