The Organisational Gardener

Post written in June 2, 2025 for my Organisational Gardening newsletter

In today’s fast-moving work environments, collaboration often feels rushed, mechanical, and exhausting. Much of traditional organisational learning, design, and development is still rooted in industrial-era metaphors — organisations as machines, structures as rigid hierarchies, people as resources.

I believe it’s time for a new metaphor, one that honours the living nature of human collaboration. I am not the first to say this; I draw inspiration from many, particularly from Frederic Laloux and hundreds of other key people I have met over the past ten years.

Organisational Gardening offers an alternative perspective. Instead of treating collaboration as a set of tasks and meetings, people to be managed, and work as a “necessary evil,” I see collaboration as the act of cultivating relationships within organisations — living ecosystems for creating something valuable in the world.

Organisational Gardening: A Definition

I define Organisational Gardening as the cyclical process for collaboration — literally, doing work together. Like a real garden, effective collaboration follows natural rhythms: sowing ideas for ways of being and doing, nurturing relationships, harvesting wholesome outcomes and learning, and composting initiatives that drain energy so they can fertilise projects where focus is most needed. In other words, the “cyclical process” is a Cultivation Cycle, where the main work of a Gardener-Leader is tending the soil — the organisational or team culture — that fosters collaboration.

Key Concepts

The Cultivation Cycle

Collaboration flourishes when we acknowledge and respect natural cycles:

• Sowing: Planting the seeds of ideas, intention, and vision for different way of relating.
• Nurturing: Tending to relationships through curiosity, openness, and trust.
• Harvesting: Reaping the fruits of collective creativity, outcomes, and lessons from both successes and failed experiments.
• Composting: Ending initiatives that disperse collective energy, recycling learnings and focus back into the system to enrich the soil for the next cycle.

When we follow this cycle, collaboration is no longer forced — it becomes more alive and organic.

Collaboration for a Better Soil

I see collaboration as the act of cultivating the social soil (term from Otto Scharmer) of a creative field (concept taken from Peter Koenig and Tom Nixon).

In nature — as well as in organic, biodynamic, permaculture, and regenerative farming or gardening — healthy soil is diverse, nourished, and teeming with life. It is the unseen foundation that supports every harvest. Similarly, thriving teams need an environment where different perspectives can meet, relationships can deepen, and individuals can bring their whole selves to the work.

Natural Rhythms

Nature doesn’t produce at high speed all year round — it follows seasons of growth, rest, and renewal. Organisational Gardening reminds us that sustainable collaboration respects these rhythms. Teams, like gardens, need periods of focused growth, but also time to reflect, recover, and regenerate.

Ignoring these rhythms leads to burnout. Embracing them leads to resilience.

Main Ideas & Reflections to Takeaway

Ideas

1. Organisational Gardening offers a new metaphor for rethinking collaboration — shifting away from traditional industrial-era views of organisations as machines and people as resources, toward viewing them as living ecosystems.
2. Organisational Gardening is defined as a cyclical process for collaboration, mirroring natural rhythms of sowing, nurturing, harvesting, and composting — with the Gardener-Leader focusing on cultivating healthy team or organisational culture.
3. The Cultivation Cycle (Sowing, Nurturing, Harvesting, Composting) provides a practical, natural model for fostering healthier collaboration that feels alive and sustainable rather than forced.
4. Healthy collaboration requires cultivating the ‘social soil’ of a ‘creative field’ — a diverse, nourished environment where different perspectives thrive and individuals can fully participate through their creative energy.
5. Respecting natural rhythms — allowing time for growth, rest, and renewal — is essential for sustainable collaboration and resilience, preventing burnout and fostering long-term flourishing.

Invitations to Reflect

• What might change if you thought of your organisation as a garden, not a machine?
• If you want to take a first step today, try this: Ask your team what needs sowing, nurturing, harvesting, or composting in your way of working.

It’s a small shift in perspective, but like planting a seed, it can lead to powerful change.