Main idea

When opening a workspace on a subject costs little, you open plenty of them: product opportunities, explorations, intelligence gathering. Most will never become a feature. In the classic sense of the word, they will have served no purpose.

They are not isolated, though. An exploration of industrial maintenance habits feeds a reflection on asset management; a survey of SaaS pricing models sheds light on an opportunity to monetise a module. Three subjects opened separately converge one day on a fourth, which would never have been as rich without them. The value of an abandoned subject is therefore not read on its own balance sheet: it is read elsewhere, in what it made possible.

This changes what you cultivate. You no longer work in "one idea → one deliverable" mode, where each exploration has to justify itself by its output. You maintain a set of subjects that fertilise one another, and the day a product decision has to be made, the soil is already there.

Why it matters

This takes the legitimacy away from the criterion that kills explorations: asking what a subject is going to lead to before opening it. The return on a portfolio of contexts is not measured subject by subject, and demanding that amounts to keeping only what you already knew the conclusion to.

It also gives the real condition for this mechanism: the subjects have to stay accessible and open to being brought together. A context abandoned in a space nobody reopens has fertilised no one.

Nuances and limits

The argument is convenient and easily turns into an excuse: it justifies any amount of scattering, since anything might always serve one day. It does not say how many open subjects one person can actually hold.

And fertilisation is in no way automatic: it assumes someone remembers the neighbouring subject at the right moment, or that some mechanism reminds them of it.

Open questions

• When should a context be closed, given that its possible value lies precisely in a use you did not foresee?