Orbiting the giant hairball

Hallmark’s “Creative Paradox” Gordon MacKenzie worked for a card company, but a higher calling shaped his career:

“I contrived a private agenda to subvert the stupefying power of corporate culture and provoke the emancipation of creative genius…[to] catch the attention of sleepwalking geniuses and lure them to wakefulness, help them become who they truly were instead of who they thought the company expected them to be and entice them into meeting life with an exuberance that befits humanity.”(46)

MacKenzie didn’t enter the ministry or become a therapist (or influencer!) to accomplish this very human mission. Rather, he pursued it within Hallmark’s corporate structure for 3 decades.

To do so, he devised a strategy he called “Orbiting the Giant Hairball.” The trick was to stay within the gravitational pull of the enterprise in order to access its strength, while simultaneously and persistently moving away from established processes, bureaucracy, and norms:

“Orbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mindset, beyond “accepted models, patterns, or standards”—all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.
To find Orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance where you benefit from the physical, intellectual, and philosophical resources of the organization without becoming entombed in the bureaucracy of the institution.
If you are interested (and it is not for everyone), you can achieve Orbit by finding the personal courage to be genuine and to take the best course of action to get the job done rather than following the pallid path of corporate appropriateness.” (33)

For those who lead or manage creativity, MacKenzie advised learning to value both the measurable and the immeasurable in a person or team’s work. Creative process itself must be valued and supported, in addition to quantifiable creative outcomes. Many, many leaders get stuck here:

“Trustees of the Hairball are loath to commit resources or genuine moral support to the amorphous concept of creativity. They lust for the fruits of creativity…but mistrust the act of creativity, which remains invisible and elusive.
Only the Renegades in Orbit, removed from the Hairball’s obsession with quantifying everything, are free to reap the unpredictable bounty of the inscrutable creative process.
If an organization wishes to benefit from its own creative potential, it must be prepared to value the vagaries of the unmeasurable as well as the certainties of the measurable.” (197)

“Unpredictable bounty” is the most exciting—and riskiest—thing about creative process. When we’re out in Orbit, we never quite know what we will discover, do we? It takes tremendous confidence to trust a process and stay open to multiple outcomes. And this is precisely what creativity requires.

Many will be turned off by this, and that’s fine. Organizations also need risk managers, implementers, quality control, accountants, and other by-the-books emoloyees.* It takes all kinds to really do the thing.

However, creativity remains the wellspring of change and growth:

“Temporary as these Orbits out of the Hairball may be, they are expeditions that promise finding in the chaos beyond culture antidotes for the stagnation of status quo.” (206)

For the outliers, the different ones, the odd ducks who turn towards unpredictable bounty; for you who feel giddy at creative possibility, even as you sense its sharp edge: You are are so needed in your organizations—and this world. Please keep going.