A little outside irritation keeps a company inventive
Companies that hire only people who think alike become efficient and predictable. A small amount of friction from outside can be worth its cost.
If you want to unleash more creativity in your company, you need to allow for a little contamination. It is the sand in the oyster that creates the pearl.
The biology behind the metaphor is slightly off. Natural pearls rarely begin with a grain of sand; the usual trigger is a parasite or a small injury to the oyster’s tissue. The principle survives the correction. A pearl forms because something foreign got inside, and the oyster responded by coating it layer by layer.
Fred Wilson, a New York venture investor at Union Square Ventures, applies the same idea to companies. A company left to itself tends toward uniformity. It hires people who resemble its founders, adopts a shared vocabulary, and gets good at solving the problems it already understands. That is efficient, and it tends to produce the same kind of idea over and over.
Contamination is whatever breaks that pattern in small doses. A designer hired into an engineering team, or an engineer who came from a newspaper. A customer who is invited to a product meeting and complains. A partnership with a company in a different industry. A weekly slot for side projects that have nothing to do with the roadmap. Each introduces ideas the company would not have generated on its own, and each is somewhat uncomfortable, which is part of why it works.
The harder part is keeping the contamination once it arrives. Organizations react to foreign bodies much as oysters do, by coating them until they are harmless. The unusual hire is slowly trained to think like everyone else, or leaves after a year. The customer’s complaint is noted and filed. Newcomers from other fields keep their value only if someone senior protects their different view and makes sure it reaches decisions.
Some places in a company should not be contaminated. Accounting, security and anything touching safety depend on strict process, and creativity there is usually a problem. The word “little” matters too. A company that hires many people with no shared view of its purpose does not become more creative; it becomes incoherent, and every decision turns into a debate about basics.
The practical reading is to add difference on purpose and in measured amounts: in hiring, in the people whose views reach decision-makers, and in the time allowed for work outside the plan. Then protect the few processes that need to stay clean.