Snow Peas on Substack

On Saturday I turn 40 years old. Holy Shit… I have spent 40 years saying that age doesn’t matter. But today I am 39.99999 and I am not happy about it. Have you ever held a belief so tightly through it all, all the trials, all the false summits, all the sideways waves, and then one day you give it a passing glance and it shatters?! Oh my god, I am 39.99999. I decided the best self soothe mechanism I could apply was running really fast down the farm road we live on, jumping into the freezing river down the street, and buying a book and a plant that grows food. Im so predictable…I have been a triple Taurus for all of these years and fortunately for me (and everyone else) that will not be changing :)

Lately, I have been good busy balancing the needs of my business clients and thought that for my 40th birthday I could stop writing about appliances! Cheers to all my readers who open their inbox to find my latest Substack article and don’t wince when they think that ‘maybe, just maybe, Bri has sourced enough information on chest freezers, that a third telling is lying in wait’. Today is different. I swear. Instead, I want to write about how we fix what’s broken. Or how you can fix what’s broken. Or… if you’re tired and you want me to fix what’s broken, my process to solve complex problems. Not everyone has funding available to pay me an hourly rate and this Substack can be free to those who can’t afford the expense but want to pick my brain anyway. Welcome. You are among friends.

Back to the point of today’s article…Snow peas. I mean problems. I mean solutions! Many of my clients routinely thank me for following their side trails during coaching sessions. Little do they know that why I am so good at tracking their thoughts, motivations, and emotional entanglements is because exploring side trails are a favored past time! There is actually really critical and genuine information shared down side trails that always helps me identify exactly where a business idea originates, the challenges its team is facing, and where the heck we are trying to go. Take this local store front for example.

Pine & Eight is located on the Olympic Peninsula and began out of the desire by multiple farmers to pool food resources fresh from their fields, cut out the middle person, and feed a community. After a renovation of an old laundromat they opened up a small community grocery store. Farmers with mud on their boots stock the shelves and refrigerators with fresh produce and neighbors greet neighbors as you search for your favorite fresh things to bring home and cook.

As I mozzied up to the front of the store in hopes of finding my favorite frozen bagels (NY style of course), I spied this gorgeous, knock out, beautiful, sophisticated…

Snow Pea plant!

I continued to quietly observe the plant in its whole form. I touched the dried out sections of the stem and dug around in the dirt a bit.

I made a few brief mental notes of the most likely problem. And then I began guessing.

Too much water? I thought.

Maybe someone at the small grocery was overzealous about watering the collection of fresh spring starts?

I tested the theory by comparing it to a small group of pumpkin starts I had barely begun to grow in the window just days before. That was a possibility. But to fix the problem I really needed to identify the root cause and not build out a band aid to address the symptom only. Lots and lots and lots and lots of business models do this. I don’t want to open another can of worms but you can see this in homelessness prevention efforts, especially when government entities feature prominently in their funding streams. If I could outlaw quick fixes to complex social problems that have been artificially created through ineffective and oppressive policy creation, by the same entities who created the problem in the first place, I would.

Back to the snow pea and how to effectively fix problems…for now.

I went to bed that night thinking about the plant but then remembered I had much more important things to worry over like my retiring COO and new hire (pictured below)…

In the morning I decided to pull up a chair next to the plant while I drank my coffee. Unfortunately, I cannot really speak plant but I do speak to dogs and understand them much better. In lieu of not being able to ask questions to the snow pea I looked more closely again but this time I also picked up the plant and felt around its container. I looked underneath the bottom of the structure and noticed that the plant starts were root bound and were trying desperately to break through their holder. More than a watering issue this little plant was yearning for solid ground with more room. How often in life and in business is there only one thing wrong? Never.

After a few hours of the plant sitting in moisture to loosen the root binding problem, I ate my lunch standing up and thought about writing this article. Sandwich now finished and dogs watered, I carried the young plant to its new home in the big and open ground. Sunshine, water, and plant companionship now taken care of, I left it alone to let nature do its work.

In the coming weeks I will continue to check on its healing and progress. Once it feels right I will build in another structure that matches in size and style the snow peas growth rate. In my experience growth should not be allowed to outrun structure (i.e., danger). In the plant world, if my future trellis is not strong enough to match the power of the snow pea, it will cause the snowpea to crush itself and die off. I have had a lot of intentional exposure to organizations and their growth models. All teams are different; they each succeed and fail in different ways. How a specific group of people identifies and comes to terms with their “problems” is a really good indicator of how successful their solutions will be.

In today’s piece we’ve briefly covered business and non-business topics such as how to look at a problem, effective staffing, targeting the root cause of problems to build out effective solutions, snow peas, and my birthday. Thanks for reading!