Two decades back, we bought a piece of farmland. We are complete novices in agriculture. Therefore, we simply did what others around us were doing. We planted more than 250 mango trees. There was no water available for irrigation, and we hired a person to water the saplings. After a couple of months, there were no plants left. All had dried up. We then tried three bore wells, and all of them turned out to be dry. Our original estimate was spending one lakh rupees in a year for this project. We had to shelve our project after spending almost double that amount.
Road work was undertaken near our farm, and we came up with an ingenuine idea. We asked the contractor to take soil free of cost from a designated area in our plot. The idea was to create a crater that would eventually become a lake. On our instructions, the contractor dug the pond, twenty feet in depth. We waited for the rain. In the first monsoon, the soil simply took all the water in. There was no water left in the reservoir. Ditto in year two. Then, from the third year, the accumulation started. We realized that the groundwater level was so much depleted that it took a couple of years to raise it. We had an abundant source of water supply. Our dream of growing an orchard was eventually realized a decade after the original plan. We then decided to raise fish in the pond. We bought fishes like pomfret, surmai, and ghol. All of them died. We then consulted an expert in fisheries. He told us that the pond should have been shallower. We can never raise commercially viable fish in our pond.
So, after more than a decade and a cost overrun of many folds, we finally completed the dream project. If we were part of a project team in any organization, we would have been axed. But, I learned a lot about the plantation, irrigation, fish, government schemes, issues with the pricing of agricultural produce, etc. No academic course or organizational initiative would have helped me learn so much. I am sure you would have attempted such initiatives on your own - interior design, building a house, or some other thing. How accurate were you in your forecast? My guess is that you would have been off it by quite a margin. Yet, in hindsight, didn't these initiatives seem worthwhile? If we get a chance, we all will do it again.
Most of the companies I worked for had a very elaborate process to manage to fund such initiatives. In SI Group, we used the Stage-Gate Approach. The CFO in many organizations is the final decision-maker regarding the Go-No Go. This is perfectly fine. But, if you just use financial numbers to drive your decisions, then there will be no innovation, and you will never create a learning organization. Therefore, it is essential to nurture the dreamers in your organization.
Small Metrics - When was the last time one of your employees came to you with an idea. Even if the idea was not very costly, did you approve it? Just reflect on this. If nobody has come up with an idea, then it is serious. It means the employees are already feeling stifled or have no attachment to the company. One of the reasons could be the past rejections faced by them or the existence of too much bureaucracy. When was the last time you undertook an initiative with ideas worked out on the back of an envelope? Measure it, analyze it, change it.
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