There are a lot of community building lessons from trees that we can (and should) apply to our worklife. Here is an example of how trees take care of each other:
A few years ago my book club read The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, which is a mind-blowing exploration of how trees communicate, strategize, think, and feel. Our Copy Editor, Godfrey, hosted the meeting and we co-wrote this piece. Humanity has a lot to learn about what it takes to build healthy communities that are sustainable for the long term. Trees, as it turns out, can teach us a lot about such things. Here are five community building lessons from trees.
Take the long view
Modern work life overvalues speed and growth at all costs. Rapid growth produces dazzling outcomes, but it can also be harmful because it means an organization focuses on too many priorities or a neighbourhood’s health and safety is compromised because so many cars clog unready streets. Here’s how Wohlleben explains the long-term impact that comes from humanity’s short-term thinking:
Even when you make a thinning and just cutting one of the other trees and leave, for example, 50-percent of the trees untouched, this social network is destroyed. When you do it like this, you make a tree changing from a social being to single. Those trees suffer. They don’t get very old. For example, a Beech may grow as old as 400 years and when you make a thinning in such a forest, this Beech will die at around 200 years, nearly half the age which is natural.
“A business ecosystem is an economic community of organizations and individuals that interact in countless ways,” explains Fast Company’s Faisal Hoque. “These ecosystems encourage companies to evolve their capabilities competitively.” By imagining our workplaces and neighbourhoods in decades instead of weeks we can begin making more thoughtful and sustainable choices.
Put down roots
Trees put down roots to extract nutrients and water from the soil, sending them channeling upwards into the trunk and right out to every leaf. But this isn’t the only purpose that a tree’s roots serve. The delicate hairs on the end of its roots seek out fungi, whose threads intertwine with not just those roots, but also those of others. In effect, a tree’s roots are the starting point for an interconnected network enabled by fungi. Each tree can now communicate with others allowing them all to exchange vital nutrients.
Diverse communities are smarter and stronger, sure. The affect of multi-tree root systems, however, takes collaboration to another level – as leaders we can reflect on how we might develop truly connective relationships with our colleagues. As more work happens remotely or thanks to temporary gigs, the challenge of building authentic and hyper-connected communities with deep roots is greater than it has ever been.
Foster inter-generational connections
Trees can teach us a thing or two about inter-generational understanding. Young trees like nothing better than to grow quickly – stretching their limbs out as wide and as quickly as possible to soak up the sun. Fortunately for them, their wiser parents, who tower above them and form a canopy, shield them from heedless size-building and reckless expenditure of precious resources. Canopy cover in a deciduous forest is so dense that it only gives new saplings three per cent of available sunlight. It’s barely enough to keep them alive.
Without such strong, inter-generational community building, trees often grow recklessly and, unfortunately, live much shorter and less healthy lives. To emphasize this point, Wohlleben introduces the concept of “street kids”:
Urban trees are a special thing. Urban trees are like street kids without parents. They can grow as they want to grow, and in a metro forest, in a primeval forest, those old mother trees didn’t rely down to three percent, so the little ones may produce just as much sugar that they don’t die, but not more. They are not allowed to grow in the first 200 or 300 years. In the street, they get from the first day on light as much as they want. They can grow, they can produce sugar as much as they want and they grow in a very unhealthy way, very, very fast.
Curbing this kind of behaviour in service of the community’s greater purpose is just what the tree needs – a quasi period of gradual gestation that allows it to build an incredible strong core, making it resistant to storms and hardy enough to withstand fungi and disease. Sounds harsh, but science has shown that slow growth when a tree is young is a prerequisite if it’s to survive and reach a ripe old age.
Knowing how to engage multi-generational teams is essential for community-building in our work life. As a Millennial, I struggle a bit with the idea of being held down – as a manager of a multi-generational workforce, it makes sense to focus on the unique, individual needs of my teammates while simultaneously setting a clear vision for how each person’s development aligns with our goals and purpose.
Embrace supportive reciprocity
Trees do well when they stand together because they depend on their forest, their neighbours, and their extensive tree community to weather whatever nature throws at them. Incredibly, new research is showing that trees have the ability to communicate via chemical signals when danger is near or when a community member is struggling. This supportive network of information exchange through underground intertwined root systems, electrical signals passed through networks of fungi and also via pheromones in the air. Their fungal connections can send chemical signals for miles around ensuring that every tree in the forest puts up the same level of defense to ward off pests, disease and insects. When weaker trees aren’t able to feed themselves stronger ones divert water and energy – again via their interconnected root systems – to keep them alive.
Trees intuitively understand that communities are stronger and more resilient when we work together in service of a collective purpose, as oppose to just looking out for our individual or niche needs. Knowing why you’re in something together drives the best outcomes for all sorts of communities.
Be mysterious
For everything we’ve discovered about trees – things as seemingly implausible that they communicate with others via fungi and electrical impulses – they still have a few secrets that they prefer to keep from us. The biggest mystery of all is how they actually draw water from the ground up into their solid wooden truck and out to the leaves. Is it through capillary action, transpiration? Or, is it something else altogether? No one really knows.
According to Psychology Today’s Scott Barry Kaufman, human beings are drawn to the unknown because it engages our capacity for curiosity and focuses our thinking on what could happen (especially when it comes to cultivating interest from new friends or romantic partners): “When it comes to seduction, it seems one of the most potent forces is the allure of the unknown.” Leaning into what makes us mysterious brings to life qualities that are not only deeply human, but also wonderfully tree-like.
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Most of this article was originally published on October 6, 2018.