Cultivating Business As A Garden
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to This Human Business, a podcast giving voice to the movement of business professionals seeking an alternative to the technologically obsessed machinery of conventional business culture.
There’s nothing that represents the analog side of humanity better than a garden. This episode will concentrate on the articulation of an alternative metaphor for business. What if we thought of a business not as a machine, but as a living garden?
The garden is not an arbitrary choice of a metaphor for human business. We forget this, what with all our TED Talks, blockchains, digital media and derivatives of derivatives, but business was born in a garden.
Thousands of years ago, nomads gathered together in many places around the world and settled down to create the first gardens, which were also the first world’s businesses. The cultural template established in these gardens provided the basic structures for business that are still in use today.
The connections become clear when we think of the horticultural metaphors that are embedded in business language. We cultivate clients, get to the root of our challenges, grow our companies, cut back when a branch gets too large, and look for seed money for startups.
When I spoke with Fateme Banishoeib, a poet of business, she considered the gardening metaphor of investments coming to fruition.
Fateme Banishoeib:
Well, it is almost like a process of maturation. It’s almost like you know when there is a fruit on a on a tree, on a plant. Yes, the fruit is there. It is hanging there but it’s not ready. It’s not ripe.
Jonathan Cook:
In her business metaphor, Fateme suggests, opportunity is perceived as if it is growing on a tree in an orchard. Those in business who seek to understand when the time is right to ask must become as intimately familiar with developing conditions as a gardener is with the growth and changing color of fruit on the tree. Picking the fruit of opportunity too soon or too late can result in a bitter or rotten experience.
Another gardening metaphor comes from Roberta Treno of the Joy Academy: The metaphor of sowing seed in the proper ground.
Roberta Treno:
Our idea is not to go to a company and cultivate joy in there, but bring in people that are from the company, and they’re feeling this need of joy. So it’s kind of when you were speaking about seeds before, and you know better than I do, you plan to see where the earth is not ready, when the ground is not ready. You are throwing away the seed. That seed will never be a plant or a flower or whatever.
You know the strawberries, the strawberries are those seeds you plant and they know how to plant themselves. So the idea is like that. We planted a seed in the people that we knew would be fertile ground to plant the seed, and now they are the ones creating our plans, inviting other people inside and speaking about us.
Jonathan Cook:
Roberta identifies a piece of wisdom that business has inherited from gardeners: The selection of proper context contributes as much to success as effort. Although Roberta and her colleagues specialize in cultivating joy in client corporations, they choose prospective clients who appear to be fertile ground for the seeds of joy that they spread.
Often, businesses understand in the abstract that they need to reform their internal culture, and so they’ll hire consultants who specialize in the reform of corporate culture, but won’t do the groundwork necessary to prepare their organizations for reform. No outside expert can come in and change an organizational culture singlehandedly. They can only guide an organization that’s already trying to change.
It takes a lot more than a seed to make a garden. You can throw as much seed as you want onto a lawn, but it won’t grow into a vegetable garden if you’re not allowed to remove the turf and stop the weekly routine of mowing.
To make a business like a garden requires more than just a couple of small tweaks. It takes the adoption of a comprehensive new metaphor that’s radically different from the metaphor favored by conventional business culture: The metaphor of business as a machine. Chantal Woltring explained the central flaw in this mechanistic model of business, and the opportunity of adopting a more natural alternative.
Chantal Woltring:
We’re coming from an age where everything is being based on the machine metaphor, like leverage and output and input and feedback, and they all come from machines, cybernetics, engineering language. They’ve gotten into business language based the Homo Economicus, being a rational person from Enlightenment times onwards. The Industrial Revolution heightens that idea with putting productivity and efficiency up front. Machines are great for that, but people are not machines.
I think we are moving from this machine-based metaphor idea into an ecology-based metaphor, because any living system, being a human or social system, is basically a complex adaptive system, and over-constraining them basically means getting rid of life in those systems. So that’s why I sort of see that we need to free ourselves from too much urban technical screen environments and get more in touch with nature. It’s amazing the effect of just walking amongst the trees in a forest or on a beach has for so many people. It’s suddenly as if they release attention and the stress that has suddenly gone, and as soon as we’re back in the steel building high rise cities, in our cubicles, in our cars, with our screens, the stress is are back again. So apparently, something’s lacking.
Jonathan Cook:
Chantal brings up the concept of forest bathing, the practice of walking through natural environments for the sake of mental and physical health benefits. Research earlier this year showed that people who live within a few minutes’ walk of spaces dominated by living green plants are ranked higher in terms of mental health than people who live in spaces dominated by human design. Mental health, in turn, is strongly associated with productivity.
So why is it that most corporations keep their employees working inside sterile, modernist buildings, separated from the healthy world outside? Vacations in natural spots are great, but what if people didn’t need to retreat from corporate life in order to enjoy the benefits of a natural environment? What if a corporation itself could become more like the forest we desperately seek?
Peter Coerper, a corporate lawyer who focuses on conflict resolution, imagines what it might be like if corporations could become more like gardens, but then asks an important critical question: What kind of garden would the corporations become?
Peter Coerper:
I could picture business being a garden in certain ways and there are gardens who are like Zen gardens, then there are gardens who are like boringly but nicely laid out, and then there are the wild gardens and I could picture of course myself and one of those and feeling better in one or the other.
Ultimately and what I want on the garden perspective, then ultimately go to, is a garden where the individual feels comforting or comfortable in and my garden is completely different than your garden or his garden or her garden.
Jonathan Cook:
Peter points out something essential: Gardens are diverse, and not just with the plants they grow. Gardening is not a single thing. There are different kinds of gardens for different purposes, and there are many different kinds of gardeners, ranging from those who develop regenerative ecosystems integrating many different plants and animals in a healthy, living system to those who create abstract designs using infertile plants grown in industrial systems, dependent upon heavy doses of synthetic chemicals, including herbicides and pesticides that poison the natural world around them and depend on huge investments of external resources.
A garden isn’t necessarily a restorative environment, for the earth or for the people who visit them. There is a long tradition of gardens that have been created as expressions of wealth and political power, requiring massive amounts of labor just to boost the egos of their owners.
When business reformers talk about the idea of a garden as a different kind of metaphor for business, they’re talking about a particular sort of garden. For one thing, they’re talking about gardens that are welcoming gathering spaces where communities are made. Author and leadership coach Christine Locher, for example, imagines a strawberry field where corporate employees can gather as an alternative to orthodox team building exercises held inside, dependent on design cliches.
Christine Locher:
The schools, for example, are now experimenting with school gardens and teaching children that you know apples don’t grow on Styrofoam in a supermarket, and I think that’s a really good development. I’m sometimes wondering if there might not be room for companies to do something similar. You know, all those fake team development things where it’s like, oh yeah, we’ll do half a day and we’ll do all sorts of interventions that involve Post-Its in different colors in a windowless meeting room, that feels so contrived sometimes, and I’m wondering if a team would just be outside in at lunch break seeing if the strawberries are ready and maybe picking a few, if that might not achieve similar goals in a much much better way.
Jonathan Cook:
Vasco Gaspar, a consultant who specializes in human flourishing, builds on Christine’s ideas, picturing the garden as a setting that models symbiotic relationships between corporate employees.
Vasco Gaspar:
I like the image of the garden, and the garden, and the word that comes to mind is also, I don’t know the correct word. It’s kind of a symbiotic relationship. If you look at nature, nature has these kind of symbiotic relationships. I think the elements are interconnected. Nature has these kind of symbiotic relationships.
I think the elements are interconnected. So, the waste of one is going to be used by the other to produce, and I think we now live in a way that is, it’s not so much a garden, but it’s actually the image that comes to mind is more of a graveyard, with not even grass as you have in some parts of the United States. In Portugal, graveyards are just the stones.
How can we create a business society where, of course some competition is needed, but most of all is, to have this symbiotic relationship between different businesses?
Jonathan Cook:
Roberta Treno develops Vasco’s idea of symbiosis further, pointing out that symbiosis is inherently dependent upon recognizing the power of difference. Instead of having a single idea of a model corporate citizen, a garden-worthy business would accept the different qualities of individual workers, and seek how to bring them together in teams where their differences would support each other, rather than resulting in conflict.
Roberta Treno:
Cultivating means you cannot give the same attention to different plants. A cactus or, I don’t know, a flower, they need complete, completely different attention and people and companies they need completely different attention. The cactus don’t want so much water that the flower wants.
Jonathan Cook:
Garden designers have a phrase that they use to describe this concept: Right plant, right place. The trick is that there’s variety within species as well as difference between species. Gardeners can’t simply follow a simple formula of sun versus shade or dry versus wet. There are huge number of variables that contribute to the successful growth of a community of plants, including their interaction with each other. What’s more, every now and then, an individual plant defies the conventional expectations of its species, and thrives in a spot where it wasn’t supposed to do well.
Christine Locher explains that gardens and businesses alike must deal with the unpredictability of complex interactions.
Christine Locher:
You might plant something and you have a sense of what that’s meant to be turning into. That might or might not work. It might come out in a completely different size, completely different color. One year it might be going well, one year it might not be going well, even though the circumstances are quite similar. You might have an idea as a human: “Oh that flower or that thing should be growing in that spot,” and you know that thing might not like that spot or it might not be the right conditions and so on. So ideally, I would say it’s teamwork.
I think there are a lot of similar aspects. I think in both cases humans have the illusion of control, that they’re the ones who have all the plans who set the objectives, who make the decisions, who who get things started, in the illusion that they’re going to be able to control the outcomes, and what happens in real life might be quite different. It might be a lot better than planned. It might be worse. It might be something different entirely. They might find that you plan one thing and then this tiny little thing that was just sort of growing on the side where you’re not even sure where that came from all of a sudden takes over and turns into something entirely different. I think that’s both through with a garden as well as with a business, and I think humans have this this massive illusion that we get to decide and control everything when at best we are sort of making the initial pointers, and then it’s really, it’s trust. It’s the right circumstances. It’s whimsy.
I think we’re really trying to force feed things into the machine metaphor, and I think if we look closely enough and if we’re actually honest it should be pretty clear what the limitations of that one are, as in we think we’re these really powerful entities that decide all these things and that stuff is perfectly linear, which it really isn’t. I think a garden, it has this mix of teamwork with the outside surroundings. It’s also clear that you can maybe set the right conditions, but there is no guarantee that something is going to turn out the way you’ve intended. There is also the question: What’s a weed and what’s a flower? So, what are things actually good for? Can I just let that grow for a little bit and see what that might turn into? Which might actually be quite interesting which might actually be profitable.
Jonathan Cook:
Mark Lehmann of Global Citizen expands upon Christine’s idea of profitable weeds with the metaphor of the needed bugs of business, the useful pests that perform useful roles in business ecosystems.
Mark Lehmann:
Plants and trees need good soil and, in other words, to feed it. Business needs good ideas that needs good people it needs, you can almost say, the fleshy matter, as in compost. You do need some worms. You do need some bugs, because they will also spread not only pollen but maybe they are spreading disease but at the same time they are doing some good. So, you will have those small bursts that might be doing things which are objectionable but the overall result is most probably it makes things better and highlights certain needs in other organizations. I would say also a very big thing for me is the fact that the most trees and plants go through this phase of either dying or shedding their leaves and then being rejuvenated and reborn. Businesses go through many, many aspects or certain phases. You can almost say they die. An organization is to repivot. They have to learn a new way of making ends meet. They have to learn a new way of doing business. They get reborn. They have another time in the sun. The seasons change. They might go somewhere else. They haven’t lost their leaves in a long time, and good for them.
There’s room in just in the same way as in a garden, there’s room for all sorts of trees and all sorts of plants, and what people think are weeds that are most probably extremely healthful and helpful. There’s room for many types of business in the world.
Jonathan Cook:
As Mark says, there ought to be room for many types of business in the world. Nonetheless, the world of business is dominated by a few big players who gobble up their competitors like a kudzu vine overwhelming a garden plot in the Southern United States.
The diverse ecosystem of businesses that’s the ideal in the permacultural garden model is being replaced with massive business monocultures that achieve immense scale, but at a terrible cost to the landscapes they occupy. Under such coldly efficient development, Roberta Treno explains that we have become estranged from the ground itself. We have been ruthlessly urbanized.
Roberta Treno:
I live in the city, but we have a lot of plants. It’s more my partner who is into this. He loves plants more than I do, but I always had this connection because I come from a village that is kind of small. So everybody had a little piece of soil where to put the strawberries in. My mother used to have a special love for our plants and we kind of grew up with plants. And even if I’m not the one taking care of plants and soil and so on, now I have a partner who loves plants and greens with a garden.
Jonathan Cook:
Given that the garden is the original metaphor for a system of human enterprise, isn’t it odd so many corporate campuses are devoid of them?
Christine Locher:
I think people forget that nature is messy. So, I don’t know how many jobs ago I wanted to bring a plant just to have at my desk, you know, a little flower or a little something. I was told I wasn’t allowed to have it because it had earth in it, and they told me I can bring a plant but only on you know, on those clay bubbles. I don’t know what they’re called, you know, like the hydroculture ones. I wasn’t actually allowed to have a living plant that was sitting in Earth in the building and I didn’t even know what to say. So I didn’t bring a plant in because that just didn’t quite do the same thing.
I definitely wasn’t working in a microchip chip factory or anything. That was just normal, kind of normal health and safety office procedure sort of regulations.
That office did have plants and they were coming from a subscription service, and they would come in and do all the maintenance and stuff, and swap out the the dead bits, so you never saw any, you know, sort of slightly droopy looking plants. There were also always in bloom. It was very sort of Stepfordian and in a way like a Stepford plant.
It made me so sad, and I was working in another office that was very designy, and apparently the fact that there weren’t, the way that the rooms were laid out were part of the protected design. So you weren’t allowed to bring any flowers in, which obviously I ignored because I mean, seriously. So I remember each Monday morning smuggling a single flower past the guy at reception and then sort of half hiding it behind my big screen in case some official person came by.
I wasn’t particularly happy in that office, and I remember what I did to remedy that. I did have a little bit of a garden where I was living at the time, and I also had, I was living on the first floor and I remember very often when I came home from work especially when it wasn’t in the middle of summer, I actually had a big bag of potting soil in my room and I would stick my naked feet into the bag of potting soil just to literally ground myself, because it just felt I don’t know like I needed something.
Jonathan Cook:
Commercial culture, Christine suggests, treats nature like a Stepford wife, to be discarded and replaced as soon as it begins to show the slightest deviation from its idealized form.
The sterile imitation gardens allowed at Christine’s workplace reminded me of a more recent example of what happens when business culture attempts to manage a garden in its own way. For some time now, the MIT Media Lab has been publicizing its work on what it called its “personal food computer”, a closed box within which the MIT Media Lab claimed people would be able to grow vegetables in an optimized way. A computer equipped with a machine learning system would use digital sensors and its razor sharp artificial intelligence to provide exactly the right conditions for young plants to thrive, all without any natural soil or sunlight.
This month, the technology was exposed as an elaborate hoax. People who tried actually using the MIT personal food computer reported that often, the plants inside wouldn’t grow at all, and when they did, the plants were typically weak and sickly. The MIT Media Lab, in order to obtain funding for its personal growth computer technology, had been taking plants grown in natural conditions, delicately removing them from their soil and sunshine, cleaning off the roots, and placing the plants inside the AI gardening machine just in time to be shown off to investors. It was going to be a booming business, the engineers at MIT said, and who wouldn’t want to get in on the ground level of that?
Rather than recognizing plants as the elegant result of hundreds of millions of years of refinement and adaptation, the MIT Media Lab looked at these living things as simple objects that could be easily manipulated. It applied the machine metaphor of conventional business culture to gardening instead of applying the garden metaphor to business. In a mockery of the scientific process, the MIT Media Lab began with the conventional business presumption that anything can be improved just by attaching artificial intelligence to it, rather than conducting honest experiments to judge whether such a hypothesis is justified.
Frighteningly, a similar mindset is at play in corporate human resource departments. What they did to those poor garden plants, digital optimizers are also doing to human beings. Instead of recognizing our adaptive abilities, they think of humans as awkward and dull things that require the refinement that only their technology can provide.
True intelligence works to understand the remarkable abilities of living things, creating new systems that respect life, and give it the conditions it needs to thrive, but without needing to be in control. That’s the approach taken by Francine Stevens, an innovation specialist working in the UK.
Francine Stevens:
My name is Francine Stevens. If people are trying to decipher where my accent is from, I’m from New Zealand originally. I live here in the UK close to London, a little bit out of London, so I have my garden and my trees around me. I work in the field of innovation, which means all sorts of things to different people. Essentially, for me, I work primarily with multinational corporates and businesses.
I’m currently working in an insurance company, and I look at different aspects, like helping the business set the foundation for success, so having the right tools and processes and frameworks to innovate within the business, but also to help from a cultural perspective. You cannot innovate without making people do that. So, how do you do that and take them through change, and also drive a positive culture moving forward? I also look at emerging technologies, and really how businesses can harvest some of those to address some of the challenges that their clients may be facing as well.
I do find parallels of, while I am an amateur gardeners, I find parallels with what I do in business and gardening. For example, you can’t make plants grow. You can nurture them. You can ultimately make sure that they have enough water. You can add nitrogen, you can fertilize. You can optimize them as best as they can, but you can’t make them grow faster than they are able to grow. I think that’s a really nice parallel in business today, because we’re all chasing to find the next growth opportunity, the next unicorn, the next big thing, but ultimately, you can only go as fast as your organization is ready to go.
Have you put the right nutrients in the soil? Are you watering enough? Are you allowing your business to get and build really good roots, just like a plant needs to do before it can really grow on the surface and above the ground? It’s got to have a really good firm base, and some good roots, and I think there are some really good parallels of gardening and business.
I have always had a passion for, I would not call myself an avid gardener, but growing up, from a young child I was gifted pansy plants from my mother, and we always grew up with a vegetable garden in the back yard. So, you always had an appreciation of where things come from, and also that things need to be nurtured and tended to be able to harvest something, whether that be some beautiful flowers, or whether that be fruit or vegetables.
I had, I guess, an interesting experience coming to England from New Zealand, because the soil, the environment is all very different, but I wanted to have a home with a vegetable garden and also some places with trees that I feel I could reconnect, and it’s a way to destress and a way for me to feel mentally happy, being around nature and around gardens. I think the Japanese call it forest bathing, and they see it as something really important in terms of spending with nature to get balance in your life.
Jonathan Cook:
Getting balance in your life might be dismissed as abstract and unnecessary by business managers who seek to squeeze maximum value out of workers by keeping them at work in the office for as long as possible. Francine’s experience in the garden, however, shows that such a tight grip of control is often counterproductive.
Francine Stevens:
I work in a line of innovation, and I think that my gardening approach is very much like an innovation approach. I experiment to see what works and what doesn’t. So, I do do some research, but essentially, over the years, and I don’t think I’ve literally got the right formula, I try out different things in my garden, because I want to be organic and do the right things. So, I will plant out different seeds and see which ones survive, which types of plant species work well in my soil.
I have a great example of an experiment that was probably a little bit unexpected, which is that I love artichokes, and I love eating artichokes, and I so I had been planting out artichoke plants in my garden. They take a long time to grow, to start harvesting the flowers. So, I was very proud. I had these beautiful flowers that were coming along, and one day, I looked at this one plant that was nice and tall and strong, and the buds were coming along, and it was literally covered with aphids. Normally, you would use soapy water to help with aphids, but these looked like the plants, there were a lot of aphids, and I didn’t think soapy water was going to cut it. So, I wasn’t quite sure what to do.
I did sort of spray it down a little bit to give the plant a bit of a rest, but I didn’t want to use any chemicals. So, I just left it for a little while, for a few days, to think on what I could do, and this is where nature just amazes me, and I think there are parallels with that time to reflect as well, because when I went back out to the plant, I then noticed and saw that there were these little beetles with little spikes on their backs. I didn’t recognize the beetle. I didn’t know what it was, and I thought, “Oh, great. I had aphids, and now I’ve got beetles.” And of course, because I had lots of aphids, I had ants on it as well, because ants actually are like farmers with aphids. They actually coexist very nicely with aphids and will protect them, because they harvest some of the food from the aphids.
So, I wondered what’s going on with my artichoke flowers, and I left them for a couple of more days, and lo and behold, I start getting all over this plant these pupa all over these plants, and then these ladybirds start to emerge all over the plant. Of course the ladybirds, their natural food source is aphids. So, before it was time to harvest my buds, to actually eat on the plant, the ladybirds came along and took care of the aphids, and everything got back into balance.
For me, that was a really inspiring experience because it taught me about balance. It taught me that actually, there is still so much to discover, and that actually, just looking at that first problem, there’s something there that’s going to help with that as well. I’m an avid amateur wildlife photographer, and that gave me a great opportunity as well to capture some of those stages and processes, and it was just truly fascinating as well.
Particularly in innovation, people want to rush to solving the problems quickly, and picking up tools, and trying to do something about it. This is a great example of sometimes you have to go through the process. You need to allow things to take place and to thaw before you rush to solve the problem. Get a real good understanding of what is going on, and what are the factors that are going to contribute to helping solve that problem before you run and before you start trying to fix things blindly.
If I I had run in and tried to address the aphids quickly, the only solution would have been, and it’s a solution I didn’t want to go down, was to look at sprays and contaminants. In actual fact, there were some answers that were ready to avail themselves and I was patient and I nurtured that process.
Jonathan Cook:
Success in a garden requires patience, Francine says.
Gardens bring us into a different experience of time. In last week’s episode, we learned that time isn’t just a physical phenomenon that can be measured with scientific instruments. It’s also a subjective human experience that is inherently separate from all external attempts at measurement and observation.
Christine Locher reiterates Francine’s point: Past a certain point, working faster doesn’t translate into increased productivity.
Christine Locher:
Growth takes time and you can’t just, I think that’s also one of the downsides of the machine metaphor, where you think you can just assemble all the right building blocks with no time in between at all if you can assemble them faster, that they’re done faster or they’re finished faster. Also with a garden, that’s not the case. So, a plant takes as long as it takes to grow and it doesn’t grow faster if you up the quarterly goals or if you start pulling at it, or if you I don’t know, set things to twice the amount of heat. It’s not growing twice as fast. That’s really not how it works, and I think we can learn from that, because I think there are limits to how much we can fiddle around with the circumstances and sometimes we just need to accept that things take as long as they take, if you want the right outcome.
Jonathan Cook:
Accepting the natural rhythm of a garden and working with it is a practice in stark contrast with the cult of leadership that’s widespread in business today. Gardens don’t have leaders. They’re communities, Francine says.
Francine Stevens:
I think a couple of things. So, a forest is much more than what you see. So, when you go into forest bathing, one of the things when you’re around plants is what’s underground in that forest is a really solid root foundation that coexists with many other plants in that forest. It is not a single tree. It is actually a community of organisms, and really what makes a forest successful is the foundations that sit underneath that. For me, having that space in the forest is also taking the time to breathe, taking the time to just be present in the here and now.
Also, for me, because I am a wildlife photographer as well, to be there with observation. What’s going on around me? What’s really going on around me? How are the seasons influencing what’s going on around me? What are the animals doing? There’s so much that’s happening in the present here and now that we tend to cut out of our daily lives, and also in business. Taking the time to be present and have that time to think and head space I think allows space for other ideas to come in. It allows for different approaches and concepts to be thought through.
Jonathan Cook:
As Francine says, gardens bring us into awareness of the present moment, paying attention to what’s happening around us. They can’t be managed remotely, by tapping on a screen. So, if you’d like to make your business more like a garden and less like a machine, the first thing to do is unwrap your fingers from around your smartphone and get your hands dirty again.
Pay attention to where you are, and learn the rhythms of that system, following that tempo instead of trying to force it into a relentless acceleration.
Work with human nature rather than micromanaging it to death.
Nurture diversity within your business instead of planting a monoculture.
Get into the middle of your business garden, and tend it, rather than trying to be its leader from inside an office far away.
Above all else, gardening is about what you do, not what you say you’re going to do. So, give speeches if you must, but do it with a basket in one hand, and a shovel in the other.
Gardeners know that every season must come to an end. Next week will be the final episode of the second season of this podcast. We have heard many voices sharing a whole lot of ideas, and next week’s episode will be the time for us to confront the central question around which this podcast has grown: Can business actually become more human?
That episode will be available one week from today. I hope you’ll listen in.
For listening today, thank you. Thanks must also go to the artist Meydan, who produced the music that opens and closes each episode. The song is from the album For Creators. It’s called Underwater.
