Is your low-hanging fruit ripe or rotten?

Hey Reader,

Why do we do the things we do? It’s one of the central questions of my work. When I see a client’s strategic plan, for example, what interests me most at first is not what the goals and objectives are, but why they were chosen.

When an organization wants to roll out a new tech tool internally, launch a product or initiative, or go through a rebrand, before we can design an implementation strategy, we have to uncover the why first. Of all the things to do, why this? Of all the times to do it, why now?

After I do a little digging, one of the most common answers I hear is that the thing the organization has decided to do (or at least what they think they must do first to achieve it), was chosen because it was low-hanging fruit.

What is low-hanging fruit?

Low-hanging fruit is “the obvious or easy thing that can be most readily done or dealt with in achieving success or making progress toward an objective” (Merriam-Webster).

(While Merriam-Webster certainly captures the idea, the definition in Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage made me chuckle: “Sometimes ridiculed as one of the more overripe outgrowths of business and management speak, this phrase is not particularly common outside those spheres. It can be defended as an exceptionally vivid, immediately graspable metaphor, whose freshness has not yet withered on the vine. That said, it is still likely to figure high on many people’s list of rancid management bovine scatology, and what precisely it means is often rather vague.”)

What’s wrong with going for low-hanging fruit?

The main issue with low-hanging fruit is that folks fixate on the concept in the first half of the Merriam-Webster definition and disregard the second. They do “the obvious or easy thing that can be most readily done or dealt with” and forget all about “in achieving success or making progress toward an objective.”

Don’t conflate doing something easy with deciding to do something easy

The decision to go after low-hanging fruit should be part of your overall strategy, which means you should be able to clearly articulate why you are going after low-hanging fruit, how it fits into the big picture, and what you are going to do next.

If you can’t explain your decision-making, that means it’s too early to do anything. Otherwise, how would you know whether picking low-hanging fruit is preventing you from doing something more meaningful? That doesn’t mean the only other option is climbing to the top of the tree. Maybe it’s more urgent to milk the cow. Or more impactful to repair the barn roof. Maybe if you don’t jar food for the winter, none of this matters anyway.

This got very homesteader very quickly, but you get the gist. If you go for the low-hanging fruit, the “why” can’t just be that it’s easy. If you can’t explain how the low-hanging fruit will help you achieve success or make progress to your objective, it’s not the right call.

The curse of the quick win

Ah, the quick win. Whether it’s to secure funding, sway stakeholders, provide evidence for a hypothesis, or boost morale, people tend to like a quick win. But the problem with quick wins is that once you go for low-hanging fruit, it can be hard to stop.

The intention is typically to get a quick win and then move onto the hard stuff. However, it doesn’t always look good to get a quick and easy win and then…what…take longer to do the next thing? Struggle? No, things are supposed to get easier, faster, more efficient. So what happens? You go for the next quick win.

To fill your fruit basket, you might start scooping fallen fruit right up off the ground, bruises and worms and all. You might make excuses for the quality, because now the goal has become “to secure another quick win” and the why is “because we have to keep winning.” And what happens? You end up with a big. old basket of rotten fruit that nobody even wants.

So this brings us to the question: to pick low or not to pick low?

Is low-hanging fruit always bad?

No. What’s bad are poorly-made decisions to go for low-hanging fruit. Embrace the full definition of the phrase. Do the obvious or easy things that can be most readily done or dealt with in achieving success or making progress toward an objective.

What’s your goal? The purpose? The future state? The objective? The ideal outcome? Will the low-hanging fruit meaningfully contribute to that? There's nothing wrong with ripe, delicious low-hanging fruit. It can sustain you. You can even live off of it if you like. If you know the type of life you'd like to live.

Talk soon,

Caitlin

Caitlin Harper
Founder & Principal Strategist, Commcoterie

A few words about THE STATE OF THE WORLD

As a child, I clipped and kept articles about the repression, discrimination, displacement, and resulting humanitarian crisis of the Albanian Kosovars during the war in Kosovo in the late 90s. I would bring the articles to my dad in the evenings, asking him how it was possible that people could do this to other people. "Who will help?" I wanted to know. "Who will stop this?"

Campaigns of terror are designed to separate, degrade, and destroy. And for those of us watching from afar, the onslaught is meant to immobilize us. To numb us into inaction. Like many folks, I stumbled into 2026 already numb from years (a lifetime) of reading about and watching death and destruction around the world.

In middle school in the 90s, there wasn't much I could do. In the years since then, I have done much as an activist and community member, taking action on a number of topics. But I can do more. I must. I have power, yet it says something about the depth and breadth of the news we are exposed to every day that I feel almost too numb to use it.

Now, decades after I clipped those photos of refugees, which I kept stacked in a neat pile in my closet, I know the answer to my question: I must help. And you. Not as individuals. As a collective. As I read this Minnesota Under Siege Timeline earlier this week, I finally felt my numbness fade. I felt the fire inside me return.

I won't just watch. I will help. Will you? Together?

From Commcoterie's Coterie

coterie: co`te*rie" (k?`te-r?"), n. A set or circle of persons who meet familiarly, as for social, literary, or other purposes; a clique

Write & Rise, Emily Crookston's Newsletter for Authorpreneurs

As an aspiring authorpreneur (yes, I've written a novel, but I'd love to write a book about how values-driven leaders can guide their organizations through change!), I've been following Emily for a while.

Write & Rise is her free weekly newsletter for experts, thought leaders, and business owners who are ready to write a book that sells.

If you want to break free from overthinking and get your Big Ideas onto the page, you don't want to miss it. I'll help you move from "someday I'll write a book" to becoming the recognized authority in your space—one actionable insight at a time.