The Gardener Leader

The great of earth,
How softly do they live;
The lesser ones it is are praised,
Revered;
Still lesser, feared;
But these,
One hardly knows that they are there,
So gently do they go about their tasks,
So quietly achieve;
When they have passed,
Their life’s work done,
The people look and say:
It happened itself.

The Tao Te Ching, Verse 17

There are people around whom things bloom. Great ideas are generated, adventures begin, people grow energized and passionate, opportunities flow. Let’s call such people Gardeners.

Gardeners steward Gardens into existence. A Garden is a complex, self-organizing system. It consists of multiple organic entities and processes all operating at once in chaotic harmony. In contrast, a Factory is a tightly run ship. Each detail and process is planned and orchestrated to the last T.

There’s a place for both Gardens and Factories. A lunar mission may be ideated by a community of Gardeners, but the final mission should stick to the meticulously planned sequence. On the other hand, businesses are better run as Gardens, emergent and flexible as each division creatively pursues their ends in alignment with the organization’s greater goals.

I’m editing this essay while sitting in the newly furbished room in a coworking space my friends launched this summer. The walls of this room are full of paintings and poster-size photographs left over from an art exhibit hosted here two weeks ago. Fitting with the gallery’s theme of “How do we play?,” there’s a charming wooden swing dangling from one corner in the room. The room is full of colorful rugs and low-set sofas they got last weekend. They rented a U-Haul to grab furniture they scoped out on Facebook marketplace, and enlisted the help of another friend to help design the space.

The space is a Garden, cultivated by Gardeners. It is the joint outcome of many people’s ideas and energies and values, each overlapping and interweaving organically. My friends allow people to show up as they are and to give precisely what they would be delighted to give. And second, they just do things while staying committed to their deepest values and greatest visions. As a result, they’ve created a complex and generative ecosystem of people, ideas, relationships, and companies. Around them, things are always blooming.

Gardeners operate ecologically. They work along the grain of the myriad forces and resources in their environment. It’s similar to how a Tai Chi master elegantly redirects their opponent’s force with the lightest touch. By perceiving natural rhythms and channelling the latent forces around them, they are able to resourcefully cultivate a self-sustaining Garden that is attuned to that specific context.

In The Fifth Discipline, a business classic, author Peter Senge tells the following story. In 1986, Roger Sailant of Ford Corporation was tasked with launching an electronic components plants in Chihuahua, Mexico, the first of its kind in the country for the company. Through dialogue, he discovered what was most important to the local workers. They cared deeply for their community and for their families. So, he decided to build the plant with their deepest values at the center. He instantiated a collaboratively developed open promotion system, and stepped in to take action when an old boys’ network appointee threatened the created system. The final plant also included a family activity center and family health facilities.

Years after its launch, the plant went on to win on a Mexican Presidential award for being an outstanding business. Still, mainland executives were surprised upon their first visit. The plant was painted a bold blue and pink, colors that are popular in Mexico but are apparently not typical for American manufacturing plants. One of the executives remarked, “This is not a Ford plant.”

Despite it “not [being] a Ford plant,” no one could deny he had succeeded in creating not only a vibrant community but also a successful business and plant. He did not impose a pre-conceived idea of what a Ford plant should be, or try to half-appease the local workers and half-appease mainland executives. He allowed the plant to come into existence. The Chihuahua plant was a living expression of the cherished values of those who worked and lived there.

In my experience, it’s not always easy to allow things to bloom. It requires a tolerance for operating in uncertainty, steadfast effort, and an eye that can notice and appreciate the myriad subtleties of nature. It is one thing to oversee a manicured lawn clipped to specification. It is a wholly different task to tend to a delightfully abundant plot with more herbs and more trees and more flowers that even the Gardener sees something new each time they take a stroll.

A commitment to orderliness and adherence to plans unquestionably produces results. But these same qualities are impediments to Gardeners, who more interested in cultivating complex ecosystems. AKA, becoming a Gardener requires dismantling every OCD, perfectionistic tendency you have and chucking it out the window.

Imagine you are the steward of a community. Could you tolerate brand new members driving initiatives that are perhaps beyond your original vision? Can you allow sub-groups and offshoots and clubs to spring forth on their own, thereby enabling your community to become self-expanding? Can you take the risk of enabling decentralized programming, which effectively takes the flow of information out of your hands?

The essence of being a Gardener is in relinquishing control while holding onto a vision. As anyone that has ever been micro-managed can tell you, it’s hard to bloom into your full potential when being monitored by someone that wants to orchestrate your every movement and decision. A Gardener needs to trust the process of unfolding even when progress seems slow. Organic self-organizing systems can take many cycles of seasons to mature and come to fruition. This trust can come from many places - from within yourself, faith in your destiny, in the systems you formulate & iterate on, in having shared values with those you are building with.

When done well, the work of Gardeners seems obvious in retrospect. It almost seems like what they created was ripe to come into existence in precisely that way. It feels as natural as flowers blooming or leaves sprouting from the branches of trees. The real brilliance of Gardeners is not that they cause plants to flower, but that they allow it. This requires letting go of control, maintaining faith amidst nonlinear growth, and a commitment to values over establishment thinking. Sneakily, the Gardener leaves only a faint trail in their wake. And when it is all said and done, “The people look and say: it happened itself.”