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Cultivated is a publisher, studio, teaching and advisory practice helping leaders and teams make work better. Turning good ideas into lasting value. And making the work worth being part of.
Welcome to Cultivated
Cultivated is a publisher and studio exploring the things that make work worthwhile.
We publish, teach and advise around ideas, observations and interesting ways of seeing work, giving them form through writing, books, photographs, films, conversations, workshops and whatever else seems appropriate.
Always exploring whether an idea becomes the value it could – and whether the work of getting there is any good to be part of.
Underneath all of it is a simple practice:
Learning to see what's really going on.
Because before you can make something better, you usually have to see it properly.
Have a wander.
Find your way in
You don't need to understand all of Cultivated before you start. There is quite a lot in here.
Just pick the thing that sounds most like what you're looking for.
I want to read something
Writing
More than 200 essays, observations and field notes about work, ideas, attention, communication, creativity and how to turn ideas into something valuable in work.
Some are practical. Some are philosophical. Some begin with a notebook, a shop, a bad meeting or something I noticed while helping a client release better value.
I want to learn something
Field Guides & Courses
Field Guides, books and practical courses for turning ideas into value, communicating better, taking a day off, landing a talk, running a workshop and doing more meaningful work.
Short enough to actually finish. Practical enough to use. Interesting enough that they don't feel like a chore, or homework.
Explore Field Guides & Courses →
I have something I'm wrestling with
Office Hours
One hour. One work problem. A fresh pair of eyes.
Bring an idea, a piece of work, a difficult conversation, a presentation, a project, a decision – or simply something that isn't quite working.
We'll spend an hour looking at it properly.
No six-week programme. No homework. No coaching workbook.
Just you, me and the thing.
£180 · 60 minutes · Online
I don't have a magic answer for every problem. What I do have is a lot of experience looking at complicated things from different angles.
That's what you're buying: an hour of attention, experience and another pair of eyes.
I want to bring this into my organisation
Talks
Ideas worth putting in a room. Talks about attention, ideas, communication, work and what happens between having a good idea and making it useful.
Workshops
A little less sitting and more putting information into action. Always practical, always making something, always useful the following day.
Workshops for teams who want to make something clearer, better or more useful – from ideas and communication to talks, collaboration, creative constraints and the way work actually gets done.
Advisory
Sometimes you don't need a programme. You need another mind in the room.
Selective advisory work for people dealing with something interesting, exciting and complicated: a change, an idea, a problem, a decision or a piece of work that needs looking at from a different angle.
I want to spend more time here
The Studio
A membership for curious people who want to make work better.
The Studio is where the wider Cultivated practice comes together.
Members get access to the Department of Interesting Things letter, a growing library of essays, Field Guides, books, seminars, films, conversations and experiments – alongside new work as it is made.
It's less like a content subscription and more like having a little independent ideas publisher in your pocket. It also helps to keep the vast library of other work free.
£5 a month · £50 a year
The question underneath it all
Cultivated began with a couple of questions that have proved rather difficult to let go of, because once you start asking them, and learning to see, it changes the way you look at work:
Whether an idea becomes the value it should and what happens between those two things.
And whether it's any good to be part of the work that gets it there.
An idea can be clever and still go nowhere. A strategy can be perfectly sensible with nice fonts and still make people's lives worse. A project can deliver exactly what it promised and still have no value associated with it. A business could be achieving great business results and be a miserable place to work.
So I'm interested in both sides of the equation:
Does the idea become the value it should?
And:
Is the work of getting there any good to be part of?
That tension sits underneath almost everything I make.
Learning to see
Before changing something, I like to look at it.
Properly.
Not just at the thing itself, but at the climate around it. The assumptions. The people. The language. The incentives. The room. The history. The bits nobody thought were worth mentioning. The way people work together. The environment that supports personal growth or doesn't.
Sometimes the answer is obvious once you can see the situation clearly. Sometimes the situation changes because you looked at it differently.
And sometimes you discover that you were solving an entirely different problem.
That's the work I'm interested in.
Mottainai
There's a Japanese word, mottainai, which is often translated as something like what a waste.
But it carries more than that.
It suggests that things have value which shouldn't be casually squandered – materials, resources, time, effort, potential.
I like it as a way of thinking about work.
People spend an enormous part of their lives working. Ideas take time and effort to make. Teams spend years learning how to do things.
People bring their finite human resources of time, energy and attention. So perhaps we should be a little more careful about how that gets spent. Because, unlike money, which we can generate more of – we can never reclaim our time, energy and attention.
That's one of the reasons Cultivated exists.
Mottainai is the closest I have to a manifesto. Not just avoiding waste. Rather, realising the potential.
A little about Rob
I'm Rob Lambert.
I've spent more than twenty years working in business. I've been a journalist and filmmaker, a Vice President of Engineering, a Vice President of HR, Business Agility leader, consultant, writer, teacher and independent advisor.
I've helped build companies, change how large organisations work, communicate difficult ideas and turn good intentions into things people can actually use.
These days, I'm less interested in the job title and more interested in helping good ideas become something valuable, and ensuring the work of getting them there is worth being part of.
Cultivated is where that work lives.
I write. I teach. I make things. I take photographs. I run workshops and give talks. I talk to interesting people.
And often someone brings me a problem and we spend an hour figuring out what's really going on.
If you only do three things
Read something.
Start with the writing.
Learn something.
Have a look through the Field Guides & Courses.
Bring something.
If you've got a problem, idea or piece of work you'd like another pair of eyes on, try Office Hours.
Take your pick
You don't need to follow a particular path. There isn't a programme to complete or a funnel to work your way through.
You can read something and disappear for six months.
You can buy a book. You can join the Studio. You can bring me a problem. You can book a workshop for 40 people.
Or you can simply wander around and see what catches your eye.
Cultivated is a place for ideas worth playing with — and work worth making better.
Have a wander. If something here turns out to be useful, that's the whole idea.
— Rob
Value beyond profit
Five percent of profit from the books, courses and membership is given each year to Naomi House — the hospice caring for life-limited children and their families. Because every system should create value beyond profit.