Form over Substance

After graduate school I found myself working for the same university in IT. That wasn’t in my plans. Regardless, for better or worse, I was in IT.

For some time, I ran the university's help desk. I worked closely with the director over the department our email and directory systems were housed in, so it wasn’t uncommon for me to come to his office and discuss various issues with him.

He had a square of paper taped above the whiteboard in his office. It simply read:

As I found myself talking with him one day about a particularly wily individual, we eventually reached the point where he asked me what I thought that paper meant.

“Not sure,” I said. “A fraction of some sort. ‘F’ over ‘S’ or something along those lines.”

“Right,” he said, “but what do the letters stand for?”

“No idea.”

“‘Form’ and ‘Substance.’ It stands for ‘Form over Substance,’ and I have it there as a reminder to not allow that to happen.”

We went on to discuss it further, and why it was in his office.

He had worked for the university for decades at the point he and I were working together. He had seen so many odd things (politically and bureaucratically) that he concluded there were some who worked with us who were more concerned with the Form of a product or service than they were Substance of said product or service.

Do not get me wrong—I like Form. I love it. I’m an Apple user (and have been for over three decades), and many expect Form will be a significant part of their product. I like beautiful things. I walk into the Detroit Institute of Arts, and I see beautiful examples of Form. There is nothing wrong with Form. There’s nothing wrong with Form except when it’s solely Form and nothing else.

If there is no Substance, Form is empty. It is nothing.

It might be pretty, but it’s nothing substantial backing it up. Nothing useful. It’s a gossamer-thin coating. It’s hollow Easter candy.

Now, I dislike hollow chocolate. I have since I was a little kid. Every Easter, I’d get a chocolate Easter bunny or a chick or something. I mean... it looks like a solid piece of chocolate, right?

Nope. It's not.

To me, there’s something inherently dishonest about it.

We could discuss being grateful for what you are given. For innumerable reasons, I was. However, for many years, I figured it was merely because I like candy (chocolate in particular) and the lack of anything inside said hollow candies served-up a chocolate shell that had to be enjoyed for what it was.

Usually, Form is created with the best of intentions—if it looks good, it will be good, right? The artifice has been, and Substance will follow, yes?

Maybe(-ish).

I’ll be honest: It’s pretty unlikely.

Things don’t just occur because you want them to—you need to do the work. Moreover, just putting the lipstick on the pig doesn’t give you a not-pig—it gives you a pig with lipstick on it. Creating that hollow Easter bunny does deliver some chocolatey goodness to an otherwise non-chocolatey goodness-served kid, but if they’ve yet to be jaded by the utter lack of Substance and all they see is the Form, you end up upsetting said little kid when they bite off the ears of that hollow bunny and are greeted with nothing but emptiness on the inside.

Those who focus on Form first and foremost will end up failing. Again, I’ve no issue with the idea of Form as an attractive, aesthetic thing to view and enjoy.

However, it’s a shell.

Those focused solely on Form create nothing but a shell. That shell should be necessary—it should house something vital. Form and Substance should exist symbiotically, but for some reason, that shell is the thing so many keep coming back to, and the individuals responsible never understand why they keep failing.

As a society, we need to identify better lack of Substance in anything we do.

Sure, now that you’re an adult you can read that the bunny is hollow. You know what you’re getting.

What about more complex scenarios? Perhaps political promises, software development, and crowdfunding campaigns.

People do not as easily identify these at this point, are they?

A candidate claims they can single-handedly revitalize manufacturing in a state. Does anyone honestly believe that one politician will bring production back to the US at the levels we saw post-World War II?

A software app claims to be the code equivalent of the One Ring. Does anyone genuinely buy that it’s going to include a coffee-serving monkey?

A competent small company gets carried away on their stretch goals during their crowdfunding campaign. Does anyone think this revolutionary product really needed that extra chrome covering?

The Form makes us want to believe there is Substance.

I’d think this is somewhat a result of using more and more WYSIWYG systems from the past 30 years (we see something and expect it to act exactly as we see it), but it’s not like we’ve haven’t been warned about this before. George Eliot told us not to judge a book by its cover in 1860 (I have so many paperbacks from my teenage years that can attest to that). Shakespeare told us “All that glisters [glitters] is not gold…” (and Aesop may have told us even before that). We accept them because we want to. We hear it or read it and want it and it’s an adult safety blanket. Doesn’t matter how many times we’ve been warned or burned, we’re still like a group of Fox Mulder clones—everyone wants to believe (except, unlike Mulder, no one wants to do the work).

A teenager buying a book or a child biting into a hollow bunny is one thing. You aren’t an adult yet. You’re learning.

However, adults who spend $1 million on an ops suite because it looked pretty when they saw it in action at another data center (and then gave up implementing it correctly years later and had to go with another suite)? Adults who voted for someone because they claim they can do something, but they offer no concrete plan and have no experience in doing something similar before? Adults who financially back a project solely because they love the idea, but the creators have no expertise in the sphere and don’t plan to bring in people who do once funded?

These all have warning signs.

Critical thinking skills need to be better used when it comes to looking at Form, yet critical thinking (from anecdotal evidence over my 21 years as a student and full-time employee at a university) is what most people try their best to avoid. We don’t want to have to think. We don’t want to have to do the work. We want someone to tell us that everything is fine and we can have rainbows and cake and parties and unicorns.

Is our very nature to want the Form over Substance?

Substance is boring. It means we have to think.

Form is fun.

Form is sexy.

Form doesn’t require thinking.

We need to move beyond that. We all have the critical thinking skills to do so—we learned them in school: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.

Look, if you see something new and you take a step back and say “Damn… that is a nice artifice staring back at me,” that is okay. However, at that point, you need to start asking yourself what’s behind it (and you can apply this to almost anything you come across).

Who is responsible for it? What is it for (or what does it solve)? When will it be available or be usable or affect you? Where will it be used? Why is it around? How does/will it work?

If you look at this fantastic thing/campaign/whatever and can answer those questions to a point where you are satisfied, then it’s likely (at least for you) a case where Form and Substance are equal.

That’s the caveat, isn’t it? Perhaps for someone, that hollow Easter bunny is precisely what they need, and they can justify it.

That’s the whole point.

Our answers to Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How are going to vary dramatically. Moreover, they should.

Again, the beauty of critical thinking is that we have to make decisions for ourselves. We can’t rely upon the decision-making of the crowd to be the basis for our choices because, if we do, we are solely choosing Form over Substance.

So, aside from being an apt metaphor, I know I’m tired of eating hollow chocolate, but that same hollow chocolate may very well serve a particular need for you. Only you can decide if it does. I'm merely asking that you educate yourself about that decision.

This post has appeared in various forms on my blog over the years. I've adapted it and put it here because I think it's relevant to a lot of what I see today.