During my elementary and middle school years, there were a few summers, when I got to experience picking fruit off trees during long weeks of summer holidays.
This seems like forever ago and my memory is fuzzy. When I think of it, I think of long summer days, ice cream and sunshine; unscheduled free time, being out-and-about from mid-morning until late – and, yes, on some days, spending hours collecting fruit – cherries, apples, plums, and more.
When you are small, you cannot reach very high. So you pick ripe fruit off the ground and you stretch up to the branches for whatever you can reach. The older kids and the grownups have the physical advantage, casually picking what you cannot even touch.
It is all relative, of course. In later years you might experience being in their shoes and smaller kids might look up to you, with a measure of envy, as you now reach a little higher.
When you are picking fruit as a child, your experience of low-hanging fruit is visceral. It is those fruit that are within easy reach. You don’t have to ask one of the bigger kids for help. No need to climb a ladder either.
Context matters a lot. Whether a fruit is hanging low is of course a matter of perspective. As such it depends on the fruit, in relation to you.
Strawberries and blueberries grow on bushes, close to the ground. Speaking of low-hanging fruit there does not make much sense, since all those berries are almost necessarily so.
When we use the term, we usually think of fruit on trees instead. There the distinction and relationship matters more, so how high up in the tree the fruit is actually positioned. Moreover, where is it in relation to the person? A fruit that seems within reach for you, might be quite outside the reach for me – or vice versa, depending on our respective heights.
There is typically only a single type of fruit on any given tree. You want to pick those that are ripe or nearly ripe, but you do not otherwise need to do much to distinguish one fruit from the others.
As an expression, low-hanging fruit has made it into the world of corporate jargon. Whether in the realm of product development, software engineering and initiatives generally – those tasks or projects that are considered low-hanging fruit are the ones that appear readily doable, within easy reach.
What counts as low-hanging fruit for one professional, team, or organization may not count as such for another. Of course, here the fruit comes in many different shapes and sizes, so a wide variety of different things may be within easy reach.
Within organizations, reach is shaped by structure. Factors such as role, authority, training, experience, existing infrastructure, access to information and permission to act all determine what appears close at hand.
In that sense, calling something low-hanging fruit inside an organization often says a lot about where one is standing as well as about the work itself. Low-hanging fruit look different for a fast-moving tech startup than it does for a publicly trading enterprise company than it does for a government agency.
As a metaphor outside the realm of actually picking fruit off a tree, low-hanging fruit is descriptive. Having the quality of being within reach is what makes this what it is. That is useful: It distinguishes from those that are further away.
Having reminded us of what it is, it is likewise important to be explicit about what it is not, i.e. what we are not making a statement about.
- Value. The thing may be valuable. It may not be. Its value might even be negative.
- Importance. It could be important and it might not be.
- Usefulness. Just because something appears close does not mean it is useful. On the other hand, it could well be that it is.
Critically, using the term low-hanging fruit, i.e. referring to something being within reach, should be understood as an indicator of distance between here and there, from a specific perspective in a given context. It should not be mistaken as a value judgment otherwise.
Low hanging fruit is one that is within reach. Actually reaching for it may or may not be a good idea.