Dr. Grauer's Column - Earth Day Excerpt: The Forest Wisdom of Nara

Earth Day Excerpt: The Forest Wisdom of Nara
By Stuart Grauer

Some organizations try to heal the way amateurs fight wildfire or do their logging: noise, urgency, overreaction. Forests teach another way.

Years ago, I was sent to Japan to create an exchange with an international school, but the trip turned into a lot more than an exchange. It was more of an immersion. Walking beneath the great trees of Nara, Japan, far from the ivory towers, I started getting acquainted with a kind of leadership older than the leadership and management theory I had been studying at university. Nothing there in the forest strained to impress anyone and the optics were exactly what you saw. Nothing rushed. Towering trunks rising, centuries of gathering, no quarterly demands to live by.

Looking up above, anyone could see the canopy was not built by one tree somehow winning or scoring anything and right then I wanted to create a new leadership and wellness maxim that was just: “Look up.” Leadership was somehow just relationship: roots below, shelter above, light streaming and shared and infiltrating everything, and the strength distributed across the “whole” living system.

In schools, I had seen a lot of the opposite: Leaders pushed for instant transformation through more and more programs. Dramatic announcements. Create a task force. Fix it. Tip the balance through force and rank. We make ourselves exhausted.

Obviously, forests do not grow by spectacle or check lists, and that’s the message for organizations that will sustain and the leaders who will sustain them.  A healthy culture, like a healthy forest, depends on what is protected, what is nourished, what is allowed to mature slowly, and what is cleared away however painful that can be. What Earth Day calls ecology, organizational leaders call culture: a set of universal values we grow and sustain by.

Earth Day was on April 22, and our nation’s leaders have put our forests at grave risk. This is no time to look down. Some 45 million acres of trees are being positioned for logging amid a different set of values: politics, ego, big-money jockeying for short-term gain. Real leaders rising are called to look through the larger lens—values that endure: ecology, stewardship, mutual benefit, and the view from seven generations into the future. Forests ask the same question of us that great institutions do: will we extract, or will we sustain?

Walking through the forest of Nara, I started to understand that leadership was going to be less about commanding growth than about creating the conditions in which sustained growth becomes the most natural thing in the world. Happy Earth Day. Look up.

[Excerpt adapted from The Forest Wisdom of Nara, in The Way to Pancho’s Kitchen by Stuart Grauer]

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