Hairball prison notes that save my sanity

My friend Scott Berkun and I are writing a book on "Why Design is Hard". To keep up with our progress, sign-up here.

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I was talking to my friend Sara the other day when she mentioned one of my favorite books of all time – Gordon MacKenzie's 1998 Illustrated handbook, Orbiting the Giant Hairball.

It's a guide – complete with illustrations and poetry – for making things that matter inside of complex corporate systems without losing your mind.

Pro-Tip - Skip the kindle version if you buy this. It is a hot mess of OCR madness. Get the print version instead. It’s wonderful.

I first read it while I was helping lead the Amazon UX team that designed all the software for fulfillment centers worldwide.

We had a mission to create the best software we could for the countless warehouse laborers around the world and it was an honor to advocate for their health, safety, and productivity right there in the belly of Amazon's distribution operations.

It was an interesting ride to say the least.

This passage in particular helped me understand that, in our effort to create great software for warehouse workers, our team was navigating a network of systems born of past realities/successes and how they had naturally grown out of alignment with one another over time – in ways that often made it deeply challenging to make good things.

Every new policy is another hair for the Hairball. Hairs are never taken away, only added. Even frequent reorganizations have failed to remove hairs (people, sometimes; hairs, never). Quite the contrary, each reorganization seems to add a whole new layer of hairs. The Hairball grows enormous.

With the increase in the Hairball's mass comes a corresponding increase in the Hairball's gravity. There is such a thing as Corporate Gravity. As in the world of physics, so too in the corporate world: The gravitational pull a body exerts increases as the mass of that body increases. And, like physical gravity, it is the nature of Corporate Gravity to suck everything into the mass in this case, into the mass of Corporate Normalcy.

The trouble with this is that Corporate Normalcy derives from and is dedicated to past realities and past successes.

Just knowing that I was not imagining the enterprise entropy we were swimming in became a huge salve to my soul because it helped me understand that what we were all really up against were conflicting systems and not bumbling idiots who refused to see things the ways I did.

It’s often "The Hairball is Real!" prison notes that save my sanity

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