Seeds in the Soil [LC19]

Tchaikovsky provided a valuable glimpse of his process: “The seed of a future composition usually reveals itself suddenly, in the most unexpected fashion. If the soil is favourable — that is, if I am in the mood for work, this seed takes root with inconceivable strength and speed, bursts through the soil, puts out roots, leaves, twigs, and finally flowers: I cannot define the creative process except through this metaphor. All the difficulties lie in this: that the seed should appear, and that it should find itself in favourable circumstances. All the rest happens of its own accord.”

— Mason Currey, Daily Rituals (2013)

In an organization of people, the seeds of future direction grow through many layers of soil. Beyond any individual's mood, favorable soil exists in its people, processes, groups, and systems, at different levels of scale.

A seed takes root in the minds of those who will do the work. It extends into our tools for shaping and expressing shared understanding, gaining energy from people and processes that adapt and refine the work. It finds support in the existing infrastructure, or its existence must have the force to reshape that infrastructure. It grows into the minds of those who shape, support, and represent the organization’s offerings in the larger ecosystem. And while it begins life under the protective shade of existing structure and strategy, any idea that will alter the current direction will eventually find its way to light, generating its own energy.

Gathering seeds — encountering the sparks of what-might-be — is not difficult in an organization with attentive and curious people. Those of us attending to users, market, and ecosystem will not be short on useful questions or provocative insight. Much more difficult is recognizing the value of those sparks, and ensuring the conditions exist for useful work to unfold. No seed of the future will grow to bear fruit without favorable soil.

Each seed is a guiding feeling of possibility. We may mistake it for a specific and concrete idea; more interesting is the life beneath that idea. We feel the latent opportunity of a new direction; we feel the pain of a problem and sense how it may be addressed; we feel growing confidence in the work, bolstered by signals from context and data.

Whether a seed represents a simple improvement to existing features, a new capability, or an entirely new product direction, it takes many forms throughout its growth. (No oak tree looks like an acorn, and no honeybee is like the egg it was born from.)

We use sketches, documents, experiments, presentations, models, proofs of concept, and prototypes to express the seed and its potential. Some of these will be useful in clarifying, shaping, and refining the strength of the seed, if such strength exists. Others will be harmful. Constraining, over-specifying, or misrepresenting a seed that is not ready or even suitable for growing.

When the soil is favorable, those of us doing the work can find, adapt, and refine the intent of the seed we're operating with. And those of us leading the work understand and enable pathways for the seeds of good work to grow inside the organization.

This is a necessary pre-condition for healthy product work and any hope of strategic play. If the simplest seed can't move from inception to activation, what hope do we have that high-order strategy — a coordinated and coherent set of seeds — will bear fruit along the same path?

Until next time—

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