Never Grow Up

Organizations get old. They grow up. They lose that edginess that gave them a competitive edge when they were startups. Most corporations lose the edge that led to their eventual success. The original entrepreneurs are replaced with professional managers who are given the responsibility to sort out the mess left behind by the amateurs who gave the company life.

At HP, the crisis of youthful disorganization has long since been replaced by dysfunctional middle age. It’s all so wasteful. It’s so adult. It’s so painfully realistic leaving little room for joy, courage or humour. There’s the political fighting and the macho (male and female) posturing. It’s an unhealthy menu of the apathetic, the amoral and the incompetent.

On paper, they do everything right at HP. They have the layers of traditional hierarchy. They benchmark. They have staff surveys. Yet they are dominated by heavy duty, top-down leadership and, every now and then, thrown into further confusion by an accident-prone board.

The board of directors might respond that they have been forced to make changes to survive. It’s necessary, they might say, to shake things up from time to time in order to bring new perspectives into the company. Yet, is because HP veers between mid-life crisis and middle-aged complacency that it looks outside for renewal. Leaders seek the secret of perpetual youth and vigour via acquisition.

The most successfully adaptive companies are those that never grow up. Instead of buying into the notion that they must become old and boring like their competitors, they stay for ever young.

Some remain fun-loving, curiosity-driven rock stars long after their peer group have gained grey hairs, suits and a clichéd vocabulary of nauseating corporate speak. They refuse the downsides of maturity and the longer they refuse the more successful they remain.

Growth is not something grown-ups do.

Pretty much all the poster boy billionaires start out that way. Microsoft people played practical jokes, drank, partied and coded for days on end. They wanted to put a computer on every desk. They were genius hobbyists obsessed with making their dreams reality. Here’s an example of Microsoft pranksters at work:

"The first Bouncy Ball war was an accident. We had a ping pong table, and it was in use in the lobby of the Northup building one evening, perhaps 8pm [...] As one of the ping pong players went up for a big smash, 500 bouncy balls were dumped from the landing above.

For several long seconds, nobody understood what had happened. Then everybody did. Soon a dozen people were involved, occasionally traitorously switching between below, where most of the ammunition was, but with virtually no defenses, and above, with good defenses but little ammo. People wandered through and immediately got caught up in the action. Everybody had a great time."

Google has also pulled off several famous April Fool’s Days hoaxes. It’s first in 2000, the MentalPlex, a custom-google search screen, asked users to try to send a mental image of what they wanted to find. An animation on the screen would then display a random message indicating an error message including the classic: ‘Error 001: Weak or no signal detected. Upgrade transmitter and retry.’ Google has since featured PigeonRank, a method of improving search results with trained birds, advertisements for fictitious job openings on the moon, and scratch-and-sniff functionality.

These pranks indicate a kind of excess creativity and enthusiasm that cannot be contained by the day-to-day work. They suggest the kind of energy and thinking needed in a culture that is capable of rapid adaptation.

They also serve as a way of keeping the organization young. They help people relax. Playing shakes off the pressures of the day and overcomes some of the unhelpful formality that increases over time.

Sending people into the world to play appears wasteful to many leaders, who are only comfortable when workers are doing what they understand and can control. Yet, the most adaptive organizations recognize that playfully interacting with the real world reveals new answers.

As one scientist points out:

"The discoverer of the anti-bacterial properties of penicillin, Alexander Fleming, was famous for his playfulness. He was accused disapprovingly by his boss of treating research like a game, finding it all great fun. When asked what he did, he said that: “I play with microbes” and went on “… it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something that nobody had thought of.”

What would have happened if Fleming had stopped playing with microbes? What if he had been forced to 'grow-up'?

Nike’s first shoes were a fusion of a love for athletics and a waffle iron filled with rubber. They continue to organize their work around the energy of individual sports which increases their stimulus to adapt. Instead of just designing a general shoe, they design specific shoes adapted to a particular need. But more than this, they stay youthful.

Back in 2008, one of their designers, Shane Kohatsu, travelled to China just to look at how basketball was played there. He noticed that street ballers opted for really durable footwear like hiking boots to cope with the demands of hard concrete and high temperatures. He watched the players, he played with them and designed a new fabric, Hyperfuse, that could cope with the heat and the harsh conditions. Never grow up ■

◾️Audiobook: Adaptability: How to Win in an Age of Uncertainty)

◾️Adaptability: Table of Contents

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