Ideas at the intersection of living systems, human potential, and the future of leadership.

Partway through an afternoon with the board of Make-A-Wish Oregon, I noticed something that took me a moment to make peace with. I wasn't doing very much. The room was fully alive. The board had broken into three groups, each taking on a different piece of the organization's fundraising — one reworking the golf tournament, one rethinking individual giving, one reimagining the Wish Ball. Ideas were compounding. People were leaning in. The energy was climbing on its own. And I

Ask most organizations to point to their leaders and they'll point up — at the executives, the directors, the people whose titles contain the word. Ask them where they invest in leadership, and they'll point to the same place: the programs, the coaching, the development budget, nearly all of it aimed at the small group at the top. The assumption running underneath is so common it's almost invisible. Leadership, we quietly believe, is a position. It's something a title confers

Every organization has a graveyard. Walk into almost any company that's been around a while and you'll find it — the quiet burial ground of past initiatives. The values that were painted on the wall and then contradicted by the next reorganization. The offsite that generated a wall of sticky notes and a burst of energy that had fully evaporated by the following Wednesday. The engagement survey that surfaced the same problems three years running and changed nothing. The leader

There is a moment, early in almost every conversation about organizational change, where someone reaches for the solution. The team isn't communicating — so let's run a communication workshop. Morale is low — so let's do an offsite. Trust is thin — so let's bring in a trust-building exercise. The impulse is understandable and almost always premature. It is the equivalent of writing a prescription before you've made a diagnosis, and it is the single most common reason culture

If you accept that an organization is a living system rather than a machine — that it is more hive than engine — then a particular kind of question follows. You stop asking what levers do I pull? and start asking what conditions does a living thing need in order to thrive? That word, conditions, is doing a great deal of work, and it's worth pausing on before we go further. A tactic is something you do. A condition is something you cultivate. You can execute a tactic on Tuesda

Most of the language we use for organizations is borrowed from engineering. We talk about building teams and scaling operations. We re-engineer processes and optimize workflows. When something goes wrong, we say the organization is broken, and we go looking for the part that failed so we can replace it. We drive results, move levers, turn the flywheel. Leaders are asked to be architects and mechanics — to design the system, install the right people in the right slots, and kee