The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

by Scott Berkun

A favorite example of this tragic management habit is how in 1999 the famous design firm IDEO was featured on ABC's popular Nightline TV show. They demonstrated an idea development technique they used called a “deep dive” to redesign a shopping cart in just five days. Soon hundreds of companies were doing their own half-baked versions of deep dives, and, surprise, the results were disappointing. Somehow, despite how dedicated some were to following all the steps and all the rules, an element was missing, and they couldn't match the results they'd seen on the show. The missing ingredient was, of course, the primary one: the people involved. Watchers of Nightline worked at places with employees who were not as talented in design as IDEO's. But beyond their talent, IDEO employees shared values and attitudes that were not explicitly captured in the deep dive method despite how essential those things were for the method to work. In anthropology terms, this superficial mimicry is called a cargo cult, a reference to the misguided worship of abandoned airplane landing strips among tribes hoping for the goods that airplanes had delivered to return. Every year new trends in work become popular in spite of their futility for most organizations that try them. These trends are often touted as revolutions and frequently are identified with a high-profile company of the day. Concepts like casual Fridays, brainstorming sessions, Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, matrixed organizations, or even 20 p...

Humor, storytelling, and songs are social skills we developed thousands of years ago around fires while we did the critical work of staying warm and cooking food to survive. It's a shockingly recent notion that work and play should be mutually exclusive things. We learn about ourselves and each other through play, which helps us work together.