I went to go get dressed this morning and I quickly grabbed a set of socks from my sock drawer. I thought I was grabbing a pair of navy blue socks in our darkened room, but once I got them into a good light, I saw that I grabbed a pair of black socks. I went back to my sock drawer, this time in better light, and saw that there were only two kinds of socks…black and white.
Our daughter often does the laundry, including folding and putting them away. What happened was that she did the laundry and matched the socks she found. After that, she put all of the singles in a wash-basket to be sorted later. I found the basket kind of buried in the laundry room and found a rainbow of colors. I didn’t find a quick match, so I went on with my black socks.
I remember being at a training event once. Everyone was asked to tell some strange habit they had. Mine was taking pictures of a miniature llama on my trips across the world (this is a picture of Dolly at Abu Simbel during our trip to Egypt). Another man said that he only wore black socks and white socks. Everyone laughed at him and thought it was a little silly. But he explained…”look, it is too hard to match socks and find the right ones. So I buy blacks socks that are all the same kind and white socks that are all the same. It makes matching socks very easy.” I guess I fell victim to the same issue.
During my morning of reflecting on this strange occurrence, it struck me. The same thing happens in our personal and professional lives. We are constantly working to strike a balance between variety and simplicity. We seek to explore the new, but we streamline our lives to make it easier for us to cope with all the complexity we face.
Companies do the same thing. They seek to streamline the number of options to make it easier to manage. Instead of offering different services to different types of users, they make everyone use the same “vanilla” solution. Why do they make salespeople carry the same bulky laptops as the folks in the corporate office? Why do they make everyone use SharePoint, when a wiki could suffice? It all comes down to simplicity and control.
So I took a break from writing this post and went to work. On the way, I listened to the new Six Pixels of Separation podcast from Mitch Joel. He played an interview with Arielle Eckstut, one of the founders of the amazing LittleMissMatched, on his podcast.
LittleMissMatched started with the premise of “Why do we have to wear matching socks, anyway? Maybe matching is overrated?!” They sell socks in sets of three which allow three choices for a pair instead of just one. Suddenly socks aren’t just boring socks, but a means to self-expression and creativity.
Could the same concept apply to our work and home lives? Can we identify flexible tools that allow us to mix and match them together? Is there a way that we can pick a few very flexible tools that can serve a number of purposes? In other words, can we simplify the palette of tools yet allow for greater creativity?
Web 2.0 tools may allow for this “divergent simplicity” but I think the jury is still out. Can people make the shift to more flexible tools and then allow their creativity to take them to new heights of productivity? Microsoft has created structure and interconnectivity between specialist tools to assist people in adopting a suite of office applications. Are we able to diverge from this habit and be able to adopt “Technicolor” applications that can allow for both divergence and simplicity.
