Business lessons to learn from lemons

I came home the other day to this broken branch fallen off our young but exceptionally fruitful lemon tree. The branch weighs about 2kg it has so many lemons on it (you can't see them all in the photo), no wonder it broke!

Gardening has so many rich metaphors and lessons for business and organisations (if you've been following me for a while you will know this!). There are a few in this blog, so hang in for the ride and some powerful questions.

Know what you're working with

A tree can only produce as much fruit as the tree structure can hold. Too much weight and things start to break. My lemon tree was carrying too much fruit. It didn't have the structural strength for that much fruit. If you think of the fruit as what an organisation produces, you can immediately see what I'm getting at.

A thing I see a lot of people miss when trying to apply a strategic lens, is their internal context. Context is the set of realities that we are working within (whether we like it or acknowledge it or not).

Things like...

 - what resources do we have to work with?

 - what constraints must we work within?

 - what do we have capacity for?

 - what strengths and momentum can we leverage?

 - what budget do we realistically have to work with?

 - what season are we in as an organisation?

It's the concept of organisational resilience we are talking about here, which researchers have various models for, but one thing all business experts and strategy thinkers will all agree on is that knowing your unique level and flavour of organisational resilience, and operating within it is the key to successful strategy execution.

In these times of tight budgets, lean organisations and slim capacity, the pressure for results can so easily lead us to push harder, against the tides of our internal realities. Why? Because we want the fruit. We want to achieve meaningful, important things.

Nothing wrong with that… unless we either never achieve them because something breaks, or we achieve them, but at a cost. Like my broken lemon tree… which brings me to my next point.

Know when to cut your losses

I should really have seen it coming and done something about it before it broke. But all that beautiful fruit!!! It's sooooo tempting and delicious. The end result in my case was a big bowl of 90% ripe lemons, and a nasty open wound on my tree. Worse than that, I lost a branch that could have kept producing fruit for years to come, and probably the worst of all is the risk created to the whole tree should infection get in through the wound.

I'm sure you will immediately see the metaphor here for organisations. In the case of my tree, the stakes are of course less high, and the fix infinitely simpler. Almost ripe lemons will come right and be usable after a week or so. Maybe a bit tart, but usable. The jagged branch can be trimmed and sealed. In organisations, when something breaks because you were trying to do too much, the results involve real people, complex systems, and usually a lot of cold hard cash. Partially complete projects aren't always usable either.

As for the worst parts, just like my poor tree, it's the often unseen or unacknowledged opportunity cost of the lost branch, and the risk of losing the whole tree due to infection. It's the things that break irreparably because you didn't cut the fruit off early enough. The people you lose, the institutional knowledge, the organisational capability, the reputational damage. And worst-case scenario, it's the infection that can spread like poison throughout the organisation when one part of it is damaged. There's no doubt that sort of thing leads to the downfall of any size organisation. Just ask Jim Collins - and read his book 'How the Mighty Fall'.

Sometimes the trade-off is between the replaceable and the irreplaceable. Or the short and long term. Or a small immediate loss and a big potential risk.

Unfortunately, human biases don't lend themselves to making trade-offs. We are far too fond of certainty and gain over uncertainty and loss or risk. Here's some questions you can ask to help identify when you need to cut your losses:

• What will actually happen if we don't deliver this project/initiative?

• What is making this project/initiative feel so important and tantalising? Do those things connect to our high-level goals?

• What do we stand to gain by pausing?

• If we looked back in 5 years, would this matter?

• What position would we be in in 5 years if we made this cut, and what would have made it successful?

• Is the hard thing we don't want to do actually the kindest thing, because it results in the best overall or long-term outcome for everyone? 

Know the value of pruning

We have to talk about pruning. We all know the purpose - cut back to stimulate growth, improve structure and form, and enhance health. All with the goal of the tree producing more of what the gardener wants it to produce, whether that be fruit, shade, or aesthetics.

Sound familiar? Yup, plenty to see here in this metaphor when it comes to organisations!

When we bought our tree from The Big Tree Company, we'd already been in our house a couple of years and had finally gotten the garden where it would live ready. I have always had a lemon tree, and a couple of years without one and having to buy those terrible lemons from the supermarket and beg from neigbhours had me more than ready for some of my own juicy home-grown produce. Hence splurging on the 2m tree so we didn't have to wait years for lemons. And we sure didn't. It's first season we got 26 lemons!

The thing with trees is they either put their energy into growing fruit, or into growing branches and foliage. If we'd been patient, we probably should have foregone fruit for a year or two by cutting it off and allowed the tree to strengthen its structure. But we weren't. Our lime tree on the other hand, dropped all its fruit two years in a row in protest at being relocated, and instead absolutely shot off and became the most beautiful strong bushy tree! The difference is stark…

Organisations are a bit the same. It's a delicate balance between using our available resources to build organisational resilience, capability and culture, and using them to directly produce outputs. The trouble is, it's not a simple mathematical formula. Lean too hard in one direction and you either compromise the strength of the organisation, or the outputs (and usually therefore productivity.

I've seen organisations who have leant too much into building their culture to be incredible, and lose sight of the imperative of their outputs. And I've seen plenty of organisations who have leant too much into outputs, and lost sight of the value of a strong culture.

Look back again at the images of my lemon and lime trees. If these represented organisations, which would you prefer? If you answered neither, you'd be heading in the right direction. The best result is a matter of balance.

In the garden, pruning is the critical process. In business, it's strategic thinking.

Knowing how to use your tools like a professional

"A good workman[person] never blames his [or her] tools"

If pruning is the process, your shears and secateurs are your tools. If strategic thinking is your process, your mind, expertise and deep knowledge of your context are your tools.

So you know what you have to do.

Stop. Think.

I mean really think - proper, deep thinking. Not skimming the surface, quick reactive decisions to just get it done and on to the next thing.

True strategic thinking is considered, deliberate, dot-connecting stuff. It's connecting the now with the next, the real with the possible, the constraints with the opportunity. And it can't be done well without remaining firmly grounded in context.

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