My friend Randolph Hodgson, one of the co-founders of Neals Yard Dairy in London, told me many years ago that the industrial approach to pasteurizing milk and the use of lab-produced starter cultures for the purposes of making cheese had, in fact, radically reduced the number of really bad cheeses that had once been quite common. Unfortunately, pasteurization and purchased (rather than made-for-yourself) starter cultures also eliminated a lot of the “highs.” Consumers no longer had to suffer through terrible cheese, but at the same time, they lost a little of the joy and pleasure that was possible with the best of the best.
Excessive application of rules in the workplace can do similarly destructive things in the context of wisdom. They’re designed to drum out the worst of the worst, but you’ll likely have no trouble finding examples of places where people took a pass on doing what was both possible and right, because the rulebook told them they “couldn’t.” Practical wisdom helps us move in the opposite direction. Barry Schwartz believes,
A wise person is like a jazz musician—using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand. A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the service of the right aims. To serve other people, not to manipulate other people. And finally, perhaps most important, a wise person is made, not born. Wisdom depends on experience, and not just any experience. You need the time to get to know the people that you’re serving. You need permission to be allowed to improvise, try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures. And you need to be mentored by wise teachers.
Where, I started to wonder, would wisdom show up in the organizational ecosystem metaphor? I stumbled on a good answer in the work of Duke Redbird, an Ojibwe-Canadian elder, poet, writer, and businessperson. Wisdom, it turns out, is in the woods. When we feel like we’re in the weeds, the wisdom we need is up in the tallest of the trees. In a talk given four weeks before the onset of the pandemic, Redbird says of the forest:
The first canopy are the oldest trees that grow the tallest in the forest and protect all the other plants. Among these tall trees are the walnut, the chestnut, the beechnut, and the maple trees. From them we learn wisdom. For example, the meat of the walnut is shaped like the human brain and modern science tells us what our ancestors already knew: that walnuts provide nutrition for the mind along with the sap from the maple tree. Therefore, we call the tallest trees in the food forest the canopy of wisdom.
Suzanne Simard, whose book The Mother Tree I highly recommend, backs up Redbird’s good words, when she says, “forests are wired for wisdom.” There is wisdom, Simard says, to be found in a healthy forest. And as is true in any organization, every element of the ecosystem contributes to making that wisdom possible. The tall trees that make the “canopy of wisdom” cannot exist without all the fungi and insects and berries and bushes that work in their shadows. Wisdom, by definition, embraces imperfection and humility.
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