Gone wild
It’s the start of my second full week doing freelance work. It was my time on the inside of large-scale, multi-national creative organizations that made me realize how important outsiders are.
Big, successful companies are highly tuned machines with tight processes and teams. They reward people who like to stay inside the lines. But that can only survive on its own for so long. In order to grow, things need to change shape — growth is seldom linear and evenly distributed.
How and when do we change? That’s what I’m interested in, and the place to make the biggest impact is from outside of the bureaucracy and ingrained incentive structure these companies have. Outsiders can bring an objectivity that doesn’t really work when you’re on the inside.
I started writing under Wild Garden last year as an exploration of creativity at scale, the ways companies use creativity to grow.
The name is an analogy for how we should look at brands and organizations — they’re like wild gardens.
They’re gardens because they require planning. We set goals and create intentions around what we expect to happen. They have set conditions and constraints that inform where we start. A garden is who we are today.
They’re wild because the exist in complex environments that include things way out of our control. By acknowledging that, we can see potential rather than risk. Wild is what we could be.
The approach, then, is to plan what we can while creating opportunity for upside.
In practice, it’s a campaign, a positioning, or change management for growing teams.
I’m talking to marketing leaders about things like: How do we communicate what we stand for? What should my team look like? How do we structure our organization for 100%+ anticipated growth? How do new functions fit into our current work flow?
There’s no single answer to any of these things, which makes it that much more useful to focus on truths and needs (garden attributes), and potential accelerators (wild attributes).
We’ll see where this goes. For now, it’s pretty fun.
(If you want to learn more, check out this little site I put together: https://wildgarden.live/)
