Choosing.

Ari Weinzweig on the benefits of choosing the unordinary ...

The more I played with the idea of unordinary, the more it resonated. I began to see that, while the quality of our food may indeed be particularly special—extraordinary when we do it really well—most of what we do in our business practices, seen through my new lens of understanding, is definitely unordinary. They aren’t, I’m realizing, especially extraordinary at all. Anyone who wants to could do them. It takes neither a particularly special skill nor years of intensive formal training to learn to be kind. Kindness. Compassion. Dignity. Diversity. Humility. Empathy. Inclusion. Any eight-year-old could have their hand at them. Vision-writing. Extra-miling. Open-book management. Open meetings. Consensus. Also wonderful, but still, not really “extraordinary.” We have no special ingredient that makes us more able to do what we do than any other American organization.

All of those processes are really important to us, and I recommend them wholeheartedly to you too, but the truth is that anyone who decides to could do them. In that sense, I would now describe them as “unordinary.” Yes, uncommon, but not because of a rare ability that’s uniquely abundant in and around Ann Arbor. They’re hard to find because they’re not the norm—most people color within the same behavioral lines their colleagues do. They’re not the norm because, in current conditions, it may take a bit more attentiveness to take positive, dignity-based action. And, at the same time, they are absolutely unordinary.