Don't confuse neatness with goodness

I hope my wife doesn't read this blog post. We fundamentally disagree on one simple element of parenting. When I get home I run through the door, drop my bags, kick off my shoes en-route, throw down my coat, go straight to the family and say 'right what are we playing or doing and can I join in?' My wife on the other hand walks in, hangs up her coat, straightens the rug, closes the bin lid, puts away some washing and organises the recycling, before she has made it to where. we are.

She is frustrated with me because I always leave the house a mess. But my defence is that my primary aim is not to have a tidy house, it is to raise wonderful kids.

Of course I jest, but only in part and I actually think that having a tidy house (neat organisation, well run services etc) is really important but it isn't the objective of why we exist.

One of the favourite movies in our house is Matilda the musical and the great music by Tim Minchin drives it brilliantly. One of the songs has become an anthem, sometimes over-used, to re-imagine behaviour. It is called 'Naughty' and the premise is that if life is going how it is, things are not how you would want then don't let them system, the institution, or people squash you but recognise 'sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty'. So when I see my 3 year old pinching some chocolates I get the cheeky repost of 'well sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty!'

When I walk through organisational change with people I often want to say to them - 'sometimes you need to be a little bit naughty.' You need to change things, break things, mix things up, do it differently. And I am amazed at the people who prioritise bad performing but 'neat' and 'manicured' organisations, rather than mixing things up.

The paradigm shift is this...don’t confuse neatness with goodness, they are not always the same.

My son is learning how to do the rubric cube. He has mastered getting one side the same colour and is proud of this. But when I tell him that to get more sides correct he will have to mess around with the completed side, this freaks him out. So he is stuck with trying to leave the one side perfectly in tact whilst moving the other pieces around. This limits how much he can achieve and what he can produce.

We often do the same with our organisations, we have one piece that is performing reasonably well and when it comes to broader organisational change the moment it has an impact on the one piece that feels settled we dismiss every idea and treat our completed side as a sacred cow. Not realising in the process that actually the thing we are prizing can often be limiting the development of everything else. I think we live in a moment where we have confused neatness with goodness, where order has been seen to represent progress.

In latin the word 'regula' where we get the word 'rule' from has a number of meanings but largely we take 'rule' to mean a command or directive. And it stays in that rigid and unrelenting form. In latin it also has this beautiful other meaning to be a trellis. Something that would allow a plant or a vine to grow. It has flexibility to allow for the plant to grow the best way it can and it maximises fruitfulness. A trellis has the sole purpose of allowing the vine to grow, if it stops doing this, or the vine outgrows it, you would get rid of it. The trellis is not an end in and of itself.

In healthy organisations we hold these things well recognising there are rules in a traditional sense but that there are definitely 'trellis' type rules, ones which offer support and allow growth, but have a shelf life and can be bent to support the growth that is needed.

I was with a brilliant head teacher this weekend and we were talking about increasing bureaucratic pressure placed upon teachers and I said how do you deal with it. And he said 'if it makes teachers better at their job and helps kids learn and have fun at school we do it, if not, we don't'. I would always encourage organisations periodically to look at the things they do if they are legally bound to do it, then do it. If it is serving the vision then do it. If it makes you better, great. If it does none of these things you must at least ask 'why do we do this?' And if you can't come up with a good answer then drop it. If a good answer emerges, that you didn't think about, once you have dropped it, then just reinstate it.

The danger is this that being neat, tidy and efficient is often so useful and valuable that it can become an end in and of itself and detract from who you really want to be and distract us from the goal. Having a perfectly neat coffee house, with no soul, so no one comes. A brilliantly packaged chocolate that taste disgusting so no one buys it. A wonderfully slick appraisal system that sucks that life out of your team. We need the bravery to recognise when neatness isn't serving us, often it will. But not always.