Notes about Orbiting the Giant Hairball

Summary of book

Metaphor: institutions are necessarily hairballs. Every policy, experience, and bit of history adds another hair. These accumulate and exert increasing gravitational pull.

Some people are creative. Indidual. Unique. All people are, really. But some are such that they are especially unsuited to being tangled up in and held down by the institutional hairball.

There's a virtuous middle ground, where a creative person extricates themselves from the institutional hairball enough to break free, soar, and orbit the hairball. Seek a balance in remaining tethered enough and aligned enough to add value and perspective to the institution. It's a balance of being but not so weighed down by the institution as to be unable to add the value you have to offer as an individual, distinct, interesting human, and also not so unmoored and flying so fast as to reach escape velocity and become irrelevant to the institution and inevitably parting ways with it.

The book is about responsible creativity, about a dynamic relationship with the organization. Connected enough to be supported and to add value. Loose enough to contribute the perspective and creativity that the person was hired for.

Live an authentic and meaningful work life that true to you and is also true to the mission of the organization. Do so supported by but not smothered by the institution.

It is a delicate balance, resisting the hypnotic spell of an organization's culture and, at the same time, remaining comitted from the heart to the personally relevant goals of the organization.

Should you read this book?

Yes. It's short, light, illustrated with interesting drawings.

(I'm glad I bought my own physical copy of the book. It's a book where the physicality of it is adding to the charm. I've found writing in it a worthwhile way to further engage with it.)

Its advice might be directly applicable. You might find yourself having creativity and uniqueness to offer an institution trying to weigh you down and crush your individuality. This book provides a useful way to think about that phenomenon, about a healthy relationship to that gravity wherein you soar but do not go flinging out into space. The orbiting metaphor is useful.

Its advice might be relevant to your interactions with others. Maybe you solidly have your feet on the ground and that's the right place for you, but you're looking around and seeing others uncomfortable with so pedestrian a relationship with institution and authority. This book provides a framework for understanding that, parameters for how one achieves liftoff in a way that adds value to and remains tethered to the institution.

Chapters

(These notes probably aren't enough to get the lessons of the book. They might be enough to remind of the lessons of the book if you read the book first.)

1. Where have all the genuises gone?

Most young children self-identify as artists. Most older children do not. This is in part because institutions crush the individuality out of people. Society suppresses creative genius. The pressure to Be Normal.

Reviving the creative genuis in you is the beginning of Orbit.

2. Giant Hairball

Organizations are hairballs. The hairball is made up of accepted processes, standards, and methods. An organization necessarily, naturally synthesizes past experiences and successes.

Hairball is policy, procedure, conformity, compliance, rigidity and submission to status quo, while Orbiting is originality, rules-breaking, non-conformity, experimentation, and innovation.

3. Pink Budha

On the power of storytelling to exert gravitational pull to turn tangents into orbits.

Orbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mind set, beyond "accepted models, patterns, or standards" -- all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.

4. Preparing for lift-off

Grow into readiness in the cocoon of the hairball. But don't get too comfortable to the point of complacency such that you never launch.

Being infinite, the whole of reality is too much for the conscious human mind to grasp.

Similarly, an organization comprehends only a limited slice of reality. Avoid accepting that limited slice as the whole of your reality.

5. A chicken's fate

When you join an organization, it will tell you "this is the way we are". Avoid being hypnotized by this and taking it to mean "this is all we can be, the way we always will be."

There has never been anyone quite like you, and there never will be. Consequently, you can contribute something to an endeavor that nobody else can. There is a power in your uniqueness...

... find the goals of the organization that touch your heart and release your passion to follow those goals.

6. Thou shalt not have it easy

Metaphor of a champion pool player who makes the game look easy but the reality is they're making it look easy through their mastery of it.

Organizations can value heroic effort, exerting pressure to be performatively miserable.

This cultural seduction plays into the old illusion that if we just work hard enough, and if we just work long enough... we will finally be found loveable.

This culture erodes quality of life by contrived travail.

turn your back on the overwork-as-an-end-in-itself game, and instead ... develop the skills to play like a champion.

Work shouldn't hurt; it should feel joyful.

7. What you don't see is what you get

Stop trying to control people and start trusting people.

Creative work involves measurable evidence of work only at the successful end of the creative effort.

A management that is obsessed with productivity usually has little patience for the quiet time essential to profound creativity.

A healthier alternative is the Oribit of trust that allows time - without immediate, concrete evidence of productivity - for the miracle of creativity to occur.

8. No access

It is so much more sensible to admit having made a mess than to burrow deeper into it.

Courage to cross boundaries. Courage to admit idiocy. Courage to acknowledge impasse. Courage to open up to being rescued. We need much courage if we are to respond successfully to the consequences of exploring beyond authorities' sometimes-beneficial, sometimes-detrimental boundaries. And, if we are to grow, explore we must.

9. First there's grope, then there's rote

On corporate entropy, the tendency of degradation of anything special towards an ultimate state of intert uniformity.

Acknowledging, embracing, and experiencing joy in non-linearity, where the whole is not the sum of its parts and systems are not fully predictable.

I have always wanted my acts of rebellion to be met with approval, and, at the same time, I have always been disappointed when such approval is bestowed.

10. Containers contain

Don't let job descriptions overly restrict.

Contained in a box called job description. Intended to make you accountable and containable, more often than not its net effect is to restrict you.

leave our containers-turned-cages and find the grace to dance without stepping on toes. Others' or our own.

11. Cage dwellers

Be intentional about where you are on the security-freedom spectrum.

If you want to live more fully, start somewhere toward the safe end of the security/freedom continuum and move mindfully, ever so mindfully, toward the free end.

12. Introducing your brain

right-brain left-brain.

Reasoning your way to more creativity is ineffective. It plays into the strengths of the rational mind.

Irrationality is more effective at getting beyond the limitations of the rational mind. Ungage original thought transrationally. Poetry. Myth. Art. Imagination. Magic. Play.

13. About teasing

Don't tease.

Teasing is shaming.

when one of us finds the courage to risk to grow - to leave the status quo of the Hairball - that can be pretty threatening for the rest of us to witness. The threat is that we, too, might be expected to grow. And sometimes growing can be a frightening and painful experience.

Teasing is a tool for stopping others from risking, growing, sharing, and living. Because when they finally stop living they'll stop feeling like a threat.

14. High-tech peaches

On tradeoffs between professionalism, authenticity, uniformity, humanity. "Professsional sensuousness". (Sensuousness in the sense of sensing, of being in and aware of reality.)

15. Milk cans are not allowed

Any time a bureaucrat (i.e. a custodian of a system) stands between you and something you need or want, your challenge is to help that bureaucrat discover a means, harmonious with the system, to meet your need.

16. The power of paradox

An off the wall story about the author's last 3 years of his career at Hallmark in the position of "Creative Paradox".

Saying yes to ideas.

think of any organization you're in as a unique medium in which you have the power to create

17. Death masks

Candor pays.

On how the author was excused from attending staff meetings after being honest about how he felt about them.

18. The pyramid and the plum tree

On organizational structures. Pyramids (rigid) vs plum trees (organic).

But not really. Really about:

my presentation caused no significant change of heart at Hallmark

my efforts would be best spent not in trying to change Hairballs, but in offering to midwife out of Hairballs anyone who longed for a fuller, more original work experiece.

19. Orville Wright

Orville Wright did not have a pilot's license.

20. Beyond measure

If an organization wishes to benefit from its own creative potential, it must be prepared to value the vagaries of the unmeasurable as well as the certainties of the measurable.

21. A conference of agels

On culturally appropriate and functionally appropriate meeting modalities.

To be functionally inappropriate is to be dysfunctional

The story of a meeting intended for generating ideas.

A dry, statistics-oriented, corporate-feeling meeting is not functionally appropriate for creativity.

So the author switched up the meeting to something entirely different.

The escape from habitual culture must always be temporary if you wish to be permitted back into that culture.

Yes, you may go out and play, but you must be home before dinnertime.

This one reminded me a lot of the concept of the "magic circle" one enters in playing a game.

22. Dynamic following

Waterski analogy. Static following. Dynamic following. All points in the arc of the tow line as legitimate following.

Also mentions:

Compassionate emptiness. A state of nonjudgmental receiving.

23. Pool-hall dog

Let go. Do not reject. But do not cling. And thereby be open to other possibilities.

24. Paint me a masterpiece

Only you can do your life's work.

Discussion prompts

Alignment

What parts of the spirit of the corporate mission are worth remaining connected to? What goals of the organization touch our hearts?

Preparation

Do you want to Orbit?

What are you doing to prepare to Orbit?

storytelling

What stories are we telling how well? Are these effective at exerting useful but not crushing amounts of gravity, turning tangents into orbits?

Who are our storytellers?

Agile, control, and the immeasurable parts of creative work

To what extent is Agile, Scrum, sprints, etc., an effort to exert organizational control over creative work? To obtain reassuring concrete evidence of productivity?

Valuing performative effort

Where is the organization valuing performative effort? Could we become more aware of that, move that culture?