Why Farming Tools Don’t Work in Wild Forests

When you walk through a managed tree farm, there’s a certain order to it. The trees are planted in neat rows, evenly spaced, growing straight and tall. They are cultivated for predictability and yield. There is little undergrowth, no wild diversity, and no surprises.

Walk into a natural forest, however, and the experience is entirely different. Trees are tangled and uneven. Some are old giants, others are just beginning. Fallen trunks create mossy corridors, fungi and insects thrive in hidden places, and seedlings of every kind compete for the dappled light. It is not orderly, but it is alive.

This contrast captures one of the great challenges in business today: knowing when we are in the realm of the complicated versus when we are in the realm of the complex.

The World of the Complicated

In the manufacturing world, where I spent much of my career, the aim has often been to treat the world as complicated rather than complex. Complicated means that things can be broken down, analysed, and controlled. If you have enough data, tools, and processes, you can predict outcomes.

Factories are designed like managed tree farms: standardised, ordered, and shielded from uncertainty as much as possible. When something goes wrong, root cause analysis can usually trace the issue and lead to a corrective action. It’s not easy, complicated systems require expertise and discipline, but it’s ultimately a world where cause and effect can be known, and solutions can be engineered.

This mindset has dominated organisational life for decades. The larger the organisation, the more it can buffer itself from volatility through sheer scale and structure. And in many contexts, it works.

The World of the Complex

But small and medium-sized businesses don’t have the same insulation. We live in a world that is increasingly complex: shaped by interdependencies, global events, political shifts, and social currents that ripple unpredictably.

In complexity, there is no clear cause and effect. The same action taken twice may lead to completely different outcomes. You cannot plan with precision. You can only experiment, sense, and adapt.

In my own business, I’ve had to shift from building blue-sky visions that were executable in a complicated domain, to nurturing parallel experiments in the complex domain. Instead of deciding on “the right answer” upfront, I test multiple seedlings at once. Some falter, some survive, and occasionally one takes root in a way I could never have predicted at the outset.

This is uncomfortable. It requires patience. It requires admitting that we don’t know, and may not know, until we try.

Emergent Vision

The biggest shift for me has been in how I think about vision. In a complicated world, vision can be designed: a clear destination, a roadmap, a sequence of steps. But in a complex world, vision must emerge.

That doesn’t mean having no direction. It means holding identity and values as anchors, while allowing the shape of the future to reveal itself through experiments, interactions, and feedback loops.

It’s humbling work. I’ve learned that my own worldview can limit me, and that vision must be shaped not just from my perspective, but through conversations, context, and connection. In complexity, the forest speaks back, and if I don’t listen, I risk growing the wrong canopy, which ultimately won’t survive.

The Soul of the Forest

And this brings me back to the metaphor of the forest. A managed tree farm, for all its order and efficiency, is not the same as a wild forest. It lacks the richness of diversity, the resilience that comes from interdependence, and, in some ways, the very soul that makes a forest alive.

For small businesses, this matters deeply. We don’t have the scale to behave like industrial tree farms, nor should we want to. Our strength lies in our diversity, our adaptability, and our connection to something living.

So yes, we must manage complexity with discipline and tools. But above all, we must hold onto the soul of our forest: our identity, our values, our relationships. That is what gives life to the canopy, and what sustains us through the storms and uncertainties.

How do you balance structure and order with the wild, unpredictable life of your business forest? Have you found ways to hold onto your “soul” in the midst of complexity?