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Nonconformity

Entry 1112, on 2009-11-04 at 20:11:13 (Rating 4, Comments)

Several recent items have lead me to a great epiphany regarding modern society. One was when I completed reading the book, iWoz, which is the autobiography of Steve Wozniak, one of Apple's founders and one of the most important figures in the computer revolution of the late 70s. The other was an interview with well-known New Zealand musician, Dave Dobbyn.

The common theme of these, and other sources, was that nothing great ever gets done by committee, or in an over-managed environment, or in an environment controlled by people with an inflexible mindset. Many people will say "so what, that's obvious". But if its so obvious why do the vast majority of people work in that sort of environment? Why do potentially creative and original people have their creativity stifled by a system which encourages unthinking conformity?

So either its not obvious to many people, or they don't care, or I'm wrong. Thinking back to the great steps forward for modern society it does seem that most of them were made by individuals working outside the existing constraints of society. For example, Steve Wozniak was certainly in this category when her created the Apple I and Apple II computers.

And scientific geniuses like Einstein, Newton and Darwin made their great breakthroughs by working alone. Sure, their work was partly based on what had already been done by others but can you imagine relativity or evolution being discovered by a committee? OK, we are going to vote on time dilation. Who here thinks time slows down to ensure the speed of light stays constant? Yes, I can imagine the outcome of that vote!

Einstein made a lot of his discoveries in his spare time when he was working at the patent office. So its precisely because he had a lot of spare time to "waste" that one of the most important theories of all time was discovered.

Its probably not quite as simple as I have described here. Many projects do require a large organisation to make them practical and some discoveries do come from large organisations. For example, a lot of the ideas we now have in modern computers (the mouse, ethernet, laser printers) came from Xerox PARC, but it operated in an unusually open and unmanaged way where the researchers had an unprecedented amount of freedom to pursue their own ideas.

So the PARC model is the sort of thing that more organisations should pursue. Just from my observations of the way people work around various organisations I am involved with I can see a huge amount of wasted talent because people are forced into ridiculously bureaucratic systems which waste their time and skills.

One of the reasons this lack of flexibility is so common is that certain people want more "accountability" from staff, especially in public organisations. But if you asked the taxpayer whether they really want highly skilled and moderately well paid experts doing piles of paper work to make their departments more "accountable" instead of doing the work they were actually employed for, I think they would suggest accountability isn't all its cracked up to be!

I agree that tighter controls do mean that some people who would otherwise do as little as possible are forced into doing some work but the price we pay for that: inflexibility and bureaucracy, just isn't worth it!

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