This post is and always will be a work in progress... and each version will have its own space. - Version 2 - 2017
“This world is a great wiggly affair. The clouds are wiggling. The waters are wiggling. The clouds are wiggling, bouncing.
People- but people are always trying to straighten things out. You see we live in a rectangular box, all the time; everything is straightened out.
Wherever you look around in nature you find things often straightened out. They’re always trying to put things in boxes. Those boxes are classified. Words are made from some boxes.
But the real world is wiggly, if you can believe it.
Now when you have a wiggle like a cloud, how much wiggle is a wiggle? Well you have to draw the line somewhere, so people come to sorts of agreements about, ah, how much wiggle is a wiggle, that is to say a thing. One wiggle- always reduce one wiggle to a sub wiggles. Or see it as a subordinate wiggle of a bigger wiggle. But there’s no fixed rule about it.”
-Alan Watts
This quote has sat with me for some time. At first, I enjoyed it because of the fun rantiness of it. One long deep thought about the world around us, which I often have, but never share.
As time has moved on I’ve begun to understand it more and more. We are always trying to straighten out nature. This is particularly true with the way we develop process and go about working every day. Having a set process of what you do every day is lovely, but it typically doesn’t change to take in the nuances that the day brings. The process typically doesn’t try to learn how it can serve the client better. It offers the user an escape to zone out, but while the user is zoned out the world has wiggled out of sync with the purpose of the process. And that to me is how businesses are lost.
We can overcome this, not by less process but by building guiding frameworks that are broad enough to give us a path forward without detailing everything out. It helps to point out what to watch for. You build something, check it against your framework, and move on.
I work with teams on innovation which sounds super tech, but most of the time it’s the opposite. Most of the time it’s following a set of principles that help us understand what we’re trying to solve. Not by adding tech or adding more process, but by getting in the groove of the wiggly. Which is my new mantra.
This is the perfect place to play Will Smith – Get Jiggy With It, but I have to play the song that introduced me to the original quote…
STRFKR – Florida
