Smallness
I’ve been thinking about the idea of ‘smallness’ recently.
Lauren Currie, founder of UPFRONT posted an update on LinkedIn about how in the early days of UPFRONT she “did everything that didn’t scale.” This included things like creating conference badges by hand for workshops — “I literally painted a red soapbox and dragged it from event to event.”
I was particularly struck by one on the comments on the post, by Sarah Longfield: “Scaling is so wrapped up in the capitalist need for growth. Things can grow and thrive whist staying beautifully small. The heart behind a handmade badge is priceless.”
I really love this framing and wanted to build on it.
I think it’s possible to grow an organisation significantly while staying beautifully small. But it’s a mindset and something that has to be done deliberately.
I’ve tried to capture a few more ideas and thoughts about what I think this means.
Fingerprints
Smallness is how we leave our fingerprints. It’s not something other people will always see, but they should always be there.
However an organisation grows people can still keep using their hands. The danger with large organisations is that everything can become someone else’s job or responsibility.
Smallness is a willingness to hold what’s within our reach. It’s also being deliberate in how we hand things to other people or organisations. It’s networked responsibility.
Big is best built from small
Smallness is the best place to start and to build from.
I’ve been reading the excellent book How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerd and Dan Gardener. One of the key points they make is that big things are really collections of smaller things: “[you] make a small cake, then another, then another, then stack them together [and] that’s all there really is to even the most towering wedding cakes.”
This is the same with culture. It’s what I call collective, small, actions, or how the values that underpin how everyone turns up at work start to become real.
The idea of ‘handmade’ can be seen through working in the open. This is how different voices and ideas are seen and heard as organisations grow. It’s the opposite of becoming a single large corporate voice. Instead, an organisation can grow as a combination of lots of ideas and conversations being shared.
More and less
Smallness is about how we work.
Any attempt at transformation has to be small in how it initially acts to eventually achieve something significant at scale.
There’s smallness in autonomous and minimal viable teams. This is how people learn to best hold onto things collaboratively.
The best way to manage risk and assumptions work is through making small bets, starting small and learning. We can plan by making things and make great use of handmade artefacts.
Smallness is also why paper, pens, post-it notes and spreadsheets make these approaches to working accessible to everyone.
A thousand small moments
Smallness is all the moments that make progress possible.
These are the connections we make with each other, the homemade stickers we share, and the whispers of encouragement that hold people in teams closely together.
This isn’t something we can automate, but patterns we can look to replicate. It’s managing things with care, no matter how big an organisation becomes, or how quickly it grows.
Smallness can be every individual compass
Smallness is what orientates us around the things that grab our curiosity. The things that get hold of our hearts, that make us excited.
These are the things we care about sharing, exploring and building on together. They make organisations better, creating new opportunities and momentum.
In summary, it can all stay handmade in our heads and hearts. Regardless of the size or stage of your organisation, we can hold onto smallness.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.