Peanut Butter Is the Answer

“photography of brown nuts” by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

Peanuts are a wonder food. So much so that peanut oil was considered a treatment for polio in the 1930s. George Washington Carver was a brilliant man who had many ideas and inventions that were recognized around peanuts, yet he performed many studies around the cultivation of plants and botany — peanuts just happen to be the association forever linked to his name. Carver created more than one hundred ways to use peanuts, however, peanut butter was not one of them. One important fact of Carver’s accomplishments was to help introduce the use of peanut plantings as a great farming crop to help fight soil depletion from cotton and tobacco farming methods.

In honor of George Washington Carver, we need to integrate peanuts, even peanut butter, into our work whenever possible. Let’s investigate a couple of ways we can use peanuts in business today — aside from pay (mwuah mwuah — too punny).

The simplest version of peanut use is to use peanut butter in budgeting and project management applications. Just think of how one would apply peanut butter on a slice of bread or an apple slice. Spoon out a dollop and spread it evenly over the surface. This method can be used in business.

It may be necessary for a number or value to be used in estimations, budgeting, or project management. Applying a lump number without peanut-butter-spreading across multiple days, weeks or months makes it hard to manage and justify. Spreading the value evenly is more realistic than a giant number plopped on January 5th. Averaging this value across the calendar adds an appropriate, yet manageable weight to the project or estimates to aid in confidence. Although it is not a significantly accurate value, it provides value and visibility on the particular action when required.

Carver argued for the use of peanut crops as a method for soil remediation — adding nitrogen back to the soil to help keep it fertile and able to be used for additional bountiful crops. Using peanut butter in brainstorming sessions helps generate bountiful ideas. Depending on how your brainstorming sessions go, if you are using Rule Number 6 as part of your brainstorming sessions, then you must be applying peanut butter liberally.

Remember that with brainstorming sessions, all ideas from the sessions should be valued and considered in the development of the new solution. Brainstorming helps create additional thoughts — the chemistry generated and building of ideas from one another’s prompts leads to the generation of a solution to the problem you are brainstorming. Yet, during a brainstorming session, no matter how awesome participation has been, you will run into a lull in the idea generation process — that is when “peanut butter” (and maybe even peanut by-products) should be presented to cultivate the generation of new ideas. By introducing peanut butter, presenting the concept on the board as a brainstorm idea people participating are usually taken aback.

What the hell? Is he off his rocker?

Using peanut butter as a segue leads to a new way of thinking, leading to conceptualizing ideas completely outside the filter of experience and the project specifics that you are working. Using peanut butter will revive the participants to get them thinking of different concepts rather than the groupthink ruts that we fall into when we believe we have exhausted all of our ideas going to brainstorm sessions.

Peanuts are a wonderful food-remember they provide protein, fats, and sugars and are a great energy food (and can cause anaphylactic shock depending on your audience).

Rule #6.

Go forth and be brilliant.