Cultivation: A different approach to change

A gardener preparing ground for something demanding does not engineer growth. She tends conditions. She reads what is already present — the texture and composition of the soil, what has grown here before, what the ground can currently support and what it cannot. She knows that some of the most important work happens beneath the surface, invisible, before anything emerges. And she knows that her role is not to produce the growth but to create the conditions under which it becomes possible.

This is not how most organisations approach change.

The default logic is implementation: identify the desired outcome, design the intervention, execute the plan, measure the result. This logic is not wrong. It is coherent, often effective, and well-suited to a particular class of problem — one where the challenge is well-defined, the variables are manageable, and disciplined delivery can close the gap between current state and desired state.

The difficulty is that this logic has been extended well beyond the problems it was designed for. When what needs to change is not a process or a structure but the ground itself — the assumptions the organisation holds without knowing it holds them, the quality of attention people bring to each other, the capacity to perceive itself honestly — implementation logic reaches its structural limit. The instrument is not calibrated for this kind of work.

Cultivation - the underlying approach to my work - starts from a different understanding of what the problem is.

If what needs to change is the ground rather than the surface — the conditions under which learning, adaptation, and genuine collective intelligence become possible — then the relevant logic is not implementation but tending. Preparing conditions rather than delivering outcomes. Perturbation rather than instruction.

This is not a softer or less rigorous approach. It is a different kind of rigour — one that takes the living complexity of organisational life seriously rather than abstracting it into something more manageable. It asks different questions: not what do we need to do? but what does this ground need in order to support what we are trying to grow? Not how do we get from here to there? but what is already present that we can work with?

Cultivation also addresses a kind of problem that implementation logic cannot: the need to learn and adapt continuously, under conditions that keep changing. Organisations facing genuine ongoing uncertainty are not dealing with a problem that will resolve. They are dealing with a permanent condition that requires a different relationship to change — less episodic, more ecological, organised around building the capacity to respond rather than around executing a predetermined plan.

I want to try to describe what it actually feels like when cultivation logic is working — not as an argument, but as an image.

There is a particular quality in a room where an organisation is genuinely sitting with what it does not yet understand. Not performing inquiry, not moving efficiently toward a predetermined conclusion, but actually holding a question together. The conversation has a different texture — slower, more willing to follow something unexpected, less anxious about where it is going. People say things they have not said before, not because they have been invited to share feelings, but because the quality of attention makes it possible to think in ways that the organisation's normal conversational conditions do not support.

What is being cultivated in those moments is not an outcome. It is a capacity — the capacity to let the organisation's actual situation become visible rather than managing the picture of it, to learn from what is genuinely happening rather than from what the reporting framework can see, to sit with complexity long enough for something new to emerge rather than resolving it prematurely into action.

This capacity, once developed, changes what the organisation can do. Not by delivering a predetermined result but by preparing ground that can support growth the organisation could not have planned for — because it could not have imagined it from where it was standing.

Cultivation is not universally appropriate. It fits a particular kind of organisational moment, and in my experience that moment has three distinct faces.

The first is productive exhaustion. The organisation knows something fundamental needs to change. It cannot name what that is or what it would involve. It has worked through every perceivable option and the problem is still there — not for lack of effort or intelligence, but because the problem is not the kind that effort and intelligence applied within existing frameworks can reach. This is the organisation that has arrived at the limit of its own knowing and is still holding the question rather than declaring it solved or insoluble. There is something genuinely alive in that position, however uncomfortable it feels. The exhaustion is not defeat. It is the precondition for a different kind of inquiry.

The second face is generative ambition. This organisation is not at the wall. It is functioning, perhaps functioning well. But it is reaching toward something more demanding than what it has done before — a deeper form of accountability to the communities it serves, a more genuine form of distributed leadership, a quality of organisational learning it has glimpsed but not yet sustained. It has enough self-awareness to recognise that its current relational ground may not support what it is reaching for, and enough intellectual honesty to take that seriously rather than assuming execution will close the gap.

The third face is foresight. This organisation has watched what happens to organisations that are not positioned to adapt — has watched peers hit the wall, watched well-resourced change efforts fail to touch the ground that needed preparing — and has decided to do that preparation before the urgency arrives. It is not responding to crisis. It is recognising that the conditions bearing down on organisations in its sector are real, and that the time to cultivate ground is not when you need it desperately.

What these three share is a specific quality of genuine not-knowing — not performed uncertainty, not strategic humility, but actual contact with the limits of what the organisation currently understands about itself and its situation. And alongside that, the stability to sit with that not-knowing rather than resolving it prematurely into a plan.

This is what distinguishes cultivation-readiness from its appearance.

Some organisations use change language to meet a governance requirement or to signal progress on decisions they have already made. Some are held inside an understanding of organisational life that makes genuine inquiry structurally difficult — where everything that happens must be expressible as a problem with a solution and a person responsible for implementing it. Others simply do not have the time, energy, or relational ground to do genuine learning work, however much they might want to. These are not failures of character. They are descriptions of conditions. And they are honest reasons why cultivation, however appropriate it might be in the abstract, is not appropriate here.

An organisation in active crisis — destabilised, fighting fires, without the basic stability that sustained attention requires — is not a candidate for cultivation. Not because it lacks virtue or appetite, but because of a structural incompatibility. Cultivation requires a willingness to sit with not-knowing long enough for something genuinely new to emerge. It requires a time horizon that an organisation in survival mode does not have. Applying cultivation logic in those conditions is not just ineffective. It may do harm — by consuming attention that is urgently needed elsewhere, or by naming a developmental journey at a moment when what the organisation actually needs is to stabilise.

It is worth being equally clear about when implementation logic is appropriate, because clarity here is what prevents this from becoming advocacy for one logic over another.

Some organisational problems are genuinely solvable. They have knowable endpoints, manageable variables, and the capacity to benefit from clear design and disciplined delivery. Implementation logic is well-suited to these problems, and a cultivation approach would be indulgent — slower, more expensive, and less likely to produce the clear outcome the situation requires.

“The experienced practitioner knows the difference, and says so. The cultivator who cannot recommend implementation when implementation is what is needed has mistaken a disposition for a doctrine.”

I do not know exactly what it looks like for an organisation to meet the full weight of what the coming years will ask of it — the pace of change, the depth of uncertainty, the kinds of problems that will not stay still long enough to be implemented at.

What I believe is that the organisations positioned to respond will be those that have developed, through sustained cultivation, the capacity to learn continuously from their own living complexity. They will have prepared ground before they needed it. They will have built the relational and epistemic conditions that allow genuine adaptation rather than sophisticated defence.

What it means to cultivate ground that keeps moving is a question that remains open. The answer – to the extent there is one – emerges from the lived experience of organisations responding to complexity in real time, and in ways that can hold uncertainty lightly but with purpose.