Only boring people get bored. The idea behind this sentiment being that a curious mind will find ways of extracting interesting and new thoughts out of any situation. The first time I was made conscious of this, was during a series of inter-cultural creativity workshops that I ran in Soweto during the early 90's. With so little experience in running workshops I was worried that the township kids, mostly between 8 and 10 years old, would get bored. My friend Iaan gave me the wisdom that Africa teaches you to be resourceful, and hence, never bored.
But what happens if the system is stacked against you? "
The Lottery of Birth" a film by
Raoul Martinez makes a very provocative statement that the education system in America is
designed to create "drones," and trains young minds to endure boredom. It creates the right pre-conditions for the massive army of non-thinking support staff that have to work in zero value added roles for the rest of their lives. Disengagement is a pre-condition for surviving in such mindless tasks, so the school system through standardisation of testing and reducing expectations to the lowest common denominator, teaches millions of kids (and thus employees) to give up on the idea of an engaged, meaningful contribution to work. Predictable repeatability sucks the incentive to engage and contribute from even the most resilient soul. Boredom is thus the opposite of active engagement. The state we fall into when we are not exercising our conscious thought and developing new knowledge or value. The fatal trap is when boredom becomes an acceptable neutral, unchallenged state.
As a manager it thus becomes an essential part of your cultural mandate to ensure that boredom is not a condition that people need to submit to. Question why it is happening, where you have failed to engage the team fully? Is it due to a sense of helplessness? The team giving up because they don't think they can make a difference in any case? Is it a function of underutilising the skills and experience of your most expensive resource? Seek first to understand why you are boring them!
If we view boredom as the inverse barometer of engagement we can begin designing for a work environment that positively applies this knowledge. Which brings me back to the township kids. Boredom can be applied as a creative state. You begin to view objects and situations differently when you creatively escape from boredom. The knuckle bones from a dead sheep become toy cars. A coke can becomes an aeroplane. The slightly out of focus disengagement lets in a different perspective on how to apply the resources at hand. The bored cubicle workers who channel their un-suppressable creative urge into covering a
colleague's cubicle entirely in post-it notes. Can we find ways of being more attuned to employees tuning out and channel it towards productive creativity? What are the triggers for disengagement and can we use disengagement to actively stimulate innovation? As a matter of fact, isn't it the boredom of college education that is actively has lead to "the spring of start-up culture?" Bored kids used to start bands, now they write apps. How might you turn boredom into the trigger for your next product breakthrough?
