Blandification. It's Contagious
how to escape the sea of sameness
Blandification si a term usually used in design, architecture and branding to express how modern versions of everything are bland, minimalist, gray beige version of “the same”, as opposed to older things, which had uniqueness, charm and a distinct personality.
It’s sometimes called MMGB, for Millennial Minimalist Gray Bullshit.
But today I want to talk about blandification of the mind. How unique thought, distinct personalities and out of the box approaches are being replaced by corporatized, standardized, blandified ideas and methods.
How leaders not only fail but don’t even attempt to find their uniqueness, and many have even forgotten how.
Mass Manufacturing of Ideas
One of the reasons for blandification in the physical world is mass manufacturing.
If all the windows are made in The Giant Window Factory, then all the houses are going to have similar windows, because they all get them from the same factory, unlike “back in the day”, when many small local producers inevitability produced windows with much more variety.
A similar phenomenon exists in the realm of ideas. Especially with the internet, social media, a small number of ideas “win out” and everybody starts thinking and saying the same things: all teams are organized in the same way, all planning is done in the same way, all business idea are conceived in the same way, all people management is done in the same way, all the stories about what the future is, what will happen, are the same.
There’s a good side to this too: efficiency and the spreading of best practices. But excessive standardization is the dark side of the coin: everybody thinks the same things.
MBA Mentality
MBA Mentality is an abstract approach to business. It’s all about the numbers, general management principles are applied, you don’t have to actually know the specifics of the business, you don’t have put any heart and soul into it, actually, that’s a problem, it will just slow you down.
For the MBA Mentality, variance and specificity is anathema. They hate to have to treat anything, be it a person, or a product, or an idea, as unique and special. They want everything standardized and replaceable, across the entire multi national corporation and across the entire industry if possible.
In their ideal word, an employee is an employee is an employee, and a manager is a manager is a manager. It’s all fungible, just numbers in a spreadsheet. Uniqueness is a liability.
Self Reinforcing Loop
Once a small number of mass manufactured ideas spread and win out the consensus, to the delight of the MBA Mentality, any other idea is going to be looked at as strange. The mass manufactured ideas are going to be institutionalized in processes, job descriptions and in the training everyone receives.
Everybody operates in the same way, everyone hires the same kind of people and tries to mold them in the same kind of replaceable pieces of the puzzle.
It’s not only difficult to be different in the sea of sameness, but actively discouraged.
Try to get job by show how unique you are, and you’re likely to get crushed by the process: “interesting, but doesn’t match our criteria”.
Try to do something different in your little corner of the corporation, and if you happen to fail, everybody’s going to point their finger at you and say you were reckless, because you did not follow the orthodoxy. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” was the saying back in the day. It’s safe to do what everybody else does. It’s risky to be different.
What can you do?
If you don’t want to be just a number in an MBA’s spreadsheet, you need to nurture your ability to think differently. I recommend two things:
First Principles Thinking
The Contrarian Question
You need to hire an additional Senior Software Developer to your team. You start the recruitment process, you engage the machine, and you hire the person that gets the highest score after all the standardized interviews and evaluations.
This is MBA Mentality.
First Principles thinking would be to really look at your existing team, at your needs, then interview people and try to look for the exact qualities you need, not for what the checklist says.
First Principles applies in everything. Technical solution, leadership decisions, everything.
The Contrarian Question is “What is the one thing that everybody believes that may not be true?”
For example, since everybody seems to be sure AI is going to change everything, the contrarian question might be “But what if it won’t?”
This is a general, global example, but the same thing applies locally. If everyone in your team thinks one way of doing something is the best, you can ask “but what if this other way might actually be better?”
Simply asking contrarian questions doesn’t mean they’re right, or even useful. Some times, many times actually, the majority is right. I am not saying we should become rebels without a cause and reject things just because they are “mainstream”. Sometimes, mainstream is exactly what you need.
But developing a habit to at least consider and explore alternatives to popular ideas is a healthy habit which is going to develop your thinking and maybe, just maybe, it’s going to help you find something new.