Innovation Compost

I’ve been thinking about compost.

Partly because I’ve been reading Merlin Sheldrake’s excellent book about fungi, Entangled Life. Partly because I’ve recently enjoyed some wonderful collaboration spaces that encourage a kind of composting of ideas. And partly because of the serendipity of these things happening all at the same time.

I recently participated in Europe’s Energy Earthshot, a three-day design event to catalyze Europe’s energy transformation. It was an absolute pleasure and a privilege to collaborate intensively with leaders and experts from many fields, and more than 50 countries. I was particularly inspired by the focus on the “power of small ideas”, as Nicolò Wojewoda put it. Over three days, we used an Appreciative Enquiry approach to:

• identify small ideas with big multipliers;
• rapidly prototype those ideas;
• present, revise, and iterate.

Anyone who has engaged in Design Thinking or other rapid prototyping approaches will recognize the basic framework.

One of the most striking things for me was the way a few central problems kept arising, across 13 diverse topic areas with very different, self-selected teams. Clearly, there was fertile ground here. As we converged across team boundaries on the problems, it was clear that solutions could be repurposed across boundaries, too. A solution that didn’t make the cut as the most urgent or highest impact for one topic area might be top of the pile for another.

As I was reflecting on this experience, I heard a brief interview with Professor Ottoline Leyser, CEO of UKRI (UK Research and Innovation). Leyser talks about the importance of investing in the connections between people. She laments that often, R&D is seen as “a really tricky thing done by really clever boffins”, a view that harms both the “clever boffins”, and everyone who’s on the outside. She stresses that it’s imperative to fund and support the “crucible of discovery”, and equally important to make the connections to the networks of people and technology that can turn discoveries into solutions: “if we can join all of this stuff up, and make it hum together, we have?… a huge opportunity to tackle some of these huge challenges that the world’s facing”.

This crucible of discovery generates ideas. Joining those ideas is crucial. But there’s another step that some of these ideas have to go through. They can also become a compost heap. They might not be useful right now, or right here. But they have goodness, and you can tap into that goodness later on. Refining and iterating happens as part of a convergent process, but this ideas pile can remain. It’s not waste; it’s raw material. It’s just waiting to be decomposed.

We don’t think a lot about decomposition, because we’re too busy putting our efforts into building. But there’s work here, and it yields value.

Let’s go back to some basics of life. Living things are either producers (who make their own food, like plants); consumers (eat producers or other life forms); or decomposers. Decomposers break down organic matter, releasing the basic building blocks of life back into the environment, where it can be used by other organisms. We humans can be a bit grossed out by decomposers like fungi and bacteria, but they are absolutely essential to life.

Maybe that’s why we don’t think like decomposers. We like to make stuff. We like to build things and solve things and constantly add stuff to other stuff. We love Big Ideas and Moonshots and Visions. And of course we need to make things. We need to “make it hum together” so that we can solve our problems, big and small. But what if we spent a little more time unmaking before we started making? What if we went back to that pile of composted ideas and actively decomposed them, looking for the raw materials for our small, powerful ideas?

Here’s what I propose.

1. Make a compost pile. When you have ideas that aren’t quite right — in work, in life, in your hobbies — just put them somewhere for later. Songwriters do this, jotting down ideas in a notebook, often recombining them into new forms over time. For work, I like to put ideas into a simple table, so I can keep track of whatever bits of metadata might be helpful (relevant team, project, theme, problem space, subject matter expert, links, etc).
2. Tend your compost. My grandad used to turn the compost heap, by hand, with a gardening fork. This aerated the pile, and sped up the decomposition process. Turn over your ideas pile every now and then. Read them over; note down any new areas that might be relevant. Bring one or two to a regular ideation meeting. See what comes up when you look at the pile with fresh eyes.
3. Deliberately decompose. Dig into your compost. Get into those ideas and see what they’re made of. What are the good bits? What do they have in common with other ideas? How do they connect to your strengths, your strategy, your best solutions? Where might you find raw materials that you could build into other, stronger things?

Next time you’re faced with a big problem you want to solve, resist the urge to start with ideation. First, see what decomposition can yield. You may be surprised how much goodness you uncover by digging in the compost heap.