What gardening can teach us about open working
This week, I’ve been thinking about the garden. I’d love to build it out, plant out some flowers and maybe some fruit and veg and get a bit of the Good Life vibe happening in the back yard (yes, I’m that old).
I happened to mention this to a couple of friends, who took cuttings from their plants, cultivated them and gave them to me. Or dried out some seeds and gave them over. They did it without thinking twice, because nature knows that sharing doesn’t diminish value.
It got me thinking about open working. We worry that we share too much and that we’re too revealing. What if someone else reads what we’ve written and steals our amazing idea? This sort of worry is what happens when we let fear drive the car.
We don’t inspire the people around us.
The truth is that much like the plants growing on my windowsill, none of these will be exactly the same as the plants they come from. They all have a different context. They’re growing in different locations, different soil, they’re treated differently. This will all affect how they grow and what sort of plant we end up with.
Digital innovation is similar. Every organisation has a different context, a different culture, different goals. We might use the same tools or processes, but what we do will always be different because of those things.
It’s the context in what we do that offers infinite variety and innovation in the space we work in. When you’re trying to solve big, complicated problems, this can only be a good thing. Knowing this, we can afford to be magnanimous because it won’t hurt us. We can take that cutting and share it, safe in the knowledge that we’re not damaging ourselves.
We can afford to share things we’ve done, ways of working we’ve found useful, new approaches, resources and tools. Other organisations will use them differently to us but will still find value in them.
At the end of the day, we want other organisations to share the value in those tools and processes and ways of working. The most important people in this equation aren’t us, or the other organisations in our respective sectors. It’s the people we serve: our users.
