Do Nothing Much

We’ve seen how other disciplines can help us in Proposal Land:

• with lessons on fostering teamwork, drawing on a superb article on managing design teams (start here)
• with lessons on writing better, riffing on a-man-walks-into-a-bar variants (start here) and adapting instructions for writing haiku (see here)
• with meeting the schedule, leveraging winter-driving instructions (see here)

Now it’s time to learn something from a botanical garden that had stagnated for lack of big funding to fund its ambitious vision.

So because we couldn’t take
the big step we wanted to,
we didn’t take any step at all.

Here’s the short version of how a team of people unstuck that garden–but the whole post by Scientist Sees Squirrel is well worth reading, and the blog (Tagline: Seldom original. Often wrong. Occasionally interesting.) is well worth your time if you have even a passing interest in the life sciences.

My friends and I decided we’d rather do something small than be stagnant. So we started to develop a new Garden bed each year, but one that we could do for $5,000 with volunteer labour. We didn’t ask anyone . . . for $100,000, because we figured first we should be able to show that we could execute a $5,000 project successfully. And guess what? After 5 years, the Garden looked fresh, new people were coming and stalwarts were returning, and we were able to think a little bigger. Now after 10 years, we’ve quadrupled our staffing and budget, our City government sees the Garden as a major asset they want to invest in, and people are flooding through. All this because we weren’t afraid to do nothing much. (emphasis added)

Two key things here:

• They had a small group of people, able to work as a team.
• They had an ambitious vision, but they weren’t afraid to start small: “to do nothing much.”

When our proposals are a hot mess (as they often seem to be), fixing all those interlocking processes can feel overwhelming. So don’t try. Get a small group of like-minded individuals together and fix something smaller, instead:

• Improve your executive reviews:
  • fore (the review of the team’s operations concept)
  • aft (the review of the “finished” proposal)
• Improve your methods for standardizing something: terminology, organization charts, colour palette. Something.
• Improve your proposal meetings:
  • hold them more frequently
  • make them shorter
  • tell people how to participate better
• Improve your push communication:
  • post stuff that matters on the wall where everyone can see it
  • make a graphic of the schedule and send it to everyone
  • remind people daily of key decisions and constraints.

And so on.

Don’t be afraid to do nothing much. Day after day, week after week, year after year, “nothing much” adds up to “quite something.”

PS The suggestions for improvement that don’t have links here are all addressed in The Manual. Just sayin.’