The Case Against Sterility

Designers of physical spaces often warn about the design mistakes that can make a space sterile. Sterile spaces are engineered for order, optimised to eliminate chaos. Hospitals are sterile, homes are not, at least shouldn’t be. Homes should be cozy, inviting and inspiring.

To call a place sterile is to call it a place devoid of life, a place where inspiration goes to wither and radical thoughts don’t prosper.

Much of modern management has all the soul of a minimalist hospital waiting room. It’s clean, it’s orderly, and nobody wants to spend more time there than they absolutely must. Management Science has been a discipline that helped managers focus on the tasks that lead to direct, measurable profitability, cleaning everything else out. It advocated for organisation of actions, resources, efforts and thoughts. Over time, this obsession with creating a sterile space, both physically and philosophically, has left many organizations without a pulse.

The higher the mental investment in making precision engineered structures and perfected decision models, the less is the available bandwidth for creative thinking and innovation. Rigid structures seldom allow for serendipitous moments at workplace. Embracing heuristics, where possible, in place of rigid models might be a good idea. Heuristics are the smart, flexible rules of thumb that allow for brilliant decision making on the fly. They give your team the breathing room to be creative, responsive and innovative. The teams are more informal in the gaps between deterministic and the heuristic. These gaps are where deeper social connection are formed. It goes without saying that you should check for controlling biases and fallacies before employing heuristics. It takes practice, sure!

If you think that sounds a little unstructured, let’s take a surprising detour into criminology. Disorganization theory suggests that crime thrives where community ties are weak. It’s not chaos that’s the problem, but a lack of healthy, informal social connection. The same is true for our teams. A management style that is too rigid and sterile breaks down those vital connections, leaving a vacuum where creativity and engagement ought to be.

Criminologists talk about cultural transmission as the way negative norms get passed down in a neighbourhood. We can flip that idea on its head. In organizations, this is our secret sauce. It’s how the culture of innovation spreads. When you provide people space to think and solve problems together, you are building a positive feedback loop where great ideas and smart approaches are transmitted organically. This is the tiny transformation that matters: shifting from being overtly organized to being intelligently alive.

In your EPM, leave a little wiggle room in budgets. You might come at me with a pitchfork but hear me out – plan at higher levels and unless absolutely necessary, let some accounts have a higher tolerance for budget inefficiencies. Let your teams do more with what’s left over. In your HR process you can let employees craft their own roles instead of fitting them into a predefined box. This snowballs into

Let go of the sterile. Tolerate a little chaos. Draw on the back of the napkins. And remember that Ugly is Beautiful.