For nearly four decades, I have worked in the management consulting and IT industries. In these industries we're used to setting the pace. We define timelines, push boundaries, and constantly strive for faster, better, and more efficient solutions. It became my natural way of working so when it came time to begin working on our family flower farm I bought these ideas and approaches to growing peonies. It wasn’t a conscious decision and it soon became apparent that in the world of flower growing, nature is the one calling the shots, not me.
In corporate speak, I was used to defining the operating system for myself and the team but with flowers nature defined the operating system and I needed to work within her system rather than being able to mold flower growing to my view of the world. Plants have their own rhythms and cycles, and there's no way to speed them up or slow them down. Perhaps worse I’m used to a 90 day cycle but with flowers you are locked into a 12 month cycle.
The 12 month cycle quickly became a frustration. We would try something new, learn a lot, devise a plan to improve and get excited about implementing it and then ….. nothing. We had to wait for 12 months, 9 months if we were lucky before we could advance our learning and experimentation.
To move forward with any form of satisfaction I had to change my way of thinking, I needed to embrace nature's cycles and change how I thought about innovation in the field. This leads to some changes in how we innovate. For example:
- the #1 criteria for determining what to experiment on is the season. Is this the right season to run this experiment? Then the perceived importance for the business.
- Because seasons are so important we need to plan / think about innovation 12 to 18 months ahead rather than the more traditional 3 to 6 months. This is a scary timeframe when you're used to working in / with technology and capabilities double every 18 to 24 months
- While we have to plan ahead, we also have to ensure we do not over plan, in particular we need to ensure we don't try and do too much to compensate for the slower cycles. We are a small family business with limited resources, particularly people, and we need to ensure that the experiments we run run well and trust that this approach will help us move fast(er) in the long term.
As I move between the fast-paced tech world and into the rhythms of nature on our flower farm, I've learned that while the objectives may be the same, innovation, improvement and learning, how you go about achieving them can be quite different - particularly when mother nature sets the rules and we don’t.
___________________________________________
¹ This is not strictly true; you can influence their cycles, e.g. use glass houses, or in the extreme you can completely change their cycles by creating a 100% controlled growing environment. A 100% controlled environment is a very different business with different economics and requires a level of capital I don’t have access to right now.