Got the Seedling of an Idea? Here’s How to Grow It in 4 Easy Steps

The key to growing an idea from seedling to fruition is not to yank it out of the ground in your haste to see it bloom. Four elements are needed for success.

Recently I saw a post by Fredrik Haren (author and speaker, known as The Creativity Explorer) where he suggested asking yourself:

‘What grows inside of you?’ as in, ‘What ideas are planted inside of you that you can bring to life?’

It’s a wonderful question for two reasons:

• We may have many seedling ideas inside us that we aren’t even aware of.
• Actual seedlings need soil, sun, water, and time. Those four things match well with the four elements that seedling ideas need too.

But first, how do you even know what a seedling idea looks like?

Identifying Seedlings

Seedlings of ideas, those tiny little green leaves poking up out of your internal soil, can take many forms. Here are some descriptions of where your seedlings might be hiding, but it is by no means an exhaustive list:

• Feeling intrigued or curious about a certain topic, place, career, animal, planet, beverage, etc. When your brain is propelling you towards something, no matter how small, chances are a little seed of an idea is waiting to germinate.
• Questions floating around your mind, particularly questions starting with “why?” “how?” “what if?” “could I perhaps?” “how about?” Each of those questions is a potential idea waiting for permission to grow.
• Noticing similarities in disparate information/facts/objects/people/etc. Ideas come from connections, so when your brain starts noticing interesting and unexpected commonalities between things, it’s worth seeing where those thought processes go.
• Areas of experience and interest that could grow into new products, services, content, etc. if given the right environment.
• Small, simple ideas that aren’t yet big enough for a category or an action plan or an email. Gentle, miniature thoughts often need more time and ideal conditions in order to grow into their potential.

 If you’ve found even one little seedling inside you, what do you do? There are four elements involved in successfully bringing a seedling to maturity.

Element 1: Soil

For starters, your seedling needs to be well planted in soil that is loose enough for roots to grow. That soil is your brain.

There’s two parts to that description.

Firstly, the seedling needs to be well planted. It needs to have been given space in your brain to germinate and live.

If you don’t value the idea seedling, if you dismiss its importance, then that little seed idea will just be blown away by the noise and necessity of everyday thoughts.

If you only give space and resources to established thoughts and processes, you’ll never provide opportunities for new ideas to form and grow. Seedlings are as important as giant oaks, because the oaks themselves came from seedlings. Also, oaks have limited flexibility, whereas seedlings have the potential to go in completely new directions.

So when you see the whisps of a “what if” forming in the back of your mind, don’t ignore it and don’t pooh-pooh it. Plant it in your mind as of relevance and value. It may not grow. Or it may turn into a brand-new oak of its own.

The only way you can tell is by letting it mature if it wants to.

Secondly, the soil needs to be loose enough for the seedling’s roots to grow. How does that work in the brain?

Mental pressure and stress will reduce the growth potential of your ideas just the same as ramming earth would hinder a seedling. Deadlines, consequences, and KPIs are among many things that have the potential to impact the quality of your mental soil if you let them.

Filling your brain with input every moment of every day (including TV programs at night) keeps your brain so busy there’s no opportunity for that little idea seedling to grow.

Permission to experiment, celebrating efforts instead of results, taking relaxing walks, writing in a journal, even having a bubble bath, all these help aerate the mental soil. And there are so many more ways to reduce your mental pressure, limited only by your imagination. 

The key is to value each idea seedling and give yourself mental room for growth to happen.

Element 2: Sun

Seedlings germinate in the dark, but they need light to grow. Same with idea seedlings. They may seem to come from nowhere, but they need a warming influence to continue growing.

One part of that influence is approval.

When we judge ideas as helpful or unhelpful, intelligent or stupid, valuable or worthless, we limit their ability to grow. They now fall into a category. A category that’s either negative or too full of expectation.

Especially when ideas are small, we need to avoid categorising them. Strange ideas can turn into ‘genius’ ideas given some time and thought. Worthless ideas turn out to be incredible when combined with another thought or moved to another use case.

So when we notice the seedling of an idea, shining approval in its direction simply because it’s chosen to show its first little leaves allows it to continue to grow into its potential.

Another influence is safety.

We need to make it mentally and externally safe to experiment and learn. Success needs to be tied to trying something, anything! It doesn’t matter if the results were not as expected. That there are results of any kind simply adds to the information we’re collecting about this idea.

Ideas grow best when they know they can send branches off in all sorts of different directions just to see what happens. Don’t start lopping off limbs just because the idea isn’t looking as you expect. See what happens. Make it safe to grow.

When innovating, even a supposed ‘failure’ provides information that helps build toward your ultimate result. Curiosity is the watchword to all of this.

Element 3: Water

With seedlings, soil and sun are not enough. They need water. Sometimes that’s in the form of natural rain. Sometimes that’s a hose or watering can.

With seedling ideas, they need some influences from outside your brain.

They may need extra information. An interest in a topic needs feeding with content. A “what if” question needs an answer. A curiosity may require a visit to a museum or a factory or a business summit. Look for every opportunity to provide that information. The more interesting the source, the better.

They may need collaboration. Perhaps there’s someone on the team who knows more about the topic than you do. Set up a meeting and pick their brain. Or perhaps your brain just does better when conversing about an idea because you think best when talking. If that’s the case, then grab a willing friend, spouse, pet, stuffed bear – whatever audience works best for you and is readily available. Multiple heads are often better than one, providing they’re positive influences. You don’t have to grow the idea alone.

They may need experimentation. Ideas grow when premises are tested, possibilities are tried, opportunities are taken. So look for chances to use your new little idea in the real world and gather data about how things work and interact.

Element 4: Time

It’s understandable to feel impatient when your idea isn’t quickly turning into something workable. But the worst thing you can do to a little seedling is grab its leaves and give it a yank to get it growing quicker. You’ll likely rip the little thing straight out of the ground.

Same with ideas. Don’t expect a perfect idea in one meeting. Don’t expect that classic light bulb moment. Give the idea (and any ideas that build from it) the time to grow. If you’re doing all of the above, you’re doing more good than impatience ever will.

Give yourself and the people on your team permission to spitball, to brainstorm, to daydream, to muse. Let it be about the journey rather than the destination. An innovative workplace values the idea-generating process over the end result. Get the process right, the end result will naturally follow.

So look for those idea seedlings, then give the seedling the mental space, the approval and safety, the extra information, and the time it needs to grow into something you can put into action.

We’ve done the theory. If you’d like to see how to do it all in practice, sign up for the companion email newsletter The Bright Idea Bulletin, where we look at punchy, actionable tips on building an innovative workplace.