Studio Non Troppo

We humans tend to use categories a lot, at least as adults. Having a category allows us to save space in our brain; it’s like a compression system. By “compression system,” I just mean that it takes less brainpower to remember “a number whose six digits are eights” than to remember “eight hundred eighty eight thousand, eight hundred eighty eight” (it’s also easier to type).

So when someone asks me, “what do you do?”, it’s easy for me to reply that I am a professor. Or that I am a conductor. Or that I am a blogger.

Of course, I’m not principally a blogger. And, frankly, I feel uncomfortable with the statements “I am a professor” and “I am a conductor,” too. They’re convenient replies; they take considerably less time and brainpower to speak than it would to figure out and communicate my existential nature.

It can be good to take the easy way out and lean on a category. After all, I don’t want to bore absolutely everyone with endless self-analysis. But categories should be tools we can use to think; we shouldn’t let ourselves be the tools of categories.

So the next time you are trying to solve a problem, consider whether the categories you’re using to describe the problem are helping you solve it…or boxing you in.

Recently, there was a big scuffle at the university where I work: should the mountain in the logo be blue (as it is currently) or yellow? All sorts of complaints and tomfoolery, made unintentionally comic by several individuals’ use of the “reply all” button to emails that had been sent out to the campus-wide mailing list.

But with all the discussion and gratuitous character assassination, one point was ignored: if a brand is supposed to represent an entity, there has to be an entity to represent. A brand can’t do all the work of standardizing and unifying on its own.

There are many different ideas of what this particular university is, what “its” goals are (which begs the question of what is “it”), and what “its” goals should be, and these different ideas are protean, in flux, none definitively unifying the constituents.

If the brand had been designed to correspond closely to one of those identities, some people would be supportive, and others would dissent, but there would at least be an active correspondence, one that the supportive folks could leverage in their work and that the dissenting folks could rally around and against. But the brand is sufficiently vague so as to avoid choosing sides.

So it doesn’t brand.

To the outside observer, the university’s brand either fails to indicate and represent an identity, or it indicates and represents a failure to create identity.

Having something work out the right way is not a matter of the thing.

As Malcolm Gladwell would put it in Outliers, it’s not just a lot of hard work that made Bill Gates more wealthy than 99.9999999% of the other people in the world. Nor was it his smarts. No, those things were necessary for his off-the-charts success, but they were not sufficient. It also took a constellation of opportunities, huge and irreplicable opportunities (though not necessarily evident as such at the time) for his hard work and smarts to pay off in such an over-the-top way.

When developing a product, say, for example, a bar of soap, it is absolutely critical to recognize that the nature of the new soap is not the key to its success in the marketplace.

The bar of soap simply does not exist on its own. It is tied, inextricably, to the particular marketing plan you attach to it. And to the time (the specific time, not just the time of day or time of year) in which it is released. And to the words you use when you describe your pet project to your friends. And to the global contingencies of soap manufacturing processes today, the day you email companies for production bids. Think the butterfly effect, smushed down to a world of implications in an instant.

There is no such thing as a bar of soap, separate from the myriad details necessary to imagine, design, create, sell, and use that bar of soap.

It’s so complicated, really, that it’s almost miraculous that any particular bar-of-soap idea succeeds. Richard Feynman talked once about how miraculous it seemed that of all the possible license plate numbers in the world, he just happened to see ARW 357 one morning. (Think about that, and feel the delightful discomfort in your mind. He was talking about how some things we consider miracles are examples of an outside-in way of looking at things that are equivalently, but differently and beautifully weird when we look at them from the inside out.)

Catching a wave is absurdly unlikely, and it’s easy to credit wave-catching surfers with superhuman skills. But it’s not that. It’s time on task, luck, sequences of opportunities, a willingness to keep playing with configurations. Aside from mental spin and Taoism, success is neither within our power nor outside of our power.

Everything, logic included, is necessary but not sufficient.

Isn’t that grand?