Rejecting the Inevitable: An Imaginative Organization
Artist Ai Weiwei is known for provocative works that speak out against the norms of Chinese culture and politics. For one piece, he dropped and broke a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn that possessed considerable financial and social value. The act, and the shattered remains of the vase, are preserved in a triptych of photographs. Historians and artists were outraged by Weiwei’s casual disregard of the object’s value.
The Han Dynasty was a defining period in Chinese history, so to deliberately break the piece was to symbolically throw away the value of the period. Weiwei was pushing back against cultural norms. According to The Art Story, “It was a provocative act of cultural destruction in reference to the erasure of cultural memory in Communist China, an anti-elite society that carefully monitored access to information, especially about its dynastic history.”
Weiwei claims that in order to build a new society, one must destroy the si jiu (the Four Olds): old customs, habits, culture, and ideas. By dropping the urn, Weiwei lets go of the social and cultural structures that impart value.¹
Rejecting Inevitability
Often, the way things “have to work” holds our imaginations hostage. The world around us dictates how we think, operate, and act. We buy in to solutions and models without giving them much thought because that’s “just the way things are.”
Culture-Bending organizations reject the inevitability of existing paradigms and push toward something new. They challenge the “four olds” with the inherent assumptions they contain in order to break norms and create a better world. To do this, to push toward something new, we must start asking more “What if?” questions.²
If you are a fast-food chain, it makes total sense to be open on Sunday — especially in the southern United States, where every God-fearing Southerner goes out to eat after church. So, when Truett Cathy founded Chick-fil-A in Atlanta and decided to stay closed on Sundays, that decision made no sense. The idea would be crazy and cost the company a lot of money. But Cathy wanted to create a workplace that encouraged employees to spend time with their families, to have a Sabbath, and to recharge for the week ahead.
Regardless of your feelings about Chick-fil-A, this was a bold move that now costs the company close to a billion dollars in revenue each year. Cathy’s decision took guts and imagination to see past the status quo. He chose to reject the common philosophy that in order to survive in the fast food industry, you must serve sandwiches on Sundays.
As soon as someone says, “That’s the way you have to do it,” the ears of the Culture-Bending organization perk up, and the leaders start to question the assumption.
What if you rejected the language of inevitability that forces our imaginations and actions into pre-defined solutions, whether they’re good or bad? What if you tried to offer people something different, better, and more beautiful than what they currently know? And what if in doing so, you could prove that business can run in new ways, speak in new languages, and offer the most good for the most people?
Finally, what if you did all this while still operating under the governing rules of business that allow an organization to stay open year after year?
This idea can shatter paradigms and lead you to new ways of operating that reflects beauty and purpose.
Thought Starters
As you consider the ideas here, ask yourself a few questions.
- Are there things within my industry that are considered the “status quo?” If so, do those things reflect my values?
- What tension do I see with my purpose and other organizational goals? (Read this as a primer.)
- In what ways can your organization reflect its purpose through how it operates?
- Imagine yourself in 15 years. What story do you tell?
This post follows-up on an article that spurred leaders to focus on building an organization that exemplifies three characteristics: Imaginative, Interconnected, Generative. Those characteristics make up what I call a Culture-Bending organization.
My next two posts will dig into Interconnected and Generative.
This is an excerpt from CULTURE BENDING NARRATIVES: Moving Beyond Story to Create Meaningful Brands.
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[1] This description and section is taken directly from https://www.guggenheim.org/arts-curriculum/topic/ai-weiwei and from The Art Story website, which has a post of Weiwei’s famous triptych: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-ai-weiwei-artworks.htmendnotes
[2] The idea of the “language of inevitability” is a bit of a theological construct set out in the book Colossians Remixed by Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat.
