The waste is what works

Once while teaching at Cornell, physicist Richard Feynman was burned out.

Physics, his passion, disgusted him. Then he remembered to play. Watching a student toss a plate in the cafeteria, he noticed the Cornell medallion spinning faster than the plate wobbled. He started doing the math, just for fun. That wobble led to his Nobel Prize in physics in 1965.

To invite play into your process might chill the veins of a middle-manager; they see messiness and diversion as waste. They prefer process, predictability, and measurable output. What they can’t see is that organizations don’t produce Feynmans precisely because of this.

You’ll never measure the ROI of a memorable jingle but someone spent a lot of time walking around before they wrote it. The screenwriter’s road trip made the third act work. The “waste” is what works; it just doesn’t look it work while it’s happening.

Pay no attention to the priests lighting candles at the altar of Gantt charts and checkboxes. All creation worth a damn disperses a miasma of mess.