Sock on Sock Violence

We discovered the hard way that socks don’t disappear in the dryer - they float/are pushed over the top of the washing machine’s perforated bucket thingie and then languish, unloved and alone, in the bottom of the washing machine. Or if they’re toddler-sized, they get sucked into the drain pipe and jam the machine. So my elaborate visions of sock gang wars (when you’re an anklet, you’re an anklet for life) were mopped away by handfuls of soggy laundry one spring day four years ago.

I bring up disappearing socks because it represents a common mystery of our age, one that doesn’t immediately evoke Occam’s razor. After all, it could very well be that the socks are plucked into extradimensional space, or that they (shudder) feast on one another during the dark ritual of suds and soaks. It could be that they’re behind the washing machine, that they’re in the little crevice between washer and dryer, that they ended up escaping the bucket in the washer. There are multiple plausible ways to lose socks.

Office behaviors are like this. When we seek to rationalize self-defeating or team-limiting behaviors, we rely on a broad variety of explanations. Most of them will tie to the party line as dictated by the office culture, and most of them will be false. Occam’s razor would suggest that it comes down to a handful of core human motivators. This is partially what our Courage Power Passion program is about - identifying the personal reasons that people aren’t making meaningful contributions to their job and their team. But the larger organizational issue is that, sometimes, the answer to the question “why?” is “it’s always been that way.” In truth, nobody knows why, and nobody asked the question a second time after receiving the “tradition” answer.

Look at the ways that you’re managing people, managing information, managing brand. Why are you doing it that way? What’s the real reason? What do you need to change to make the nonsense stop?