The Organisational Gardener

On August the 1st 2022, four years ago, my family and I arrived to the UK. Being British and Mexican opened up an opportunity and we took it.

We moved because of the opportunity of working in a great and growing company Konsileo which is based on Teal principles (Self-Management, Wholeness and Evolutionary Purpose), to provide new horizons to my children (now teenagers), start a new life adventure with my wife Mariana Diaz and personally keep challenging myself to new professional endeavours.

If I look back 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years back (I could go further but let’s stop there) my personal life has evolved a lot. The places I have lived, the initiatives (work) I have been involved with and overall the contexts I have been part of. I wanted to write this post to connect with everyone’s life experience that “the only certain thing about our present reality is constant change”.

We are the sum of our lived experiences, good and bad. We are also who we are due our DNA. I am not going to the debate of “nurture vs nature”. It is what it is. We are born, we are exposed to reality and then we make decisions that move us onwards (just because the pass of time is inevitable) and hopefully they move us upwards. “Onwards and Upwards” is one of my personal mantras.

So looking back where was I? And what brought me to this reality of being the CPO of an award winning, scale up, remote-first and Teal-inspired, commercial insurance broking in the UK?

5 Years Ago (2021)

In a nutshell, I had my own consulting and digital facilitation company based in Mexico collaborating with regional and international not-for-profit organisations on projects of strategic planning and organisational development; I lived in the highlands of Chiapas collaborating with my neighbourhood committee, my children’s school board as well as supporting indigenous community-based organisations; I had a garden and a micro animal farm at home; enjoyed mountain biking with friends and organised mini-adventures in remote settings of Mexico; and was leading a Latin American initiative connecting organisational facilitators through Reimagina2030.

What can say: Life was good!

Curiously, life at the end of that year had a surprise prepared for us. A self-managed company in the UK was looking for a Head of Organisational Development. This opportunity came through Lisa Gill on an international network I was part of, so I raised my hand and got the proper introductions, that suddenly turned into a reality at the beginning of 2022.

Change of Life & Identity

The decision to move countries, life, language, and everything for our family was agreed with my wife. It would require not only to sell or give away everything we owned in Mexico, but also to assume a new working identity for me and then for my wife. Professional transitions, changing jobs, is not an easy endeavour. It requires assimilating a new way of working and collaborating defined by the organisation, company or initiative you are joining. In my case, it also needed transitioning my identities from business owner to employee, from lead link (we used Holacracy as a self-management model) and founder to a role I would call specific source of organisational development, which then included learning and development, and three years after Chief People Officer.

I believe that personal change and development doesn’t happen just by changing certain habits and behaviours, it really happens when you revisit the identities you assume. Change requires “identity work”, and this requires true “inner work”, and this never ends if you have a learning and growth mindset.

10 Years Ago (2016)

Ten years ago I had just turned 40, and again in August my wife and I had decided to take a sabbatical year abroad so we moved to France and exposed our younger family to a whole new country, language (which we barely spoke), and lifestyle. We moved to an intentional community, which turned out run itself under another self-managing and governance framework called Sociocracy. This was actually the genesis of my personal and professional evolution to teal-inspired and self-organising initiatives.

In 2016, I had a completely different career. I had my own consultancy company specialised in tourism and ecotourism planning in protected natural areas (eg. National Parks); as a result of having done a Masters Degree in Tourism and Recreation in Protected Areas in New Zealand and then developed the national strategy for sustainable tourism in protected natural areas for Mexico (yes, the whole country). My wife and I owned three franchises (stores called Botanicus, similar to Lush) in the state of Chiapas, while having 3 kids to raise and she was working in the United Nations.

Life was full on, but also very good; so why transition?

Life is a Garden. Life is a Transition.

After my year in France taking the role of gardener, and sometimes pizza maker (every two weeks or so), my mantra was “Life is a Garden”. Nowadays, I say an “Organisation is a Garden” we are all cultivating. Life, our lives are the result of the soil we have been given, but also of how we cultivate that soil, to harvest food that will nourish us and who we love, care and influence during our existence.

A garden, as well as an organisation is always in transition. In a garden, there are moments of calm, but then the next season arrives and you have to transition what you do and how you do it. In a company what worked as a startup will need to change to transition to its scale up phase. We as individuals, when we change roles, positions, jobs and companies we will need to transition; and again a successful transition will occur when we accept the need to change or adopt other identities.

My Invitation: Onwards and Upwards

After looking back to, and in this case summarising, the last 5 and 10 years of my life I invite myself, and you, to think what will move us forward? What is the way forward? How to go “onwards and upwards” while staying true to what you value and guides your life? How to continue seeing life as a garden? What would I like to see back in 5 and 10 years related to today and say, yes life was very good as well?

Life feels good, but it feels that in my role I have to contribute to making sure that more people around me have a good life. So let’s cultivate the soil that was given to us, and we want to collaborate to make it better to harvest fruits and vegetables that will nourish us and our families. Let’s make our organisations and companies life giving, knowing that sometimes realities pull us back to old ways of being and doing.