Gardener's Intent

After reading Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, I’ve begun to recognize that the garden could be the most important metaphor for product development (at least the kind I like to do, anyway).

The key idea is that, as the gardener, you don’t “make” anything happen. A garden isn’t a machine that you create and control directly to get the outcome that you want. The machine approach is the default way that most people and companies think about product. Instead, a gardener creates the right environment for things to grow, and allows them to happen. This mindset of indirect action is an important mental shift.

But beyond the core concept, I realized this morning as I was watering my own (real) garden that I don’t have a strong sense of where the gardener should apply intent in this model.

In gardening, I like the idea of serendipity. If I see something growing on its own when I didn’t plant it myself, I like to let it go and see what happens. If it’s growing on its own without any extra effort from me, there’s a sense that it is the most robust thing that’s perfectly suited for the time and place that it’s growing. This approach can work well: last year, the most successful producer we had was a tomato plant that sprouted up this way.

This year, however, I have a dilemma. I have a zucchini plant that sprouted up spontaneously and is growing very well. Unfortunately, it’s so big that it’s crowding the sun from nearby cucumber plants that I had intentionally planted earlier. On one hand, the pure gardener’s mindset of “seeing what happens” would indulge the zucchini - if it’s showing the be the most successful, shouldn’t I go with it? On the other hand, if I let it shade out the cucumber plants, I’ll lose out on plants I really wanted to have happen. How does the gardener balance serendipity and intent?

This reveals that the gardener asserts intent (or doesn’t) at several steps in the process. First is the seeding - you can intentionally choose what seeds you plant and where. The second is environmental control - what conditions do you foster for things to grow? A third is management - if different things sprout up, do you allow them to continue?

What’s the best way to do all of these things? Perhaps there is no easy answer; it depends on the situation and the gardener and the garden. If you don’t allow anything you didn’t plant to grow, you forgo many opportunities that might be perfectly suited to your garden. If you allow anything to grow, you’re at the mercy of pure serendipity and it may not provide you things you really wanted. At the end of the day, mindfulness and intent is still the most important thing.