Bricolage
Sometimes we wait to start taking action because we feel we don’t have the resources we need. But there is an abundance of evidence to suggest that successful innovators do just the opposite, getting started with what they have rather than waiting till the conditions are perfect. Bricolage is a French word coming from the medieval verb for “to fiddle or tinker”; sociologists use it to describe how innovators use what they have on hand to do something. Bricolage is closely related to one of the most prominent explanations of how entrepreneurs succeed, a process called effectuation, the basic principles being that you: (1) pilot the plane (you can make your own opportunities by influencing the future), (2) use the bird in the hand (like bricolage, make do with what resources you have), (3) make lemonade out of lemons (do what you can with surprises), and (4) embrace the crazy quilt (find value in having a variety of partnerships).1 Although bricolage and effectuation differ in minor ways (some claim that bricolage is a resource logic and effectuation a decision-making logic), they basically say the same thing: make the most of what you have and just get started!
To illustrate, consider the race between US and Danish companies to create the sustainable wind energy industry.2 Danish companies adopted a “get started with what we have” approach, cobbling together wind turbines from gears pillaged from trucks and wood panels to quickly deploy prototypes in the field and jumpstart a cycle of trial-and-error iteration. Moreover, they did it in the spirit of collaboration, with engineers meeting up to help each other solve problems, sitting down with customers to learn what worked, and even warmly cooperating with regulators to make sure their turbines were safe. Rather than keep their advances secret, the Danes started conferences and forums to share information and designs with each other. Surprisingly quickly, the crude wind turbines evolved into ever-more-sophisticated turbines that capture energy from the steady winds blowing off the North Sea.
In contrast to Denmark’s bricolage approach to building wind turbines, US firms adopted a high-tech, science-based approach, relying on the latest theoretical thinking in aeronautics and structural dynamics in hopes of creating breakthroughs in the lab that, they assumed, would leapfrog the Danes’ simpler methods. Many US engineers looked down on the scrappy Danish wind industry. “I felt their approach was too easy or not challenging enough,” recalls one of the pioneering US engineers. Fearing their ideas might be stolen, US engineers avoided collaboration, and there was a spirit of disdain for the nuts and bolts of installing and operating turbines, which meant there was almost no feedback from customers to the labs: What could the field have to tell science anyway?
In the end, even though the US companies did make several breakthroughs, the Danish turbines were often already ahead or caught up so quickly that the breakthroughs were on par. But there was one crucial difference between the US and Danish wind turbines: the Danish designs were much cheaper and more reliable than US ones. Through bricolage—by using what they had on hand and trial-and-error efforts—the Danish companies solved one of the most challenging technical puzzles of their era and dominated the emerging wind energy industry. On reflection, the same US engineer who had denigrated the Danes and their bricolage concluded, “We trusted our engineering tools too much, and felt that they could solve the hard problems…. We felt bright and able … to solve anything. We thought, in a typical American fashion, that there would be inevitable breakthroughs that would make the ‘pedestrian’ Danish approach obsolete overnight.”3
Even in big, disruptive leaps in innovation, when you peel back the accumulated layers of history, you often see a remarkable amount of bricolage underneath. When Bell Labs invented the transistor in 1947, many recognized its potential to transform electronics constrained by bulky, unreliable vacuum tubes. But in those early days, transistors were too weak to substitute for the vacuum tubes powering the large televisions and radios Americans wanted to buy. Nonetheless, RCA Victor, one of the dominant players in TVs and radios, recognized the disruptive potential of the transistor and so authorized a landmark $100 million investment in R&D to one day replace vacuum tubes with transistors. But in another corner of the world, a scrappy, young Japanese company named TTK, a newcomer to the industry, adopted a very different approach. Instead of pouring money into R&D, they decided to use the transistor to make a small, portable radio. The transistors were so weak that the radios were poor quality compared to RCA’s (the sound was tinny and weak), but people with small budgets and teenagers who wanted to get out of the house to listen to rock and roll loved them. TTK sold tens of thousands of radios, improving them with each production run until their transistors became so good, the company realized they could use them to make TVs. RCA was already making big color televisions for the mainstream market, and TTK could only make tiny, black-and-white TVs, but these proved immensely popular for people who couldn’t afford or didn’t have a place for big TVs. Once again, TTK sold tens of thousands, improving with each round of bricolage and learning by doing until the once-tiny company, now named Sony, disrupted RCA’s main market with cheaper, more reliable color televisions and radios. Although RCA had started with far more money, they never really caught up to Sony’s bricolage approach.4
Over and over, research has underscored the power of bricolage. One of the more colorful accounts describes a farmer capturing seemingly useless methane, burning it to create electricity that he sold to the local utility, then discovering that he could use the heat to warm water for a hydroponic vegetable business and to raise fish.5 Bricolage can also save the day in more high tech domains: the Apollo 13 astronauts only made it home safely after their oxygen tanks exploded because they used bricolage to make a round filter fit a square hole!6
Anyone can tap the power of bricolage. It has even proven helpful in situations with more poverty and scarcity than most of us can imagine. Marlon Parker founded RLabs in the Cape Flats area of Cape Town, South Africa, a community where less than 5 percent of residents have a high school degree and youth unemployment exceeds 50 percent.7 In a community many residents described as “hopeless,” Parker used bricolage to build a community-training organization: “Most of the people that we were working with were gang members…. It was just not a very appealing group of people … so nobody wanted to give us any money.”
Like in our discussion of reimagining resources in chapter 15, Parker asked, “What do we have in abundance?” He realized that with so many people out of work, people had an abundance of free time, which they could use to teach or learn. Parker scrounged an old computer from the attic of a local business and then recruited fourteen locals willing to teach each other in an unused storage space in an effort to create an environment where people could feel hope. Parker encouraged people to share their stories and then teach each other what limited computer skills they had. One by one, as people learned basic IT skills from each other—and gave each other hope that the future could be better—they started to land jobs.
In speaking of bricolage—making do with what you have—we caution that there are times when the quality of your ingredients plays an important role in creating the possibilities you dream of. This idea is vividly illustrated in Virginia Woolf’s damning feminist critique, “A Room of One’s Own,” in which she lays out the immense obstacles facing women writers over the ages. The essay compares, for example, a meal she ate with the scholars at a men’s college—fish in a luxurious cream sauce, partridge accompanied by a “retinue of sauces and salads,” potatoes delicately sliced thinner than coins, sprouts “foliated as rosebuds,” rich roast beef, and a pudding for the gods, all of it accompanied by ever-flowing white and red wines—and a dinner at a women’s college with a lowly budget, a coarse meal of beef and greens followed by stringy prunes, accompanied not by wines but by water. Her takeaway is that “the lamp of the spine does not light on beef and prunes.”a
Concluding that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Woolf makes the point that sometimes we need quality inputs to reach our highest possibility. We all face constraints, some more than others, and bricolage is about taking action despite those constraints. This doesn’t mean the inputs need to cost a great deal. Beautiful music and inspiring words can be accessed for free. But part of navigating uncertainty may be asking in what areas of your life you need to maintain the quality of your inputs to create possibilities. Some inputs may be as simple as painting your walls or decorating your space. Nico Alary and Sarah Mouchot did save money on their apartment when creating Holybelly, but they did not compromise on the quality of the ingredients or the happy atmosphere at the restaurant. One of our colleagues, featured in chapter 26, doesn’t make a great deal of money as a therapist, but he observed that when he finally allowed himself to splurge on a ski pass for the resort near his home, he suddenly found he leaped out of bed, had more energy, and felt a spark he had not felt before. In sum, there are times to prioritize things or comforts that light the lamp of brilliance within you.
a. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas (Vintage Classics, 2016).
Momentum built and word started to spread. Visitors began appearing at RLabs asking how they could recreate their success in another community. Little did they know it was a difficult proposition: most social ventures fail because what made it work in one place doesn’t work in another. But RLabs has managed to defy this common curse, spreading to dozens of cities, creating 90,000 jobs, and inspiring hope, all by applying bricolage. What does it look like? Whenever Parker helps open a new RLabs hub, he asks the founder to write down what they need and then ask, “Is it really needed?” He explains,
The idea is that we say, ‘Always look for alternatives. Do you really need to buy what you say you need to buy? Is there another way to do it? … If not, do you know someone who has it?’ And so on. It guides people along the journey of nudging them to use small budgets and really utilize what and who is around. It’s also a feeling of victory for the person whenever they find a solution—to sense that you solved a problem.8
The company has proven that bricolage works even in the most desperate circumstances. Yusuf Ssessanga, a chicken farmer and the founder of an RLabs group in Tanzania, explains, “[They taught me to] start from where you are and use the resources you have; that’s how things happen … [by] looking at what we have…. It’s inspired—you can do things on your own. It gives you dignity. It’s the opposite of being in need, of being a victim.”9
Reflection and Practice
Let’s take inspiration from chicken farmer and RLabs participant Ssessanga. There may come a day when you get access to all the resources you imagine you need, but until then, getting started with what you have and learning as you go can be rewarding and even fun. Bricolage can even be used to make something out of nothing.
Charlotte Cory, a London-based writer and artist, was tasked by the BBC to create a bicentennial celebration of the birth of the writer Charlotte Brontë. As she considered different approaches, Cory had the idea: What if Brontë visited the Sir John Soane’s Museum—a residence that has not changed since Brontë’s lifetime—and we could hold the exhibit there, in a space that looks and feels like her century and where she could have actually spent time. Cory began searching the ancient visitor logs for Brontë’s signature. “With mounting excitement, I combed the columns of signatures, knowing that maybe, maybe on the next page I might possibly find [hers].”10 But after many hours, there was nothing. “I cannot describe the disappointment with which I finally closed the tantalizing tomes and admitted defeat.” Discouraged, Cory was headed for home when she had a new idea: “[M]y heart leaped. It looks as if Charlotte Brontë did not visit the Soane, but why not bring her here for her bicentenary? She did not come, but she should have … so why not bring her to London again and give her another chance to enjoy the best of what the city has to offer? What better two-hundredth birthday present for a writer who has stood the test of time than a visit at long last to this timeless place?”11
Bricolage can help you achieve your goals, sometimes even seemingly out of nothing. Here are some approaches to help you get started.
- Ask yourself if there is a creative way to get started on your task now. You may not have the resources for an entire project, but what could you do today with the resources you do have? For example, Nathan encourages his students to draw pictures of their ideas and show them to customers to get feedback before they spend a cent. Likewise, how could you start learning today? Many resources are available online or in libraries for free.
- Can you put yourself in a position where you can start learning by doing, rather than just thinking about your project? Learning by doing is incredibly powerful. One chef we interviewed, who has worked in some of the greatest Michelin-starred restaurants, got his start volunteering at a local restaurant to see if he liked being a chef. We learn the most by trying, so find a low-cost way to try.
- One of Nathan’s colleagues teaches entrepreneurship in some of the poorest countries in the world. Class starts with a trading game where students try to exchange a rock for something better, then trade that for something yet better. After many trades, one entrepreneur turned a rock into a chicken that laid eggs he could sell. Many of us are fortunate to have more valuable things we can trade into something else. Like the chef in the previous exercise, could you trade your time to start learning today?
- Cory’s bricolage example is liberating because she created something out of nothing. Inspired by her Brontë exhibit, we asked ourselves, Could we invent something for a similar effect? We landed on the idea of writing imaginary endorsements for this book, such as “The book Steve Jobs would love if he had read it,” and “The book that inspired Eliza Hamilton to cofound her pioneering orphanage.” Maybe a similar creative activity could kick-start your imagination.