Cultivation: A different approach to change

A gardener preparing ground for something demanding tends to conditions. She explores 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. And she knows that her role is to create the conditions under which growth becomes possible.

This is a different logic to typical organisational change processes.

The default logic is implementation: identify the desired outcome, design the intervention, execute the plan, measure the result. This is a useful logic and works well in a variety of different ways. It is well-suited to problems 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. This logic reaches its limits when the change that is necessary needs to happen below the surface — the assumptions the organisation holds, the quality of attention people bring to each other, and the capacity of the organisation to perceive itself honestly. The instrument is not calibrated for this kind of work.

Cultivation — the underlying approach to A Deeper Ground — starts from a different understanding of the problem.

If what needs to change are the conditions under which learning, adaptation, and genuine collective intelligence become possible, then the relevant logic is should be one of tending and cultivation. Preparing conditions rather than delivering outcomes. Perturbation rather than instruction.

This is a different kind of rigour. It takes the living complexity of organisational life seriously rather than abstracting it into something more manageable. It asks different questions: what does this organisation need 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 dealing with a permanent condition that requires a different relationship to change. Change should be organised around building the capacity to respond rather than executing a predetermined plan.

I want to try to describe what it actually feels like when cultivation logic is working.

There is a particular quality in a room where an organisation is genuinely sitting with what it does not yet understand. The conversation has a different texture. It is slower, more willing to follow something unexpected, less anxious about where it is going. People say things they have not said before 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 the capacity to let the organisation's actual situation become visible and to learn from what is genuinely happening rather than from what the reporting framework can see. It is the capacity 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. It allows the organisation to imagine a different place to stand.

A cultivation logic doesn’t work for everyone. 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, largely because the problem is not the kind that 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 the precondition for a different kind of inquiry.

The second face is generative ambition. This organisation is functioning, perhaps functioning well. But it is reaching toward something more demanding than what it has done before. It desires a deeper form of accountability to the communities it serves, a more genuine form of distributed leadership, or a quality of organisational learning it has not yet achieved. It has enough self-awareness to recognise that its current foundations 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 and has decided to do that preparation before the urgency arrives. 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. This requires actual contact with the limits of what the organisation currently understands about itself and its situation. It requires 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 quality of relationships to do genuine learning work, however much they might want to. These are not failures. They are descriptions of conditions. And they are honest reasons why cultivation, however appropriate it might be in the abstract, is not appropriate for these organisations.

An organisation in active crisis is not a candidate for cultivation. 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 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.

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.

“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 just won’t stay still.

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 the ground before they need to plant anything. 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.