Here's a lovely bit of writing about the beauty of imperfection - in both tile and business. ✨
"The most important things in life are invisible..." I was thinking about this quote the other day while looking at some handmade tile we'd just installed. If you know anything about clay, you know it's unpredictable. Sometimes it twists one way, sometimes it shrinks in another. Small changes in chemistry can yield all sorts of results both amazing and terrible. But, for me, that's all part of the wonder of the material. That the joints don't line up perfectly is a feature, not a bug. In Asian culture, there's a concept known as "wabi sabi." Essentially, this is a celebration of impermanence and imperfection. When hundreds or thousands of "imperfect" tiles come together, something beautiful happens that's felt more than seen. So many of the meaningful things in life are like this: love, pride in craft, ethics, camaraderie, culture, friendship. And, yet, despite knowing that the most important things can be felt but not seen, we're told to behave in a completely different way when it comes to business. "Experts" maintain the goal is to control what happens, eliminate uncertainty, and reap the harvest from the predictable "machine." Frankly, I'm pretty tired of these old tropes: "Work on the business, not in the business," or "what gets measured, gets managed," or even the way org charts are built (Spoiler alert: we're using the same concept developed in 1917!). All of these ideas are fine, to a point. But they're from an older era; one built on the (false) concept of predictability and constant progress. Put another way, we're told to eliminate wabi-sabi and the invisible things. We're told to build the businesses like mechanisms, and to extract ourselves from the essence of the organization while others "do the work." Again, this isn't necessarily bad... but if you love the thing you do, then treating it like a machine for extraction isn't just unsatisfying, it's also far less resilient when change happens (which is pretty much always and at greater frequency). So I say we ditch mechanistic thinking and take a cue from timeless ideas like wabi sabi. Things are imperfect and impermanent. Thing break. Change happens. Instead of trying to build a system designed to fight that change, let's build businesses that have change and antifragility built into them. Doing that will not only work better (in this era, especially) but it will also give you all sorts of invisible rewards that matter far more than a KPI!