Garden Synchronicity: Defective Cucumbers and Resistance to Change


I started a garden for the first time last year (2011). I wasn't very good at it, but I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. I learned that planting flowers with the vegetables helps attract beneficial insects. I learned that too much water can be just as bad as not enough. I also learned that plants grow better when organic material (a.k.a. compost) is tilled into the soil.

So at the end of last year, I put all of the garden and yard waste in a compost bin. Rotten tomatoes, corn stalks, grass clippings, fallen leaves, and dried sunflower plants all went into the bin. When spring came, I dumped out the compost bin and used a roto-tiller to mix it all into the garden patch.

As a process improvement over last year's garden, I actually had a plan for Garden 2012. I knew that I didn't want any more sunflowers, because they blocked out the sun for other plants. I knew that I wanted cucumbers, so I bought premium seeds and planted them in the northeast corner of the garden plot.

For 30 days, I thought I was the greatest cucumber gardener who ever lived. My cucumbers sprouted almost immediately and grew at a ridiculous rate: like 3-4 inches a day. As I marveled at the wonders of composting, I started to question if cucumbers were supposed to stand up so straight.

The punch line to the story should be obvious from the picture above. My cucumbers grew into 8 foot tall sunflowers. As I blog about lean six sigma and process improvement, I can't help but be thoroughly pleased with my defective cucumbers. Although the sunflowers don't meet the strict customer requirements, the delight of seeing the flowers overshadows the disappointment. Synchronicity, the non-causal grouping of events in a meaningful way, taught me something about process improvement: ripping up a working process to meet an imaginary customer requirement might destroy real value -- that's right, sometimes resistance to change is a good thing.

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