The cover of the latest Fortune blasts the bold headline: “Chaos@Google!” But before you sell your favorite stock, read the subtitle: “The inside story of disorder, disarray, and uncertainty at Google. And why it’s all part of the plan.” Indeed, the article implies that the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA is closer to a raucous playground than the austere sanctuary one might expect as the home of arguably the internet’s biggest success story. That’s how they want it. VP for Business Operations Shona Brown even wrote a book on the subject, “Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos“.

But it’s not just talk. Consider what Larry Page’s response to an employee that cost the company millions of dollars:

I’m so glad you made this mistake. Because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risk.

That’s crazy talk! Millions of dollars and he’s practically happy about it. To the asylum with him!

But he’s not the only one milking madness. Business Week this week (I really don’t normally read so many mainstream, Wall Street-y type magazines, but my officemate had some around) has a whole section called “Inside Innovation“, which seems to be basically a list of crazy ways for suits to get creative—and they’re good! Some of them:

1. Pairing sensible engineers with wacky artists to co-generate ideas.
2. Important rules for brainstorming from Bob Sutton, who has previously suggested ignoring your boss to promote innovation.
3. Apple Designer Jonathan Ive suggests that an innovative idea will likely change the company that produces it.
4. Or just steal good ideas from places like TED, which I’m shocked I haven’t linked to previously.

I feel kind of dirty linking to Fortune and Business Week as proof that chaos, anarchy, and noise have a vital place in the world today. Could it be that Corporate America is making the slow transition from Orange to Green?

First, there are lots of contexts in which noise specifically contributes to signal. George Lucas often quotes Akira Kurosawa on the notion of “Immaculate Reality”. In an old interview with Wired, Lucas says,

“[O]bviously everything is kind of dirty in the real world, and everything is kind of beat up, and everybody doesn’t drive around in a brand-new car.”

However, isn’t this really just noise serving as signal? The signal in this case is the Immaculate Reality used to convince movie-goers that what they’re seeing is real and a little dirt here and there is “value added”.

The case for noise is better made by the lives of woks and Yixing teapots. A wok is never washed with soap, but instead allowed a patina seasoned by the dishes it has cooked before. Similarly, teapots were traditionally for personal use and would be flavored by the past teas brewed by its owner. Thus the same tea from different teapots might have a subtly different taste. In this case, non-random data (the tea is brewed deliberately) is affecting the current signal in a random way, with the intention of enhancing the content.

Lest you think noise’s only friends are entirely Eastern (though I should mention that Buddhism’s First Noble Truth is Dukkha, or dissatisfaction, before moving on), let us not forget the West’s very own Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution. Afterall, if DNA got the signal right every single time we reproduced and there were no mutations, we would not only be just like our parents (scary enough) but our parents would still be single-celled goop. Noise is the driving force of evolution.

The question that is left for me is how noise can be allowed for in digital media. It’s one thing to imitate it with distressed text and bump maps, it’s another to let external forces actually affect your work. Signal vs. Noise has a post about Wabi-sabi, but mainly praising its comfortable simplicity and kind of missing the point. Will a format made out of 1s and 0s ever achieve the chaos of an unprimed canvas? If so, would it be any better than what we’ve got now?