A Foolish Inconsistency: The Hobgoblin Method
The tech industry’s most misquoted sentiment leads to its most misdirected method
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 1841
One of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s great charms is that he is, to put it mildly, an aphoristic writer, accumulating lines that practically beg to be ripped out of context and proclaimed as great insights. Since leaving academia — where I researched Transcendentalism, the literary movement of which Emerson was a key part — I’ve worked for several small software companies and startups where he’s bandied about with gusto.
Emerson’s take on consistency is perhaps the industry’s go-to Transcendentalist sentiment. Invoked in the move-fast-and-break-things vein of startup culture, it’s used to justify our inattention to consistency of language and design as we iterate furiously on products.
At Evernote, for example, our approach in the past has been to let each platform go its own way because, as we say to one another, “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” The idea, which has become part of our organizational culture, is that being bogged down with a concern for consistency might hamper innovation in Evernote for Android or iOS or Mac or web or Windows.
The hobgoblin method, as I think of this approach, happens when an organization is so concerned with the imagined trouble of working towards consistency that they dismiss it altogether. One particular day, in discussions of a small but universal change to a user interface, three different people considered the obstacles around pulling it off on multiple platforms and then noted to me, “Well, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Maybe we don’t need to do it everywhere.”
If you have an eye for consistency yourself, you may have noticed that my colleagues take liberty with Emerson’s line, leaving out the “foolish.” And that’s not all we leave out. For a writer who’s seemingly so quotable, Emerson is an elliptical thinker, with ideas that gradually build on one another, and it’s worth looking at a longer version of the hobgoblin passage:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day.
When Emerson published “Self-Reliance” in his 1841 Essays, he was speaking not on behalf of funded startups, clearly, but as part of a movement that prided itself on cultivating the individual. The Transcendentalists believed that the contemplative individual tapped into a source of intuition that transcended what they could learn from the world around them. To be self-reliant was to be deeply connected to your own intuition, to act confidently as your own moral and social authority.
“A foolish consistency” then, is consistency for the sake of social conventions or for the sake of consistency itself. It’s an unstudied adherence to what you say “to-day” that discounts the revelation you may have “to-morrow.” In other words, to Emerson, “little statesmen and philosophers and divines” are not brave or critical enough to change their “little minds.”
Emerson’s individualism — which superficially reads as think big and think for yourself — appeals to the tech industry. More than any other facet of contemporary American culture, Silicon Valley encapsulates the ambitions of Transcendental idealism. Yet to apply the hobgoblin sentiment as a product design ethos is missing the mark.
Yes, we want to iterate quickly, particularly early on, to think big and not get bogged down in superfluous details. But we also want to be critical as we iterate: to design products thoughtfully and not build them on shaky foundations.
From a language perspective, the problem with reading Emerson as permission to dismiss consistency altogether is that you wind up without a narrative framework. For us, the practical result of the hobgoblin method is a hodgepodge of Evernote experiences depending on what device or operating system you’re using, and a lot of duplicated efforts around words.
As an organization, Evernote is moving away from this method. The lesson that we’re drawing from it is twofold: first, a product should always sound like itself, no matter where you encounter it. Evernote should sound like Evernote on your phone and your laptop and the web. Second, aside from the distinct conventions of different platforms — Android and iOS are perfect examples of platforms that have very different kinds of style guidelines — it’s up to us to create a consistent stylistic and narrative framework.
Far from weighing us down, such a framework actually facilitates innovation by establishing constraints and taking that work out of the hands of people who have other primary roles. Consistency of language removes the option to build clunky features and expect to take care of the flaws with editorial spackle.
Perhaps the most significant thing we’ve learned is that our users crave a coherent experience. When we avoid talking to each other about the overarching narrative of our product because we fear consistency on principle, what we’re enacting is a foolish inconsistency. It’s not rebellious or non-conformist in a useful way. The hobgoblin method is misdirected, but it’s the source of the misdirection — not reading carefully —that matters in an industry that wants to think big and think for itself. If looking deliberately at Emerson for a moment teaches us anything, it’s that applying literally a single misquoted line from an expansive essay by a nuanced thinker might be a sign that we’re moving too fast and breaking the wrong things.
