Working with What You’ve Got: A Guide to Bricolage Thinking
- Danil
- Oct 22
- 6 min read
Try “stretching” a fancy framework over whatever you’ve actually got. It’s a challenge.
For example, it’s kinda hard to apply and integrate service-design principles in a two-person team whose work looks less like methodically building a perfect fire pit — complete with all the tools for sparking, sustaining, and scaling it — and more like snatching hot coals bare-handed just to carry a spark somewhere, anywhere.
Okay, fair: the metaphor is… not perfect. But we’re assembling from what’s at hand (my writing skill, for example!)… and that’s exactly what bricolage is.
Don’t wait for perfect. Make it work with what you’ve got.
A short history of bricolage
The idea of bricolage was first introduced by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (who also, by the way, developed the theory of “incest” as a way to explain the origins of law and the state 😅 ) in his book The Savage Mind (1966).
He described bricolage as “making do with what’s at hand” or more broadly, “creating from available means.” In his view, the bricoleur (I love this beautifully odd anthropological language!) stands in contrast to the engineer: instead of following a strict plan, the bricoleur improvises, reinterprets, and combines whatever materials are already there. This idea became a foundation for many later theories of creativity, innovation, and organizational adaptability.
Almost forty years later, Baker and Nelson brought the concept into the fields of entrepreneurship and management, defining entrepreneurial bricolage as “making do by combining resources at hand to solve new problems and seize opportunities.”
Their work turned bricolage from an anthropological metaphor into a practical approach to innovation under constraints.
The authors point out that bricolage is not just a type of behavior or resource integration.
It’s a mindset, a way of thinking and engaging with a situation.
Word origin
The word bricolage comes from French and originally meant “to tinker” or “to make things out of what’s available.” Over time, it came to describe the creative act of building something new from diverse, pre-existing pieces.
What does it mean in practice for project management?
On the surface, it sounds obvious: when you have nothing, you work with what you’ve got. But there’s a difference between holding things together with sticks and string out of desperation and treating it as a management principle.
In my view, bricolage is the act of combining and reinterpreting the resources you already have to create new opportunities, even when external or formal resources are missing.
I like to think of bricolage as the creative side of management, ‘cause management isn’t always about control, clear goals, or perfect strategies. It’s also about recognizing that sometimes you can’t define a goal, you can’t design a perfect plan, and you definitely can’t control everything.
Bricolage as a mindset is about working with what you have instead of waiting for the ideal moment, endless resources, or the “perfect” person.
And, of course, bricolage is a kind of iterative management: it comes with feedback, mistakes, learning, new attempts, growth, and failure.
It isn’t a reaction to scarcity. it’s a mindset of resourcefulness.
What Bricolage Is Made Of: The Who–When–How–What Framework
WHO — The Bricoleur
The bricoleur is the person (or team) who practices bricolage.
Research highlights three main traits:
A resourcefulness mindset: the ability to see opportunities rather than just limitations.
Refusal to be constrained: the bricoleur doesn’t take “impossible” as an answer.
Team diversity and shared vision: the more diverse the experience and expertise, the richer the combinations of ideas and solutions.
The Bricoleur knows how to get others on board, works well with people, builds connections — and turns them into action.
In other words, a bricoleur isn’t just someone who “makes do,” but rather an initiator and a connector.
WHEN — When Bricolage Happens
Bricolage appears when:
resources or support are missing (so… basically, most of the time);
the situation is uncertain: a crisis, a pandemic, a war, weak institutions, or a startup with no funding.
When resources are plenty, people usually take the “engineering” approach: they buy, plan, and build. When resources are scarce, they act like bricoleurs, combining, improvising, and rethinking what they already have.
HOW — How Bricolage Works
The main principles are:
Recombining resources: connecting what you already have in new ways for unexpected purposes.
Improvisation: design and action happen at the same time. Don’t wait. Try, see what happens, adjust, and try again.
Networks and connections: a bricoleur never works alone. They turn relationships, contacts, and communities into active resources.
WHAT — What Bricolage Leads To
The outcomes of bricolage show up on different levels:
Innovation. New products, services, and business models.
Competitive advantage. Especially for small or early-stage teams.
Growth and adaptability. The ability to adjust to a changing market.
Social impact. Especially for social enterprises that create value within their communities through bricolage.
Research even shows that “too much bricolage”( too much experimenting and improvising) doesn’t hurt innovation.
Principles of Bricolage: An Extended List
Alright, let’s try to outline the key principles behind this approach and mindset.
1. Try with what you have
Start with what you already have, don’t wait for perfect conditions.
Focus not on what’s missing, but on how to recombine what’s already there: people, tools, partners, knowledge.
Commit to “resource-first planning”: ask not “what do we need to make this work?” but “what can we make with what we have?”
Do a quick “means inventory”: who’s on board, what they can do, which channels, data, relationships, and tools you already have.
Try “asset remix sessions” — team moments to explore unexpected combinations of existing assets.
2. Iterate, don’t architect
Don’t design the perfect system. Build it through iterations (a friendly nod to service design!).
Bricolage follows an experimental logic: try, adjust, and reconnect things in new ways.
3. Reframe constraints as creative triggers
Constraints are not obstacles; they’re sources of ideas. This is purely about mindset.
For example, in team meetings, talk not about “risks and blockers,” but about what a constraint might be telling you, or forcing you to rethink.
4. Story as structure
This one is the strangest and maybe the most interesting.
You’ve got people with different skills and experiences, some tools, an idea, and a basic level of trust (which matters a lot) within the team. These are your means.
When the team tells itself a story — why we’re doing this, where we’re going, what matters right now — these scattered pieces start to form a system. They become resources because they gain meaning and direction.
What does it do?
Creates a connection. The story helps the team see how the pieces fit together.
Builds trust. A shared story reduces uncertainty and keeps everyone aligned.
Reframes constraints. The story turns failures or limitations into part of the journey, not a dead end.
How to use it in practice:
Replace your usual status updates with short “narrative check-ins.”
Each team member shares not just what they did, but what part of the story it moved forward.
Questions you can ask:
What changed in our story this week?
What’s driving the project right now?
Do we have a new “chapter” or a turning point?
This turns reporting into shared sense-making and the project into a living story the team builds together.
And yes, it might sound a bit naive. But when you’re doing something important with limited resources, a small storytelling experiment like this is an investment of time you can afford, isn’t it?
5. Act first, then rationalize
Act first and make sense of it later.
The entrepreneur doesn’t wait for certainty; they act and shape the future as they go.
In project management, it means letting go of unnecessary bureaucracy in favor of speed and learning.
Make small bets: small actions with clear learning potential, even if they don’t bring results right away.
6. The goal is resilience.
Bricolage isn’t about growth at any cost, but about sustainable development, strengthening local connections, and making the most of what’s already there.
And success shouldn’t be measured only by KPIs (they still matter!) but also by how the project has built skills, relationships, trust, or a stronger shared identity within the team.
7. Resourcefulness as culture
Be resourceful. Not just when things go wrong, but always. Build a culture of resourcefulness.
Create ways for the team (and partners) to exchange experience and ideas, new solutions, old insights, “workarounds”, and lessons learned along the way.
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