In a previous article on the difference between experience and knowledge in the agricultural world, I reflected on the virtues of professional experience — specifically how, through imitation, we manage to replicate the behavioural patterns of what actually works.
I also explored how, in a sector with as many particularities as fresh produce, this shared professional heritage generates an intrinsic value of its own. It solidifies the business around practices and behaviours that function reliably, and that frequently defy those theoretical teachings of microeconomics and econometrics that some of us studied profusely — only to find ourselves needing to set them aside in professional practice.
For those of us who grew up in the agricultural world and then had the opportunity to go to university, this paradox has been a painful one. I arrived at university convinced that our sector was rather basic, that it was largely populated by people without formal education, and that this was one of the key factors holding it back.
After many years of study, the time came to put everything into practice. And very quickly I realised that my academic credentials were not going to take me very far. I was better off starting to pay close attention to what the people around me were doing — however unsophisticated they might have seemed.
I suppose this epiphany is like that moment in life when you discover that your grandmother was right about almost everything. That accumulated popular wisdom which our elders carry — passed down through oral tradition and lived experience — and which we young people so cheerfully dismiss because we are, of course, the clever ones.
Fortunately, youthful arrogance tends to be short-lived. The herding effect is well-documented: as social and gregarious creatures, we are hardwired toward imitative behaviour. We end up copying those who remain standing — professionally and otherwise — and in doing so, we absorb the habits and practices of the survivors.
So far, so good. But the herding effect also has a dark side. This is something that both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche warned us about — the former in relation to the crowd and the mass, the latter regarding herd morality and instinct.
Allow me to illustrate it with one of the many memorable lines from the economist Thomas Sowell: “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.”
This concerns me deeply. I am professionally committed to facilitating change and constantly searching for elements of advancement and improvement in the business. But I am also acutely aware that the primary source of valid information is the established, successful practices already embedded in the sector.
To put it in the language of our own professional heritage: “in this business, experiments are done with soda water.” In other words, don’t even think about changing anything until you know exactly what you are doing and have thought through the first, second, and third-order consequences.
Returning to Sowell’s quote: a colleague of mine describes this tendency to swap things that work for things that merely sound good as the SRTM Strategy — Sounds Right To Me. It’s a concept that, if you search for it online, has spawned a remarkable number of memes.
And it is a risk that has become almost ubiquitous. Whether we’re talking about sustainability, product, packaging, or any other significant dimension of our business — there is currently a profusion of SRTM ideas arriving faster than we can evaluate them. Some get implemented, triggering a cascade of imitation that destroys value.
Many of these ideas are enthusiastically celebrated and promoted from positions of power and influence. We encounter them in the press, in grandiloquent political declarations, in European policy documents, in sectoral debates — and even we, the professionals of the sector, allow ourselves to be dazzled by the beauty of a lovely idea.
This is not a plea against change. Not at all. This sector is pure change; it requires change as a permanent engine of advancement. The fresh produce business is extraordinarily dynamic, and change is an inherent part of its culture.
The point of this article is rather different. The top-down logic of societal dynamics that imposes change from above needs to be counterbalanced by an experimental, bottom-up approach to change management — one that allows us to pursue achievable objectives without destroying value or placing an entire sector at risk.
Think of it like the scientific method applied to business: formulate a hypothesis, test it at small scale with controlled risk, evaluate results before scaling. The opposite of SRTM is not conservatism — it is rigour.
And remember the industry maxim: experiments are done with soda water.
