A Leader’s Garden, Redux
AI is making everything feel faster and less certain. So leaders are reaching for control.
It doesn't work. It never did.
I wrote about this in 2014. The thinking still holds. The writing needed work. Here's the version I'd publish today.
Most leaders think they're running a machine. They're not. They're tending a garden.
The machine metaphor is seductive. It implies control, predictability, levers you can pull. But organizations aren't machines. They're ecosystems: alive, interdependent, and far too complex to control. The best you can do is understand the underlying patterns and help it thrive.
That shift changes everything about how you lead.
Thriving organizations share a few fundamental properties. They're networks, not hierarchies. The people in them have diverse motivations. They share a genuine sense of purpose. They pay attention to what's happening around them. And they're held together by feedback.
You're working with a network, not a hierarchy.
When you picture your organization, what do you see? An org chart? If so, you're missing most of what actually matters. The real structure is a web of relationships, some formal, most not. The person who shapes culture most isn't always the one with the biggest title. Influence doesn't track authority as cleanly as we'd like to believe.
You can't control that network. But if you understand it, you can work with it.
People don't all want the same thing.
Some people are motivated by the mission. Some by their career. Some by fear. Some by factors that have nothing to do with work at all. That's not a problem to fix. It's a reality to understand.
When leaders pretend everyone's motivated the same way, they end up confused by behavior that's entirely predictable if you'd just looked closer. Understanding diverse motivations doesn't mean tolerating misalignment. It means knowing what you're actually working with.
Shared purpose is the real foundation.
Can anyone in your organization articulate what you're trying to do and why? Not recite it, but actually feel it? Organizations that hold together under pressure have a shared language around values and mission. It gets told in stories, not just stated in slides.
That kind of shared understanding doesn't happen by accident. It gets tended.
Heedful teams notice things.
They catch signals early. When something goes wrong, they don't wait for someone to escalate it. They see it, name it, and move. That's not a personality trait. It's a product of what gets surfaced, what gets ignored, and what people feel safe saying out loud.
All of it runs on feedback.
The master gardener doesn't control the ecosystem. They design conditions for it to work the way it naturally wants to. They know what each element needs, and they create the structures that let those needs get met.
Leaders do the same thing. The standup. The retrospective. The 1-on-1. The conversation someone had in the hallway that no one scheduled. All of it is feedback, moving through the system, telling people what's working and what isn't.
You're not in control. You never were. But the systems and patterns you design, and the ones you allow to atrophy, shape everything.
That's the job.
Photo: Aurelien Guichard / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
