Working With Natural Patterns
This is Post 2 in a series of 8 sharing the integrated view that underpins my leadership coaching and strategy advisory work. You can read Post 1 here.
As an engineer, I was trained to believe that technical solutions could fix any problem. If something wasn't working, we just needed a better design, a more efficient process, a smarter approach. Although this felt off from the start, it took me years to learn in detail just how wrong that view-point is, and what to do about it.
Working on the commercial towers at Barangaroo South in Sydney brought this tension into full view. Everything looked perfect on paper. The technical solutions were elegant, the systems well-designed. But when it came to implementation and the impact on communities, something felt off. While the project did ultimately support many positive outcomes, it also led to displacement and the further gentrification of water-front real estate for the benefit of a select few.
Learning from Nature
This experience reminded me of something I'd noticed watching my sister Sara grow and develop. Sara was born with Pitt Hopkins Syndrome, though did not get diagnosed until she was 23. Where medical experts saw limitations to overcome through intervention, she showed our family a different way – one of natural development that couldn't be forced or controlled. (As we'll explore in the next post, this development was enabled by Mum's responsive presence and attention to Sara's actual needs.)
While experts focused on the words and categories they'd created – diagnoses, developmental milestones, treatment plans – Sara was simply being. She was a complex system adapting in organic, responsive ways to her environment, finding ways to thrive that defied predictions and plans.
The contrast with my engineering work was stark. In engineering, I was trained to reduce everything to simple, controllable components. I learned to create elaborate models, and was taught that we could predict change in any setting and impose our view of what is best for a system from the outside through plans and specifications. But Sara showed me that real development happens through direct engagement with life, not through our abstractions about it.
Forces of Development
Long before I had appropriate language, I knew in my gut that life – the sum total of what complexity science calls complex, adaptive systems – is governed by invisible forces guiding it's continual unfolding. Over time, I developed the sense that this unfolding progresses through the interaction of forces we normally resist or deny.
In my early engineering projects, every successful innovation emerged through the dance between different forces. The drive to create something new would meet the constraints of budget, materials, or regulations. At first, these constraints felt like obstacles. But gradually, I noticed how they often led to more elegant solutions than we might have found otherwise.
Years ago, the folks at Regenesis Group helped me understand this in more depth through what they called the Law of Three, drawing on the work of G.I. Gurdjieff. Every new development, they explained, emerges through the interaction of three forces: activation, restraint, and harmonisation (or reconciling).
I saw this playing out everywhere. The very constraints that seemed to limit us often became the force that enabled real innovation. But only when we learned to work with them rather than against them.
This was obvious in an early engineering project (the Plumbing Industry Climate Action Centre's Net Zero Energy Narre Warren facility). Rather than running a traditional design and procurement process, I advocated for the use of an *integrative* approach to design. In effect, the client, the architect and I identified and shortlisted 3 potential contractors, then chose one to go through an 8-week design sprint with. We met for a half day workshop every Friday, working to understand the forces surrounding the project and bringing far more perspective than would typically be available at this stage of a project to the table to harmonise those forces.
The outcome was the first educational building in Australia to use a ground source heat exchange system integrated with the structural foundations, which in turn cut costs and energy use such that we delivered a Net Zero Energy building (i.e. that sells at least as much energy to the grid as it draws) for the same cost as the client expected for a building-code minimum building.
Harmonising Creates Meaningful Growth
When these forces are harmonised appropriately, meaningful growth is the result.
By meaningful growth, I mean growth and change that is meaningful to the system in the sense that it contributes to the expression of vitality (i.e. the unique expression of health from each part of the system) and increases viability (i.e. the degree to which the system is adaptively embedded within its context).
These forces that facilitate growth aren't abstract. They're as real as gravity. We can experience them in our own body, and learn to see and work with them skillfully.
Try to lift an unconscious person and you'll feel their true weight, yet we experience our own body as nearly weightless. As toddlers, we gradually learn to harmonise gravity's restraining force with our muscles' activating force. When these find dynamic balance – visible in a skilled handstand – we achieve effortless coordination, and a whole new landscape of possibility in our relationship to our world is revealed.
It's about learning to see and work with forces that are already exerting themselves on us and our world, creating new possibilities in ourselves, our communities, our businesses and our world.
Safety: The Foundation for Growth
Over time, I noticed something else: meaningful development only happened when people felt safe enough to engage with challenges creatively. Without basic security, we default to protective – and mostly unconscious – patterns that might help us survive but prevent us from thriving.
In practice, I've seen this play out in countless ways. Teams that feel secure in their basic stability are more willing to experiment with new approaches. Leaders who know their core competence is valued feel more able to lead from intuition, acknowledge uncertainty and learn from mistakes.
This shows up differently at different levels of an organisation. At the individual level, it might mean knowing your role is secure even if an initiative fails. At the team level, it's about having clear processes that provide structure while allowing for creativity. At the organisational level, it might mean maintaining enough financial stability to enable innovation without being paralysed by short-term pressures.
At an interpersonal level, it is about our nervous system and neurobiology.
We are fundamentally social organisms. We are designed and adapted to scan for social safety, and have a host of built-in mechanisms to re-orient us to social safety and security if we perceive the environment isn't safe enough.
Today, many organisations attempt to lead their staff through patterns of control and subtle forms of manipulation. Our nervous system senses this and will respond in adaptive ways that ultimately reduce the cohesiveness, creativity and effectiveness of the group. Put simply, it wastes energy managing people's nervous system and neurobiology rather than focusing on delivering a shared outcome.
I saw this in my own development as a leader. Only when I felt secure in my expertise and the value I brought to the table could I begin to explore the messier, more ambiguous aspects of leading people and navigating change. That in itself required that I understood the patterns that led my neurobiology and nervous system to become what it is today, diving into my history and past, as well as patterns in my relationships today.
The Dance of Safety
Particularly for those that have experienced trauma (which I have), it can be tempting to seek absolute safety before acting.
This is not about seeking absolute safety, but about learning what safe enough feels like.
It is a continual dance – sensing our environment, sensing our internal world in response to what we perceive and responding with wisdom and skill.
In general, we perceive threat on subtle, unconscious levels. Something feels off. We become scattered. Our gut tells us someone isn't to be trusted. These signals are hard to put into words. And they're usually valid.
One of the major problems in organisations I see today is they either invalidate or do not value these sensors exquisitely built into each person contributing to their mission.
While this requires emotional intelligence to prevent these cues being weaponized, learning to sense and skilfully respond to them is one of the biggest things any organisation can do to improve their effectiveness.
Working with Tension
This understanding transformed how I approached every aspect of my work. In organisations, I started noticing how tensions naturally arise between different needs and forces:
At the individual level, people navigate tensions between:
Their drive for creative expression and the need to coordinate with others
Personal growth aspirations and current role requirements
Work commitments and life balance
At the team level, tensions emerge between:
Speed of delivery and quality of output
Individual autonomy and team alignment
Innovation and reliability
At the organisational level, we see tensions between:
Short-term results and long-term development
Centralised control and local autonomy
Stability and adaptation
These tensions aren't problems to solve – they're the very forces that enable growth when we work with them skilfully.
Broader Implications
What I've learned through this journey has implications far beyond individual development or organisational change. Most of the fundamental challenges facing business and society today are complex, adaptive challenges that can't be solved through technical solutions alone.
Addressing these challenges require us to work with rather than against natural patterns of development – patterns that most of the time we aren't making the effort to sense. When organisations prioritise stability at the expense of adaptation, they often default to predictable, off-the-shelf solutions. While these might look good on paper, they frequently fail to address real-world problems in meaningful ways.
More importantly, they leave staff and collaborators feeling uninspired and disconnected from their work – creating exactly the kind of environment where genuine innovation becomes impossible.
Leading from Understanding
This journey has fundamentally changed how I think about leadership. Rather than seeing it as a position of control, I've come to understand leadership as the capacity to create conditions where natural development can emerge, and to offer our unique contribution in service to the creation of those conditions.
While we aren't individuals in any true sense, this work requires that we're able to notice and adapt to our own internal process and dynamics. The alternative is being guided by them unconscious, impacting the world around us reactively in a way we have little awareness of let alone control over.
I've had to learn to work with my own tensions – between my analytical mind's desire for certainty and the need to embrace ambiguity and my emotional landscape, between my drive for change and my need for stability. These aren't problems to solve but dynamics to work with creatively.
The more I work with leaders and organisations, the more I see how this understanding becomes crucial for addressing our most pressing challenges. Whether we're trying to navigate market changes, develop new capabilities, or contribute to solving systemic problems, our effectiveness depends on our ability to work with rather than against natural patterns of development.
Moving Forward
In next week's post, we'll explore in more depth how tension serves as a guide in this process of development, and how presence and attention are key to working with tension skilfully.