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Last weekend I took this (blurry) picture of the honeycomb from my wife’s bee hive. Bees can make perfect hexagonal spaces, that look like a set of Lite-Brite™. But in this particular board, there was a piece of honeyed wax that was in the exact shape of Africa. I imagined that the rest of the world used to be there, but the bees got hungry and ate through the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia, leaving Africa to be discovered. I then imagined the bees creating a new image every day: a pixelated Mona Lisa one day, a Windows 8 interface the next, a cross-stitch style “Home Sweet Home” another day.

Our brains are powerful pattern recognition machines. If we have been exposed to a pattern enough times, we will see that same pattern again in other places, even if it is a complete coincidence. This is why, when we stare at the clouds, or cracks in the ceiling, that we see rabbits or castles. This is why we see faces in the rocks on Mars, and creatures in the constellations. This is why we see the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, or a devil in the smoke during the 9/11 attacks. It’s not imagination, exactly, but rather the brain processing data, comparing it to other images in our memory, and alerting us to similar matches. It’s like TinEye, only better.

The next time you are staring up at the clouds, try not seeing faces, objects or animals. Try to just see clouds. It’s a lot harder than it looks.

You can’t change culture. You can only shift it. It took a generation to get used to wearing seat belts. It took another generation to wear bike helmets without feeling like a dork. Drunk driving wasn’t that big of a deal forty years ago, and neither was smoking. These cultural changes in acceptance took a really, really long time. And they happened in shifts. The workplace is shifting, slowly, but even in a time of rapid change, of ubiquitous internet and computer video-phones, old habits die hard. And they always will. Because people get used to doing things a certain way and most people don’t like change.

Most people will continue doing things in a traditional manner until:

a) They fail hard enough to destroy the company or themselves,
b) They are replaced by someone with a different philosophy, or
c) They slowly evolve because they are adaptive and self-aware.

A)s are the stubborn old guard who’d rather go down with the ship than change course. B)s just don’t want to learn new things because it’s too hard. C)s are the future, especially in today’s world, but are still as rare as leprechaun-unicorn hybrids.

There are a lot of books and articles about the changing nature of work, but even in the most creative work environments, ‘traditional’ ideas are very hard to shake, never mind transform. Have you read Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, wherein they discuss the poison of ASAP, and how planning is guessing? Or Linchpin and Poke The Box by Seth Goden about being unique and indispensable in the creative economy? Or this article about how working from coffee shops will make your team more creative? Or how working more than 40 hours a week actually hurts a companies productivity? These are all interesting ideas, but unless you are creating your own company, you will have a hard time convincing your boss that these things matter right now. Proven and substandard is often more comfortable than untested possibilities.

So what do you do? You can work change from within your company (which will require all of your patience). You can look for a company that matches your ideals more closely (which will require all of your prowess). You can create your own perfect company (which will require all of your time and resources). Whichever path you chose, it pays to arm yourself with a collection of articles and books that support your cause. I keep some of mine here. Who knew the future was such hard work?