Business: Homogenise and Perish
Professor Bill Buxton, in his keynote at IxDA O8, performed a simple demonstration that has resonated with me for the last year an a half; an exercise I repeat regularly for the benefit of others. He placed a number of different coloured paint smears onto a surface. The original colours represented individuality, creativity, diversity and innovative thinking – those things that make everybody valuable to your business and that which makes them different from everybody else in your business. The second step was simply to smear the colours together into a swirl of grey.
Grey is the colour of homogeneity. Grey is the colour created by pushing out free thinkers in your organisation, by not encouraging mistakes and innovation, by allowing people within the organisation to become one big club of like minded individuals (an oxymoron, naturally). Grey is when either you or your employees demand everybody simply sign off on everything without dissent, when you allow employees to isolate and marginalise other employees. When you are afraid of post mortems because they may be interpreted as personal criticism. When dissent and individual opinion are discouraged.
What are the results of becoming a grey homogenous organisation? You stop being innovative, for one. You become less likely to capture the best recruits. You also fail to capture the diversity dividend available through the added experiences and perspectives of the various employees you’ve invested time in recruiting. You get higher attrition rates as dissatisfied outsiders leave for better prospects elsewhere. You get boring products and lose market share to organisations who can actually innovate and capitalise on new ideas.
No matter what your business is you can be sure that ideas are going to be worth your time and money. Don’t let your organisational culture demand homogeneous relationships, and don’t let yourself be fooled into believing that grey is going to make your business prosperous. Grey is grey. No, grey is fucken GREY and it will put you out of fucken business. Grey does not mean employee / job / organisational fit – and that’s where most people are messing it up. Grey, to a business, is the will to perish quietly in the backwoods without a scream.
A great organisation screams in the parking lot. It pumps its lungs full of new breathe every morning when your employees roll into the office too excited to stop themselves jumping into work. A truely great organisation figures out (somewhow) where the money tree of ideas is best shaken and then appropriately nudges the hell out of it so fruit drops continously. A truely truely great organisation is bigger than the sum of all its parts, rather than the reactive puddle of common ground where each of those employees overlap. Draw a bunch of circles and you’ll see what I mean – the overlapping joins of grey conformity versus the utilisation of the complete circles of each and every person on your team.
Next time you interview someone for a position with your firm ask yourself this – are you looking for someone just like you? No. Then why are you trying to hire someone just like you? You’ve already got a you, dumbass. You should really be looking for someone who can do the things you can’t do so well, someone with new ideas and fresh perspectives around the work you’re doing. Ask them for ideas at the interview, if they’ve got no new ideas then why do you want them onboard?
My advice is to do everything you can in your power to keep the diversity of your new hires exactly the way you brought them into the business. If you’re going to drive anybody out of the job then look left and right to the homogenous grey people… because grey spells perish in ‘pidgeon business’.
