Issue #19 - What to Do When You Can't Do What You Want to Do
Theory Only Goes So Far For the Aporetic
Time Is On My Side - Irma Thomas
You might recall that this whole newsletter thing got started with me (and Erin) purchasing her 120 acre family farm in early 2021. We’ve even decided that we are going to put some Icelandic Sheep here. Those posts were about 1 year ago today; as of today, I own no sheep. The reasons for my lack of sheep aren’t terribly relevant, but it has slowed down the process of starting the value-added operations that this publication is named after. What is important to know about the reason for my lack of sheep is that it’s not really something I can do much about at the moment; its cause is external and I don’t have much control over it.
So, I am blocked from moving forward with my company/idea until I have actual sheep. Or am I?
As JP Castlin in his excellent Substack publication Strategy in Praxis points out, I am in a place of multiple belonging, where I would describe my position to be “aporetic” - “an awareness of one’s lack of insight into the situation and a deliberate attempt to unconfuse oneself; it is an unresolved confusion.”1 I thought now would be a good opportunity to take stock of where we’ve come and next steps that can move forward our ideas without actually owning sheep.
This kind of delay happens in entrepreneurship all the time. External forces impede something that is critical to the heart of the activity. You bang your head against that wall for a bit and then wonder whether it’s worth it. It can be easy to just get frustrated and not do anything: Life is taking its good ol’ time, so I will, too! Our natural inclination is to just mothball the whole thing and pick it back up when the situation is different. In other words, I could just stop until the block is removed and I own sheep.
There are a number of problems with mothballing the idea
we forget where we are and have to start all over again,
conditions change while we are waiting and put us even further behind,
we lose motivation and never come back to it.
Personally, I’ve had all of these happen more than once on entrepreneurial ideas delayed and never pursued.
When I run into this kind of block, I like to re-categorize my task list.
Normally I might have a task list or project plan in a particularized order - do this first, that second, this third, etc. But not all tasks have to be done in order. We put an order to the tasks because we can’t actually multitask and we need to start somewhere and end somewhere. In other words, maybe task 2 doesn’t actually have to happen after task 1, but our priorities at the time made task 1 more important. Our order represents our priorities.
But, our priorities are based on how we categorize those tasks and the importance we attribute to those categories at the time we need to prioritize them.
For example, in a general sense my list for the wool side of the business looks something like: buy sheep, shear sheep, clean wool, spin wool into yarn, use yarn to weave fabric, cut and sew fabric to make goods, set up website and social media to sell blankets, advertise wool goods, sell wool goods, ship wool goods, pay sales tax, pay income tax, ??, profit.
This is my priority list because I’m not really that interested in selling wool goods in the abstract. I’m interested in using my land to create consumer goods that improve the environment through agriculture. Our hypothesis is that sheep-based agriculture is an effective tool for this theory of change.
At the time that I was evaluating priority and setting these tasks, my priority was solving for agriculture and climate - the business isn’t a success if we can’t solve the farming/climate issues. In other words, I took those tasks that were categorized as “farm/agricultural/climate” and prioritized them over tasks categorized as “supply chain/processing/retail.”
But priorities change.
My students have endlessly taunted me for categorizing everything. I find categorization useful and even calming2, but more importantly, categorization is the key to understanding differences between things.
Things are related to other things differently depending on the basis for categorization. For example, let’s consider two very different things: real ducks3 and Army DUCKS. If I choose to categorize as “things that can get wet and still work” versus “things that can’t” - then real ducks and Army Ducks are in the same category and similar to each other. If my categories are “weird military vehicles” and “not weird military vehicles” then they would be in different categories. So it definitely matters how we choose to categorize and describe things.
Given our lack of sheep, it seems clear that our priorities can’t be “farm/agriculture/climate” over “supply chain/processing/retail.” But, it also doesn’t mean that we should just flip our priorities and just start doing the merchandising stuff. It would be easy to just open a soap shop and start selling soap, or open a clothing/home goods store and start selling merino shirts and wool blankets, or open a meat shop.
But the goal here is deep systemic change, not necessarily selling sheep-y stuff. Don’t get me wrong, this is a for-profit endeavor and the point is definitely to make money. But selling goods made using traditional agricultural practices bought at wholesale says nothing about our hypothesis about changing the relationship between agricultural goods and the environment.
Moving the Needle
Our task, then, is how to re-prioritize the tasks in a way that still continues to test our hypothesis. To move the needle or move towards our hypothesis in a way that doesn’t involve real sheep on a real pasture. Three things come to mind immediately and are where I’ve been spending a lot of time lately.
First, is legislative change. My ideas for our operations require a regional, systems approach. There are numerous federal, state, and local laws that have something to say about the structure of the agricultural supply chain. While my research is showing that it may be possible to navigate our hypothesis/business without legislative change, there are systemic tweaks that could make more of an impact than the industry waiting around for Jeff to prove the point through capitalism.
Second, is education. The National Science Foundation’s I-Corp innovation grants require startup teams to interview 100 potential customers and partners before the teams can be funded. Not that I plan to be NSF funded, but the task is well taken for the kinds of due diligence necessary before spending a dime.
I still know nothing about farming. Erin grew up on a farm that had sheep, but I wouldn’t call it a sheep farm4. This is where wonderful trade groups like the Three Rivers Fibershed and Woolmark have been incredible. It all feels a little academic, but to the extent we can get hands-on we’ve been doing farm tours and taking online courses and going to conferences and meet-ups. I went and spoke to Matt McCoy and his team at Field to Freezer, a software startup based in Hartland, WI that helps connect hunters to meat processors based on location. Also, I’ve been researching and writing this blog and that’s not nothin’5.
Third, we’ve been making and selling soap. If you want some awesome shampoo bars and body soaps, you should check them out or come visit us at the Platteville Farmers Market!
This is part of the Cynfin Framework - “a decision support framework … based on the principle of ‘bounded applicability’; there are few if any context-free solutions, but many valid context-specific ones.”
When I was a little I collected baseball cards, then later music, then beer and coffee. Collecting is all about categorization. Throughout my life when I’ve gotten stressed, I recategorize things - for example by rearranging my records by genre instead of artist or my baseball cards by last name instead of team or beer by region instead of style - call it the record collector’s version of Marie Kondo.
Assuming you don’t believe that Birds Aren’t Real.
It was a dairy farm, and now a cattle farm.
To wit: this post now holds the record for longest time I’ve taken to write a post. I don’t think a single word in this final draft was present in my first draft except for the title.