The wonders of suckiness: good news for the reinvention of management

Chris Flink from IDEO has an interesting TED video on how to draw inspiration rather than frustration from all the annoying, crappy experiences in life that really suck.

Suckiness began for Chris when he was born on Christmas. That, naturally, was why he was christened Chris. It was the first thing that really sucked for him, because, as a kid, he felt he never had a real birthday. People gave him one present for both his birthday and for Christmas. People thought he didn’t notice but actually he did: he was hurt. He was frustrated. He never got to hand out cupcakes at his elementary school. He never had a birthday party on the day that was actually his birthday. It was summed up one day when he got a card, “Merry birthday!”

But finally, he saw the bright side of all this frustration. While his friends were often working on their birthdays, Chris was always on holiday with his friends and family. He got to love the fact that his birthday was on Christmas. He had seen the bright side of suckiness.

Chris believes that innovation actually starts with a crappy experience. For instance, when he was 19, he noticed that shopping baskets in the supermarket sucked. Really lame. Rather than moving on, he decided to dwell on their flaws. He noticed how the handles pinched his hand and bumped painfully against the side of his leg. He saw how people struggled to carry with twisted elbows. So he invented a shopping basket that avoided all that suckiness. Easy to carry. Comfortable handles. Curved, so it wouldn’t bang into and hurt your knee. It was suckiness that led to a better shopping basket.

So Chris’s wise advice: next time you bump into something that sucks, dwell on it. Savor it. Embrace it. Study it. Lean into its suckiness. Obsess over every detail of its suckiness. It will be those little insights that will be the keys to real innovation.

The suckiness of traditional management

This could be good news for the reinvention of management. Because if there is one thing really sucks about modern life, it is traditional management.

You can recognize it in the gray feeling that comes over you when you participate in a departmental meeting, listening to the voice that drones on with announcements of “new findings” that could hardly be more banal, or of the latest reorganization that is so like the previous one, or the fatuous anodynes for managers in distress. These are stagnant waters in which no living thing flourishes. At best only one in five workers is fully engaged in his or her work. Traditional management really sucks.

But if Chris Flink is right, and I think he is, it is the widespread recognition of the very suckiness of traditional management that gives us hope that traditional management can in fact be reinvented.

Comments

[Manolis Votsis]

I think continuous stagnation reinforces reasons for compromise and that's not a good thing.
A lot has to do with the actual moments in time when somebody plunges from happiness to despair or emerges from failure to success. These are the moments that really trigger insightful thinking.
These are the moments we should tap. The following article is about them.
http://ideacosmos.com/hire-us-to-though-leaders

[Steve Denning]

Manolis

Thanks for your commment. I'm just wondering how bad does the news have to get before people despair and start real action?

Steve

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Continuing on what was started with full perseverance is a positive attitude.