Soil

What grows around you? Social Leadership is an act of tending to the ecosystem, not commanding it. It’s a boundary walking practice, like the farmer at the start of the day, seeing where the land is parched or waterlogged, where it can be worked, or left fallow.

Some of our actions lead to growth: planting a seed, irrigating, weeding, harvesting, taking things to market. Other things grow in the landscape without any obvious attention from us whatsoever. Growing between the crops, on the boundaries, the edge spaces. Some things are unplanned, emergent, still a product of a fertile ecosystem, but not a planned one.

Our artificially planned and managed structures are simply layers that sit upon a borrowed common wealth. And the system as a whole is a finite one. If we draw too much - extract too heavily - we exhaust and deplete it.

Use your sixty seconds today to consider what grows where you stand, what grows around you.

What have you planned, what do you nurture, what draws too deeply on the natural bounty of the soil?

Our privilege as Social Leaders is to walk across the whole system, between and across boundaries, but it carries an obligation. To understand that our touch is light, and that there is always a cost.

At times, the act of leadership is to step back: to deliberately not impose ourselves upon the system.