Reimagining Resources
Many of us believe we can’t take action because we don’t have the resources (e.g., time, money, education) to pursue a new project or idea. However, there may be overlooked abundance—something we have so much of that we take it for granted—waiting to be put to use in valuable ways. Likewise, sometimes the constraints we curse can actually fuel creativity and possibility. We take inspiration from the recent discovery that all the known matter in the universe actually represents only about 5 percent of the actual matter that exists. The other 95 percent is dark energy and dark matter, which we can’t directly see.1 If we become curious about the resources we think we have or think we need and the constraints we see as problematic, we prime ourselves for finding possibility, which may be hiding in plain sight.
When Rob Adams landed a job as head of city planning in Melbourne after graduating from Oxford with a degree in urban design, he was given a seemingly impossible task: reverse decades of urban decline, and do it without a budget. The city had been laid out during the gold rush of the 1850s in large rectangular blocks connected by broad roads. Over the decades, speculators subdivided these blocks into smaller parcels, adding narrow service lanes like wormholes in each block. Over time these grimy, poorly lit laneways multiplied, serving as parking by day and harbors for trouble at night. As crime increased, people working downtown fled to the safer suburbs, the wide boulevards becoming little more than clogged arteries out of the city’s emptying heart.
Adams began searching for resources that might have been overlooked because they were so abundant. What about the proliferation of laneways? As an experiment, Adams blocked one laneway with a pylon and turned the street over to the nearby cafés in exchange for their cleaning up and maintaining the space. For the restaurants, it meant a doubling of their square footage, and soon tables appeared, illuminated by hanging bulbs. As people lingered, the streets began to feel safer. Adams started blocking more laneways, encouraging street art in some, restaurants in others. Slowly the city’s laneways began to transform, today becoming hangout spaces, tourist attractions, and part of Melbourne’s unique heritage.
And when a recession pushed down the already depressed property values, counterintuitively, Adams celebrated because he saw the unwanted space as an opportunity. At that time, most people believed Australians didn’t want to live in the city. But Adams had seen the popularity of mixed-use buildings in Europe (commercial on bottom, apartments on top). So he approached the owner of an empty old Victorian building and made a proposal: Adams would renovate the building to create mixed-use space, keep the rent until it paid off the renovation costs, then give the building back to the owner—improvements and tenants included. With no other alternative, the owner accepted. Shockingly, people flocked to the now-restored grand old building, and it proved so popular that Adams paid back the loan in half the time, allowing him to repeat the process, one building at a time, until the central business district had become a vibrant residential zone as well. By the 2020s, Adams’s team had helped increase the number of occupied apartments downtown from 650 when they started to over 45,000.
We’ll mention one final example. Adams argues that “if you design a good street, you design a good city.”2 Few people would have seen Melbourne’s wide boulevards, clogged by traffic, as a hidden resource. But he slowly started converting the boulevards, a lane here and a lane there, into pedestrian space. Adams built small kiosks and attractive cafés, renting them out at cost to coffee shops, florists, and other vendors as long as they kept an eye on the street. Then he planted trees and installed durable outdoor furniture so people could sit down and enjoy their coffee. Today there are more than six hundred coffee shops (there were but a handful when he started) and over seventy thousand trees. You can even download an app—Urban Forest Melbourne—to find out about any given tree or report a problem. What Adams didn’t imagine was that the app would go viral, and that the trees would receive love notes via email. One representative email read, “As I was leaving St. Mary’s College today, I was struck, not by a branch, but by your radiant beauty. You must get these messages all the time. You are such an attractive tree.”3 Melbourne has been voted the most livable city in the world seven years in a row, a transformation Adams helped achieve by seeing the value of overlooked abundance.4
Many times, recognizing this abundance requires challenging an assumption, such as how Adams didn’t believe Australians didn’t want to be downtown. Sometimes discovering the value of abundance requires moving an abundant resource to another location. For example, in the 1800s, Boston’s “Ice King” created a global empire by connecting New England’s winter ice, leftover sawdust from the many lumber mills, and ships returning empty to the West Indies—things no one saw any value in because of their abundance—to provide ice in the hot climates of the tropics.5 Other times, we can trade our abundance with partners to get access to what we need. For example, when Kyle Nel led Lowe’s foray into augmented reality, he realized the company had an abundance of stores that could be great testing environments, trading access with partners like Google in return for their technical capabilities.6
Although there may be abundance we have overlooked, there are still often very real constraints. Few of us have all the resources we would like. But sometimes constraints can push us to do things in different ways, which ends up being a good thing. When Marissa Mayer was a vice president at Google, she purposely imposed constraints on the teams—for example, introducing limits to the size, speed, or richness of a product—because it increased their creativity.7 “Creativity loves constraints, but they must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible,” she explained.8
Likewise, David Heinemeier Hansson says that “constraints are your friends … constraints force you to do way less and different than your competition…. The fact is, when you restrict yourself, when you put up constraints for yourself, when you say … as I had to do when we were building Basecamp, ‘I’m going to work ten hours a week,’ you have no choice but to underdo your competition. You are not going to out-effort Microsoft or Google.”9 What Hansson discovered was that his constraint turned out to be an asset. “The number one feedback we have … is that ‘We love how simple your product is. We love how easy it is to get started.’ … We love all the things that come from doing less.”
Consider an even more extreme scenario of constraint: prison. Beverly Parenti, cofounder of Last Mile, an organization dedicated to teaching coding skills to inmates, believes that “constraints equal fuel.” Parenti faced innumerable constraints in creating Last Mile, from lack of internet access in prisons to some inmates’ limited education. But she believes that constraint
causes one to think deeply about the problem, to be open to ideas that you may never have thought of when you had such an abundance of resources. It makes you try harder and harder…. For me personally I found that learning how to work within the constraints and learning how to navigate in a very controlled environment made me a better leader, a better listener, and made me really step back from the way I looked at situations and challenges in my own organization.10
A constraint can force you to think deeper about what you are doing, to discover your commitment to it, and to deliver it with greater inspiration. Despite being so poor that he couldn’t afford canvases, part of what helped artist Jean-Michel Basquiat make his mark was his willingness to use whatever was at hand: postcards, discarded doors, windows, and even scraps of foam rubber. Ultimately, these constraints informed the subjects that brought attention to his work: the dichotomies of race, class, society, and wealth.
The unexpected benefits of overlooked abundance and constraints don’t always negate the need for tried-and-true methods or requirements. Sometimes we have to pay our dues, such as by taking the time to pursue a certification or degree to establish credibility for certain careers. But even then, we should probably challenge the idea that there is only one safe route. Look hard at the resources you have, and when a lack of resources is your reality, don’t forget—the constraint may be the door into possibility.
Reflection and Practice
Reimagining resources has some overlap with chapter 4, about adjacent possibles, since it is about seeing the overlooked possibilities. In this case, though, we focus more narrowly on seeing the unrecognized opportunities hidden by abundance. But “resources” can mean many things, including tasks, skills, locations, people, and so on. The table below asks specific questions to help you explore those resources and gives some examples.