Chasing Spring Through Complex Systems

I wrote this on my last day of relaxing and writing on the North Shore of Lake Superior, 250 miles northeast of my home in St. Cloud, Minnesota. When I left for vacation, the trees had a slight green haze around them as their swollen buds began to show their leaves. As I traveled to my vacation spot, the green haze disappeared, and the early signs of spring I had seen at home weren’t apparent. I knew that soon I would experience the reverse, pressing “fast forward” on the unveiling of Minnesota spring.

As I wrote, I wondered what has bloomed at home in the last five days. Will my rhododendron be blossoming? Will the trees have more unfurled leaves? Will more of my spring bulbs be up and flowering? Because that is what Nature does. It keeps evolving, growing, and moving. Nature doesn’t look the same from week to week.

A chance to flow through time

What I like about the idea of “chasing spring” is that the opportunities to flow through time like this are rare. Nature isn’t the same everywhere. Some places have an earlier spring than others, depending on context, latitude, and longitude. This moment of reliving the beginnings of spring can only happen if I travel to another ecosystem in an earlier or later stage of the season’s progress. Traveling north or south in the springtime is a way I can experience this phenomenon.

While spring’s stages may differ, the patterns of how spring evolves can be predictably seen and named. First, the days get longer, and the sun rises earlier and sets later each day. Then, the grass greens, and small shoots of my perennial beds start to show. Early bulbs begin blooming. The buds on trees and bushes swell, and finally, the green haze that promises to turn into whole leaves starts to happen.

Seeing the whole of Spring

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog on thinking holistically. I explained how complex systems must be seen as a whole to be fully understood and appreciated. In complex systems, patterns help us know the system’s dynamics and allow us some probability of what will happen next. Spring is constantly changing, growing, and evolving. It is not static. Nature never is. In broader patterns, we see the dynamics of the complex ecology and it can help us better understand the complex systems within our organizations.

Often, difficult phenomena in our organizations can be easily understood by using Nature as an example and a mentor. When presented with a complex organizational problem, we can look to the way spring unfolds as an intuitive example of how we accept Nature’s complexity. We embrace spring’s changes. While we may not feel comfortable with a human organization that is constantly changing, in Nature, we live alongside dynamic ecology without batting an eye. We see Nature moving, and it doesn’t make us anxious because we accept that it is natural.

What would happen if we applied that to our organizations? To accept and celebrate the living system of organizational life?

When we embrace our organizations as living systems, we unlock possibilities rooted in the same natural principles that guide the seasons. Just as we trust spring to unfold, we can learn to navigate complexity with more grace and trust.