Create Fun and A Little Weirdness

This is a post from my My 20-day Zappos + Buffer Values Challenge

“Create Fun and A Little Weirdness”?

This is an unusual value, but I like it a lot. It kind of has the effect of celebrating diversity and, in an organisational context, highlights that it’s an organisation of real people.

One of the things I like most about this, is the message it sends out – everyone is a bit special an unique – and you should celebrate that and have fun!

Back in the day, my friend Ben Webb and I came up with a social network(before YO!) that simply allowed people to poke each other. There were no other features. We even came up with a slidedeck pitching it for business users.

A hundred or so people signed up, and with the API, a few people built API apps.

We were about to roll out version “2.0” (for the third time), with a new feature which allowed users to upload profile picture, so you poked them by clicking it – a feature we were going to call “poke-her-face“. But by that point we figured we had sunk enough time into a joke…

One of the great things about Ben is that he completely ‘gets’ this value, and good natured pranks are something he does well. 🙂

Most of my forays into music are a little weird. A rapidly produced rap song to celebrate a young people’s hackday (Thanks Maria, Kerodean!), the worlds first (and only?) hike-hop video – satisfying that unfilled niche of hip-hop songs about hiking (thanks Dan, Bethesda!), and then there’s the love song to Nano, the unix text editor…

I guess it business contexts, it’s often easy to confuse seriousness with being solemness. John Cleese nails it when he says that you can laugh about serious things things (“the future of our children’s education”) without detracting from the seriousness of what’s being said:

It’s not even that being slightly weird and creating fun is hard… or disruptive. One of the easier ways to create fun in a relatively consequence-free way is simply by giving internal documents entertaining names – one might title a strategy document “The One Plan to Rule Them All“, or reply to an email asking “Does anyone else think this a good idea?” with a Star Trek, Captain Picard “Make it so” gif (or currently, my favourite thing is using OpenArena voiceover soundfiles!)

I guess the value also aligns well with this blog post that funny press releases and pranks aren’t just for April Fools day. 

My feeling is that we spend most of our working life at work. We’re all somewhat weird in our own way.

Wouldn’t it be great if instead of trying to compress our people into the a sort of average-centric predictable mush, we just celebrated our weirdness and created some smiles along the way?

I think it produces a harder working, more creative, happier environment. 🙂