Back in 2023 I decided to finally start work on my garden, a project delayed by a fair few years. I’m really proud of my transformation project, despite not starting with a plan or skills. However there are a number of learnings that I’ve taken from it that I think apply well to continuous improvement.
Balancing short term beauty versus sustainable work
Quite often I would visit the garden center and be wowed by these beautiful and colourful plants. The problem was that they never survived the climate in Scotland. Initially I thought that it would be okay as I could buy new ones each year but that rework had other implications as I had to remember where I had the places in my garden that were dead (technical debt). Every time I dug up and replaced the plant, I had rework issues with gravel.
Instead over the past year I’ve taken to a more sustainable approach using only hardy plants and bulbs that will keep coming back. This has meant that this year I will benefit from a beautiful garden. In the summer I can lounge in the garden more than getting mucky. It also gives me a warm feeling when I look out and see plants coming up.
Within my work I want to try and avoid getting swept up in shiny new things and trying to embed them into our ways of working or toolset. Adding in a new AI tool might help you look cool now but are you going to be ripping it out and looking for a replacement next year? Or even in just a few months’ time?
Include personality
Possibly my favourite part of the garden was when I put in a dinosaur eating garden gnomes. It was silly, a little dark and included, well, dinosaurs. It was perfect for me. Now hidden throughout my garden is also a Studio Ghibli scene, a dragon’s keep and a witch’s lair (plus many more!). These things make me smile every time.
One of my favourite things from my previous work was the daft team names that we had or using silly images in my sprint reviews. We leant heavily on our Scottish background to inject personality and give ourselves an identity within the wider business. As I integrate myself into my new team and company I think it is important that I keep this spirit for those little moments in the working week that can make us smile.
Appreciating growth
As touched upon earlier, quite often we can look for immediate results. I’ve made the mistake of not seeing growth in the garden then deciding that I need to try something different. Plant a new seed. Is it now a thriving bush? No? Plant a bulb instead. Do I have that beautiful plant yet? No? I’ll put something else in place. The impact here is that sometimes I’ve ended up with a mix of plants that don’t work together and without the space needed for them to grow.
However I should have known that transformation takes time. With gardening I’ve had to learn to become more patient. Those bulbs that I plant won’t come through for possibly months. The same is very true of continuous improvement and is a trap that I’ve seen teams get into. Rather than giving an initiative the TLC it needs, the lack of immediate results sees it replaced by something else, which also doesn’t give immediate results.
Another angle on this need to appreciate growth is that as I see my garden so regularly, it can also be hard to notice the improvements and change. Is it better than last week? This can be harder to appreciate during more challenging times like autumn/winter when all you see is the dying plants and failures hitting you. Sometimes all I can see is the weeding to be done or the mess after a squirrel has dug up patches. I’m putting in all this work and is it really getting better? This can be hard to see when only considering the change in the short term.
However sometimes it is worth taking stock of how far you’ve come. It was less than 3 years ago when I started this work so when I consider what the improvement has been, it is quite remarkable. Even in those challenging times, the garden is in a much better place than before.
This is also all very true within myself. It can be easy to look month to month and criticise myself for a lack of learning or growth. Instead, if I look back to a few years ago, I’ve grown a lot. I’ve gone from someone who never learnt about my craft but was great at finding bugs to someone who cares about continuous improvement, looks at quality throughout the SDLC and not just attends meet ups but has spoken at conferences.
I could look at my garden in March, when many plants are dormant, and feel it is less lively but reflecting I can see how much it has grown.