The Wisdom of Forests

A couple of years ago, Ralph Freese Chief Executive Director of the African Leadership Initiative suggested that I would enjoy The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer-Prize,. He was right. Central to the book is the insight, that in our eagerness to create economically efficient tree plantations, we rode roughshod over the wisdom embedded in forests. That the imposition of our ‘management’ of nature, completely missed – and destroyed – highly effective and robust ecological systems that had evolved over thousands of years.

Increasingly cutting-edge science and organizational research understand that there is an intricate, often self-organizing complexity, that underpins truly resilient and effective systems. Critically it is showing that the so-called efficient, productive solutions often wreak havoc, destroying value and resilience

It reflects a position that I’ve always held to be self-evident, that our language and our social rituals must hold truth because they reflect the accumulated wisdom of millennia. They are the endpoint of thousands of informal experiments. And so, I thought we’d have some fun today and use insights from the ecology of old-growth forests to provoke some thoughts about how we approach strategy, soul, and self.

The premise that propelled The Overstory was inspired by the work of Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, Suzanne Simard, who has just released her book on the wisdom of forests, Finding the Mother Tree.

Her work has shown that forests are complex ecosystems in which trees communicate with each other, are connected, in her words ‘wired for wisdom’.

Today’s letter draws from an On Being podcast episode with Simard.  It’s worth listening to in order to fully understand how trees speak in a language of carbon, how mycelium networks enable communication between trees, even how salmon nitrogen ends up in trees, and how aboriginal science has always known truths that western science is just now rediscovering. However, that’s not where we’re going. We’re exploring how these forests might inspire us to rethink our world, our operating models, how we approach our lives.

/Strategy

Simard’s research in old-growth forests revealed that “every tree is linked to every other tree. All the little trees — the seedlings, the saplings are all linked into the networks that these old trees had established through their lifetime, and that the biggest, oldest trees were the hubs of the network. They were the nuclei. They were what everything else was linked into”.

She explains that the older trees, with big root systems and large photosynthetic crowns, effectively cross-subsidised the seedlings, providing them with nutrients and water, enabling them to grow. Indeed, without these subsidies, those seedlings wouldn’t have survived.

This struck me as such a powerful metaphor for community and organisation building. In South Africa, the violence of the migrant labour system and forced removals disrupted networks removing the ‘old growth trees’, the people who were pivotal nodes in community, creating disruption.

Businesses with low tenure and high turnover enter a downward spiral because there are no longer those nodes with deep roots and wide experience to ensure the thriving and adaptation of new employees.

And so, in forests, communities, and businesses, we would do well to protect and nurture the ‘old trees’, for they are the hubs of enabling sustainable growth. We would do well to think about how to deepen and strengthen networks of connection.

Simard goes on to say, “These patterns exist throughout nature, because they’re efficient at moving stuff around, at communication, and they’re resilient… They’re what scientists are now calling complex adaptive systems. And that complexity has a pattern, and that pattern is highly evolved”.

Time and again, we’re discovering that the systems that we’ve imposed over the last 200 years are not sustainable. We are discovering that the natural systems that sustained the planet, and that the social systems that sustained community, had deep wisdom that had evolved over millennia – a wisdom that we’ve lost and destroyed as we’ve driven for simplicity, order, control and productivity.

What does that mean for strategy? Well, perhaps it means allowing complexity. It certainly means knowing that beneath the surface of your organisation are complex, informal, invisible social webs that don’t turn up on any organogram, and that you’re better off nurturing and reinforcing that web of interconnection than trying to force things into neat little boxes.

What else? Be curious. How would you approach building your business, or your life, if you accepted that being an old-growth forest was the best way to be?

Simard notes that “a fit organism puts on biomass, right? They grow. They flourish. They don’t just merely survive’’.  And observes that “when I look at forestry practices or agriculture practices or fishing, it’s like we manage them just to survive. We don’t manage them to flourish. We push them to the brink of collapse, right — take as much as we possibly can”.

As she said this it took me to the macro-economic neo-liberalism that emerged in the last 1970s, and the many management philosophies that have taken hold over the last thirty years – zero-based budgeting, lean manufacturing, just-in-time production – all of which operate with a worldview of absolute utilisation, rather than one that has resilience and capacity, that in turn enables vitality and flourishing.

Again, I wonder what approaches we might adopt if we emulated the complex adaptive systems of nature? They had thrived for thousands of years, in those patterns is wisdom that might help us chart new paths for our lives.

/Self

Simard explains to Tippet that whenever she left the old-growth forests that she grew up around, she would think “I’ve got to get back, because it’s in my blood and bones and DNA. You know, my ancestors for many generations lived in these inland rainforests, and it’s just the way we were… I always wanted to get back and felt so much at home when I was among the big, old trees.”

Her work and her life have emerged from the generations that came before her, and from the context that she grew up in. Whilst we may not all be able to draw such a direct line between our current context and the context from which we have come, there is no doubt that it does shape who we are and what we see.

What are your old-growth forests? What is the context that gave birth to the tree that you are? How does that context shape who you are today?

/Soul

In closing, Simard says that her research has shown her and taught her that “species, don’t live in isolation. It is a world of give-and-take. It is a relationship of silent agreements between species. We all need each other, to create these healthy systems. You know, it — yeah, I can’t emphasize that enough, that the community, the ecosystem is a complex place. And it’s about working together. It’s not just about the parts. They are more than the sum of the parts.”

This hit me hard. If the world is one of intricate, invisible, interdependence, what does it mean when we so take so much from it?

Ultimately, I left the podcast with an appreciation for how mysterious the world is. For how much of what makes it ‘work’, is invisible and not known. For the richness of the wisdom that is embedded in natural systems, in our language, in our social practices – wisdom that we’ve often ignored, but that we’re hopefully returning to.

Karl

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(This letter was first published on 03/10/2021).