I was sitting in my office getting ready for the official start of the year, thinking about how the worlds of user experience, leadership, and technology intersect, when I remembered something Ken Robinson once said:

This quote struck me because it captured something I'd been noticing throughout my career: we spend so much time trying to optimize organizations as if they were machines, that we miss out on the effectiveness that comes with managing them more like gardens.

The more I worked with teams and organizations, the more I saw this pattern play out. Companies would invest heavily in new tools, implement rigid processes, and create elaborate systems—all in an attempt to force growth. But the ones that truly thrived? They took a different approach. They created environments where good things happened naturally.

Seven Patterns of Organic Systems

I started paying attention to these naturally thriving organizations, looking for common threads in how they operated. What made them different? How did they manage to grow without becoming overly mechanical?

After years of watching organizations succeed and fail (and making plenty of mistakes myself), I've noticed seven patterns that show up in naturally thriving systems:

1. They manage complexity, and lead the people. Bad organizations do the opposite: they try to manage people while letting their systems grow wild. Good ones create simple systems that let people do their best work. (I learned this the hard way after spending years thinking more processes meant better results.)

2. They design for natural growth. Most organizations try to force growth through artificial means—more features, more processes, more everything. The good ones focus on creating the right conditions and letting growth happen naturally. Think of it like gardening: you can't force a plant to grow by pulling on it.

3. They balance technology and humanity. Technology should make human interactions better, not replace them. The best tools fit into existing workflows so naturally that people barely notice them. (This is something I wish I'd understood earlier in my career when I kept trying to solve human problems with technical solutions.)

4. They focus on context, not components. Everything in an organization is connected. Change one thing and you affect everything else. Good organizations understand this and focus on the whole system rather than optimizing individual parts. It's like trying to understand a forest by looking at just one tree.

5. They build trust through design. Trust isn't a feature you can add later—it's the foundation everything else builds on. Good organizations design their systems around building and maintaining trust. I've seen teams with "perfect" processes fail because they lacked this foundation.

6. They're driven by purpose. When teams lose their way, it's rarely because they lack tools or processes. It's because they've lost sight of why they're doing what they're doing. The most sophisticated systems can't fix a missing sense of purpose.

7. They learn through evolution. Instead of trying to plan everything perfectly from the start, they build to learn and adapt based on what they discover. This means being comfortable with uncertainty and treating "failures" as learning opportunities.

Understanding these patterns is one thing—but seeing how they clash with our traditional approach to organization building helped me understand why so many companies struggle with growth. It all comes back to a fundamental misunderstanding about how organizations really work. Here's what I mean by that. Think about how most of us approach organizational problems. When something isn't working, our first instinct is to "fix" it.

The Mechanical Fallacy

Over the course of my career, I've gotten pretty good at understanding technology and processes. The problem is that even though this is only one part of the puzzle, it's the default way most people are taught to think about organizations—and it's wrong, or at the very least incomplete.

I know because I thought this way too, especially in my early days of building teams and products. When something wasn't working, I'd do what seemed logical: add more tools, implement more processes, create more controls. Sometimes it worked, but often it just made the problems more complex.

This is the trap of mechanical thinking. It's seductive because it promises predictability and control. If something's broken, you fix it. If something's slow, you optimize it. If something's missing, you add it. But organizations aren't machines. They're complex systems of human relationships, motivations, and behaviors.

A More Organic Approach To Work

Think about how a farmer approaches growing successful crops. They have tools—trowels, irrigation systems, greenhouses—but they understand something crucial: tools don't make plants grow. Instead, they focus on creating the right conditions: preparing the soil, ensuring proper drainage, understanding the climate. The tools support this work, but they're never the main story.

This pattern also exists in successful organizations. Their secret isn't having better tools or awesome processes. It's that they've created an environment where good things happen naturally. I saw this firsthand while working with my product teams. I could give employees the most sophisticated design tools in the world, but if they're afraid to experiment, they won't create anything interesting. But when I created an environment where experimentation feels safe? That's when I started seeing real creativity emerge.

Here's something that might surprise people who know me (since I'm often the person introducing new tools and suggesting new processes to my teams): I believe processes are only a means to an end. The difference is in why and how I choose to introduce them. Remember that garden metaphor? A good farmer definitely has their favorite tools. But they don't start by buying tools—they start by understanding the environment. The tools they choose flow from that understanding, and they introduce them thoughtfully, at the right time, in the right way.

When a team is struggling, the easy answer would be throwing another collaboration tool at the problem. Instead, I've learned to spend time understanding how information naturally flows in the team. Often, you'll discover that your existing tools are fighting against the team's natural working style. By simplifying the toolkit and aligning it with real work patterns (rather than ideal ones), your output can improve dramatically.

Creating Environments That Work

The real power of organic systems becomes clear when you see them in action. When teams have an environment where good things happen naturally, the tools become almost invisible. Their processes emerge from the work itself. Team members are energized rather than constrained.

As technology becomes more powerful, the temptation to force artificial solutions will only become stronger. But this is exactly backwards. The more complex our technology becomes, the more important it is to focus on creating natural, organic systems.

The organizations that will thrive in the future won't be the ones with the most tools or the strictest processes. They'll be the ones that create environments where both technology and humanity can flourish together naturally. They understand that the real question isn't "How do we make growth happen?" but "What conditions would allow growth to happen organically?"

I've found that when you get those conditions right—when you create an environment that supports natural growth and evolution—everything else tends to fall into place. It might seem slower at first (just like organic farming), but it creates the kind of sustainable, resilient growth that can weather any storm.

Here's what I want you to remember: the best way to build a successful organization isn't to focus on success directly. It's to focus on creating an environment where success can happen naturally. What would change in your organization if you started thinking more like a farmer and less like a mechanic?