The Business Case For Weirdness

Good business is supposed to be sensible, evidence-based and predictable, right? It’s usually framed as the disciplined application of things that have already worked, which is probably why certainty has become such a booming industry.

Find the person who has what you want. Work out exactly how they got there. Copy the mechanics. Follow the formula.

As a founder with limited time, money and energy, that promise is completely seductive. Why struggle with the messy business of thinking when somebody else has already left a trail of breadcrumbs?

The problem is that everybody else can see the breadcrumbs too.

WE’RE ALL A LITTLE BIT TOO CONVENTIONAL

In The Decline of Deviance, he describes a “crisis of conventionality”, an “epidemic of the mundane” and a “recession of mischief.”

Some of that is good. Young people are less likely to smoke, drink heavily, fight, take dangerous drugs.

But the same decline in deviance appears to have a cultural shadow.

Popular culture is concentrating around fewer artists, franchises and ideas. Mastroianni notes that before 2000, around a quarter of top-grossing films were sequels, prequels or spin-offs. Now it is closer to three-quarters. Popular music has become more homogeneous, websites increasingly converge on the same aesthetic, and scientific writing has become more standardised. His line that “creativity is just deviance put to good use” is perfection.

Because business is showing exactly the same symptoms.

THE CERTAINTY INDUSTRY

We’re wildly overexposed to other people’s success and given almost none of the context required to understand it.

We see the outcome without the starting advantage, the revenue without the margins, and the launch without the existing audience. We see the strategy without the timing, network, reputation, luck or pile of previous failures that made it work.

Then the internet reverse-engineers the apparent mechanics and packages everything up as proof. Sometimes the formula works. Often it doesn’t.

But it’s the fact we’re searching for a silver-bullet to begin with, that’s the real problem.

WE’RE BUILDING AT A TIME OF SUPER ABUNDANCE

If the answer is already obvious to everybody, let’s assume that everybody is heading towards it. 

It’s always been smart to head somewhere different. Now it’s business critical.

If your ambition is simply to perform slightly better within the existing rules of your category, copying the best player may be perfectly sensible.

But the biggest opportunities usually require a different way of thinking.

Think of it this way.

Strategic rigour is how you really hone in on the important problem that deserves solving in your business - we aren’t here for crazy, for the sake of crazy.

Imagination stops you solving it the same way everybody else would.

You know what fires up your imagination? Belief-shifting levels of weirdness and deviance.

THE FOUNDER BLINDSPOT IS IMAGINATION

Because you’re a PHD-level expert on the mechanics of your business. And on your immediate competitors and you’re just inside the business.

Imagination requires a different set of lenses. Here, a little bit of weirdness will be your friend.

When I was working on recruitment for The Royal Marines we were solving the problem of commitment, so we spoke to Drug and Alcohol Counsellors about 12 step programmes.

I’ve studied sex cults to understand how to build allegiance and belonging.

The psychedelics industry to get a new language for personal transformation.

Spoken to everyone from tattoo artists and DJs, to taxi drivers and an underground female wrestling group… to explore the real heart beat of city life.

None of them hold a new silver-bullet answer. All of it helps fire up your imagination in different ways and get you to different ideas,

SILVER-BULLETS ALWAYS FEEL A LITTLE SAD

Because they so rarely are.

And they make the game of business into a set of rules to follow.

I think you can optimise your way towards the cleanest possible version of what already exists, or you can get strategically clear, widen the frame and give yourself a chance of creating something that doesn’t.

Your category probably already has enough people following best practice.

The real opportunity may belong to the person willing to solve the right problem in a much weirder way.

Image credit: L´AMOUR magazine.