The 'woke' way of finding the fault in default
In his book Originals, organizational psychologist Adam Grant highlights the trait of finding faults in default as the hallmark of originality. The originals, he says, tend to question the status quo (default) a lot more than the conformists do. The book provides a fascinating account of how Warby Parker, the online eyewear company, came to threaten the monopoly of Luxottica (owner of brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley) by questioning things everyone else in the eyewear industry had simply taken as gospel. While in the book Adam teases out sharp insights from the habits of originals, I’m more interested here in zooming out and taking a generational view of the subject.
The woke generation questions defaults more than any other previous generational cohort. Boomers are constantly surprised by the attitude of Generation Z toward jobs, relationships, gender. How can nothing be sacrosanct, the oldies wonder. And the woke respond, all rules are man-made (and hence changeable).
Let us take jobs, for instance. The archetype of ‘It’s part of the job’ has had a stranglehold on our generational imagination until now. This one phrase justified everything that workers in a pre-digital economy had to put up with. Naomi Osaka, for one, thought otherwise. She questioned the sense in an accepted practice in professional sport, that of post-match press conferences. Not many before her thought that was an option. The same goes for mental health. Industrial workers barely saw the tip of the iceberg that knowledge workers are running against today. The same rules no longer apply.
What we accepted as the status quo had a lot to do with how we were told the world functioned. I was told, like any child in a typical Indian middle-class household was, that the size of the pie was fixed. That life was a zero-sum game and that if I took more than what I needed it had to come from someone else’s share. In the 90s in India it was not easy to verify the stories we were told.
Today’s digital-native generation can more easily vet the boundary conditions for the truths passed down. Paul Graham buckets people such: “Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people.” I dare to propose that the Internet has washed out the aggressive-passive spectrum. The passively independent-minded have much less to be daunted by. A developer can quit their job and make software on their own, a filmmaker may do just fine without the backing of a big production house, and anyone can start a movement from their living room. The barrier to entry for originality has been pulled down. No longer is a leap of faith needed; oftentimes, a hop is enough. That is what Generation Z is showing us anyway.
Side note: Just dreaming up a new idea is not the end. It is one thing to have an original insight and quite another to transform that into action. That is most threatening to institutions. Naomi discovered this when her decision to skip press conferences drew a sharp and united reaction from all the four grand slams, the enforcers of orthodoxy in tennis. Institutions have an evolutionary need to self-preserve. We can expect to see more such pushbacks from the powers that be simply because questioning defaults has never been easier and institutions have not been able to keep pace with societal change.
Thanks to Atul Sinha for reading drafts of this.