Don’t say it’s organic if it’s just a little bit shit

Not having a plan for your project doesn’t make it organic — it just means you’re improvising, and that can only take you so far.

It was cold outside, in December 2017, and we’d just finished a high-paced, tiring workshop with a fantastic toy company. Now, we had two hours before dinner with a senior bod in the company, where we were going to pitch a new take on an age-old programme they’d been running.

As we talked through our own team’s initial ideas, the client, tired from the previous workshop, kept pushing back. He said:

“We do this already in quite an organic way.”

“Do you mean it’s organic, or do you mean it’s a little bit shit?” I asked.

The room laughed.

Thank goodness they did. But it was clear: yes, they had done all of the things we’d suggested, but the way they had done them was “organically”: without prior thought, without planning, without putting themselves in the shoes of their customers, without deliberately knowing what works and what doesn’t work, time and time again. It was organic in the same way manure is.

Not having a plan for your project doesn’t make it organic — it just means you’re improvising. And while improvising is great fun, and can lead to some superb ideas, it does not help grow ideas and help others in your team understand how to continue replicating, scaling or improving on that initial idea or practice.

This repeated organic improvisation is everywhere, meaning ideas that get off to a great start never really go anywhere, because there’s been no thought to the very unorganic act of creating an adoption plan after the initial idea was hatched:

Just because you’re a great ‘community’ doesn’t mean you get away without a process for new ideas to filter to the top.

Just because you want to give students more free rein in their learning doesn’t mean you get away without doubling up on your planning and resourcing.

Just because you want engineers to “be more creative”, doesn’t mean you get away with groovy furniture and flexitime: you need to build a planned, facilitated process to sustain that behaviour beyond the initial workshops.

Just because your organisation / country / regime is very different from the place where an idea originated, does not mean that you can change it beyond all recognition, on the hoof, on your own.

Engineers at the thyssenkrupp Innovation Garage sessions that our firm, NoTosh, designed and co-delivers. They develop concepts from paper prototypes to built products, plants and technologies; they need a planned process to keep their breakthrough ideas alive within an organisation that’s already brimming with successful and more proven ideas.

Organic is great for coming up with ideas. It’s less great for making them live consistently well, over time, with loads of other people getting involved to amplify the initial concept. Organic at scale becomes like open mic night — unpredictable, with moments of genius, but generally a bit shit.

After the initial organic shoots have appeared, all ideas need a bit of process, something to keep them watered, to force them into the metaphorical shade when they need it. Someone needs to make the decision to cut the deadheads off and prune the idea back to its core as soon as things shoot off and change the original idea “organically” into something it was not intended. The half-life of organic ideas will always be far shorter than when a little process and reflection is introduced.

Clayton Christensen from Harvard’s Business School puts it this way in Rotman on Design: “Companies frustrated by an inability to create new growth shouldn’t conclude that they aren’t generating enough good ideas. The problem doesn’t lie in their creativity; it lies in their processes.”

There are some key things you can introduce early on to an idea that has foisted itself on you organically.

— how do you gather information on what is going on with the idea, as people put it into action in their own department, country or organisation?
— how do you communicate decisions you’re taking with that original idea, that will help people understand how they might need to change the way they’re putting the idea into practice, too?
— how do you facilitate your time together with others putting the idea into practice?
— how do you prioritise what needs done?
— how do you define pace and deliverables so that the original idea grows in a manner that amplifies it, rather than changes it beyond all recognition?
— how do you measure the scope of the action the originating team behind the idea will take along the way? Will they act in a tight fashion in some areas or loose in others?)
— how do you ensure decisions are actioned as your idea grows quickly beyond the originating team?