Tangled Minds, Organised Forests

At TO FOCUS, we understand what it means to live with a tangled mind.

It can feel like walking through an ancient forest - not planned, not planted in neat rows. A wild variety of thoughts and ideas, twisting this way and that. Beautiful, but overwhelming.

There are days when structure is needed. Predictability. Efficiency. Like a managed plantation: tidy, controlled, everything in its place.

But the deeper we work with the metaphor of soil, tree, and forest - a model we use often in regenerating broken systems - the more we see the value in tangledness.

Not just as something to tolerate, but something to welcome.

Because regeneration isn’t about control. It’s about life. Wild, unpredictable, interdependent life.

The truth is, much of today’s leadership - especially in large organisations - is still rooted in plantation thinking. A mindset that began as early as 19th-century Germany, when foresters tried to tame nature into neat, predictable rows of identical trees. Rational. Measurable. Productive.

But those forests - though tidy - were ecologically fragile. Lacking diversity. Vulnerable to disease. Slowly dying from within.

And so too are many of today’s organisational cultures: efficient on the surface, but disconnected, inflexible, and brittle underneath.

What we need now are leaders who work from a different place.

Not from the blueprint of a plantation, but from the living wisdom of a forest.

From entanglement - the understanding that everything is connected, everything is in relationship, and nothing truly thrives in isolation.

In a living forest, there’s a role for both the straight line and the winding path. Sometimes we need a clearing - a shared focus, a patch of sunlight. But often, we need to allow growth in unseen, sideways, underground ways.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that many of those drawn to regeneration, sustainability, and climate leadership also live with neurodiverse perspectives. We’re used to navigating the uncertain. We’re used to not fitting into boxes.

And that’s exactly what this moment demands.

We don’t need one way of thinking - we need a forest of minds.

Minds that can sense-make in complexity. Sit with ambiguity. Resist over-simplification. Minds that know you cannot force a tree to grow in just one direction.

Forests are not bonsai collections. They are not charts, dashboards, or metrics alone.

They are living systems - held together by relationship, pulse, pattern, and story.

As AI and automation increase, the most valuable skill may not be technical at all. It may be the ability to hold space in the unknown. To read the ecosystem. To trust that not everything must be measured or managed to be meaningful.

Because sometimes, life grows best when it’s allowed to get messy.

What might grow in your organisation if you stopped pruning for performance and started cultivating for relationship, resilience, and possibility?

Warm regards,

Mark