From Garbage to Gold: Why Innovation Requires Digging in the Muck

It’s spring and my garden is coming back to life! I love this time of year because everything in my garden is shaking off the cold-weather slump and preparing to explode into vibrancy. While I love being able to enjoy a glass of wine in the back yard surrounded by well-manicured flowers and plants, what a truly can’t get enough of is the dirty, sweaty, back-breaking process of preparing the garden for that glass-of-wine moment – it reminds me of (you guessed it!) innovation.

Innovation, like gardening, can be hard, ugly, unpleasant and frustrating. Just as one can’t simply conjure a perfect garden out of thin air, innovation doesn’t come easily either; they both require digging deep (literally and metaphorically), giving oxygen and light to long-buried “muck,” clearing away or pruning back dead stuff or even living parts of the system to make room for new growth; protecting fledgling plants or ideas so they have the opportunity to grow and thrive; and finding the patience and trust to allow the magic to happen, instead of forcing it. Working in the garden is such a stunning metaphor for transformation – or for anything that touches our hearts and creates growth – that I’m sure I will continue to learn from it for as long as I’m able to sink a shovel into the earth.

One aspect of gardening that has always delighted me – and which I have blathered on about at more than one dinner party! – is composting. For those of you who have never done it, composting entails taking organic “garbage” – carrot peels, onion skins, cantaloupe rinds, apple trimmings, that bunch of parsley that turned slimy after too many days in the crisper drawer – and turning it into the most nutrient-rich dirt imaginable. Despite all the online forums urging specific ratios of fruits and vegetables to grass trimmings and leaves, in my experience it’s a pretty straightforward process of throwing food and yard waste into a bin or a pile, mixing it up periodically to promote aeration and decomposition…and then being rewarded with this beautiful, rich, dark, non-smelly “dirt” that doesn’t carry even a vague reminder of the fact that it was once slimy, stinky, unwanted “garbage.”

Why do I rhapsodize about compost, and why does compost remind me of innovation? Compost takes the parts of our yard and cooking activities that are unseemly and turns them into pure gold – it’s an alchemy that takes my breath away every time, even though I’ve had compost bins for over 25 years now. It is the same with innovation: if we want to do it well and end up with that “gold,” we need to dig deep, find the parts of our companies, habits and individual psyches that we’ve tried to keep out of the public eye because they’re ugly or unseemly, give them some oxygen, and allow their transformative power to emerge. Brene Brown talks about this in terms of vulnerability, and I absolutely agree that vulnerability is the essential ingredient for strength…but what most people skip over when they use vulnerability as a buzzword is that true vulnerability comes from “airing” the slimy-parsley parts of ourselves, our companies and our experiences (the imposter syndrome that most successful executives grapple with, the infighting and dysfunctional dynamics that emerge in almost all work environments, the fears and traumas that keep us constantly on the move, etc.). It’s as taboo to display these vulnerabilities in the modern workplace as it is for slimy parsley to show up on a dinner plate at a Michelin-starred restaurant, but the truth is that the Michelin-starred meal could never exist if a whole lot of nasty food waste hadn’t been composted along the way and used to nourish the ingredients that went into that magnificent meal. Similarly, no real transformation can happen if we are not willing to bring the unseemly parts of ourselves and our organizations into the light so that they can decompose and add nourishment to our dreams.