WOW! me

David, as I again read your list of characteristics of your ideal project, I’m again struck by how similar it is to mine. In my own case I would add a specific characteristic that’s closely related to your first three: projects that touch many people, the more the better. I could help someone do their income tax, but I’d rather improve the tax form so that every person who fills it out saves five seconds.

Mark asks about examples of PSFs’ truly transforming clients’ organizational cultures. I’m not aware of any but I’m no expert and will leave this question to others. What I’ve concluded from my own experiences of organizational cultures is that you can’t change an organization in-place, but you can work with the fact that organizations of any size are made up of sub-organizations that have varying cultures: you can grow the ones that have the culture(s) that you think are good, and shrink/eliminate/sideline the ones that have cultures you think are bad. And if there are no sub-organizations to grow, or this isn’t enough, you have to create new ones and protect them from being tainted by the prevailing culture. Expect resentment from people in the non-favoured sub-organizations toward people in the favoured ones. Physical separation may be necessary.

WOW! I'm excited by where you're heading here! The evolution of David Crow continues.

Rohan is of course right that organizations have cultural biases against WOW! Projects. Within a homeostatic social system, there are many systemic barriers to change-making innovation and value creation.

Reimagining the future and deconstructing our mental models of the present can create space for WOW! Projects to emerge within an organization. Design thinking is our great hope. Is it sufficient?

Culture is a strategic lever in transforming an organization, a city, a community and our world. Culture fills the spaces created by design models and methodologies. Cultural transformation supports the development of a marketplace where WOW! is demanded; such a market raises all boats.

Do we have contemporary examples of a professional services firm that truly transformed its clients' organizational cultures? Can open creative communities provide a strategic lever to crack open the possibility of WOW!?

Yeah!

But.

We need to: make a living. Including those of us whose last startup experience was not (yet) financially successful, but who still have mortgage payments and don't want to sell the house.

I 'need' to work on WOW! projects, but that's not what companies generally want. They have certain round holes that they want round pegs to go into; square pegs need not apply. A round peg is apparently someone who has done one kind of work for the last five years and wants to keep on doing it. I used to think that liberal-arts types were out of touch with the real world; now I realize that I have more in common with them than I'd thought. I've been adapting reluctantly, e.g. I finally resigned myself to removing from my CV the fact that this particular geek has also been trained as a psychotherapist, but I can't pretend to have done one thing for the last five years.

When Tom Peters autographed my copy of Re-imagine! I suggested the message 'Keep building new things!', which he liked. But 'new' implies 'different', which is threatening. Apple's 'Think different' tagline works only because it's being interpreted by people who take it to mean 'be just like all those other cool people'. As Meryn Cadell sang in The Sweater, 'different is not what you're looking for'.

A coworker once said to me that we needed more diversity in our organization. I agreed, but we meant different things. She wanted aboriginal people, disabled people, and other minorities; I wanted right-wingers because our very lefty group was horribly unrepresentative of the population we were trying to serve (Internet users in Canada). She wanted different, but not too different. I was eventually able to hire someone who wore a mullet (that's not why I hired him, of course; it just happened to be a bonus).

How much are we willing to pay for these 'needs' we have? Let's be honest: they're wants, not needs, and consequently may have to be traded off against other wants. In my case it comes down to 'work that I like' vs. 'house that my wife and I and our five cats would like to stay in', but everyone has their own tradeoffs to make. What are yours?

+1. Bug ups.