The Gardener CEO

Most new leaders inherit a mental model they have never examined. The organization is a system to be designed, and your job is to design it well. Draw the blueprint. Assign the roles. Optimize the machine. If results fall short, the blueprint needs refinement. If people underperform, they need to be fixed or replaced.

This model feels so natural that it barely registers as a model at all. It is simply how leadership works.

Except it doesn't. Not reliably, and not for long.

The developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik offers a different frame. Her subject is child-rearing, not management, but the insight translates. Gopnik distinguishes between two approaches to raising children: the carpenter and the gardener. The carpenter treats a child as raw material to be shaped according to a blueprint. Measure, cut, sand, assemble. Success means the finished product matches the design.

The gardener works differently. A gardener does not shape the plant but tends the environment. Soil composition. Light. Protection from harsh weather. The gardener creates conditions for growth and then watches what emerges. The outcome cannot be fully specified in advance because living things respond to their environment in ways that cannot be dictated.

Here is what makes Gopnik's research unsettling. The carpenter approach, which feels like responsible parenting, often backfires. Children raised under intense "shaping" learn less, not more. When adults provide rigid maps and structured curricula, they narrow the exploration that allows young minds to adapt. The mess and inefficiency of childhood play turns out to be the point. It is how children build the repertoire of responses they will need for a future no one can predict.

The implications for organizational leadership are direct. But the question is not whether to be a carpenter or a gardener. It is knowing which mode fits the challenge in front of you.

Two Kinds of Problems

Ronald Heifetz, who has spent decades studying leadership at Harvard, draws a distinction that clarifies the terrain. He separates technical problems from adaptive challenges.

Technical problems may be complicated, even extremely difficult, but they have a known solution. The expertise exists somewhere. A mechanic can fix the engine. A surgeon can remove the tumor. A consultant can redesign the supply chain. The problem is solvable through the application of existing knowledge. The person with the expertise does the work; the person with the problem receives the solution.

Adaptive challenges are different in kind. No one has the answer because the answer does not yet exist. The situation requires the people facing it to change their beliefs, habits, or ways of working. A company whose market has fundamentally shifted cannot be fixed by a strategy deck alone. A leadership team locked in dysfunction cannot be repaired by a restructuring plan. The system itself has to learn. Outside perspective can be essential here, but the value lies not in providing the solution. It lies in helping leaders see the nature of the challenge and shift their approach accordingly.

Here is the critical point: most leaders treat adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems. They look for the blueprint. They call in the experts. They search for the fix. And when the fix fails, they try a different fix, and then another, growing increasingly frustrated that their organization will not hold the shape they keep trying to impose on it.

The carpenter is perfectly suited to technical problems. When the solution is known, you want someone who can execute the blueprint precisely. But the carpenter, faced with an adaptive challenge, does exactly the wrong thing. They reach for control at the moment when control is the problem.

The gardener is suited to adaptive challenges. When the system itself needs to learn, the leader's job shifts from providing answers to creating the conditions in which answers can emerge.

The Carpenter's Trap

When uncertainty rises, leaders reach for control. The instinct is almost automatic. More process. More monitoring. More plans. It feels like diligence. It feels like doing your job.

But control and adaptation trade off against each other. Every system optimized for efficiency loses flexibility. Every process designed to ensure predictable outputs suppresses the variability that produces unexpected solutions.

Heifetz uses a vivid image. The leader who tries to solve adaptive challenges with technical means is like a doctor who treats a patient's symptoms while ignoring the underlying disease. The symptoms keep returning. The interventions grow more aggressive. The patient grows weaker. Eventually, the doctor concludes that the patient is the problem.

This pattern is everywhere in organizational life. A CEO inherits a culture of silos and infighting. They restructure. The silos re-form around the new structure. They restructure again. Same result. After several rounds, the CEO concludes that the organization is resistant to change, when in fact the organization was never given the chance to change. It was given new blueprints to resist.

The carpenter's tools cannot solve adaptive problems because adaptive problems are not problems of design. They are problems of learning. And learning cannot be imposed from outside. It can only be cultivated from within.

What Gardeners Actually Do

Let's be clear about what the gardener metaphor does not mean.

It does not mean passivity. Gardeners work constantly. They test soil. They adjust nutrients. They protect vulnerable growth from threats. It does not mean avoiding hard decisions. Gardeners decide what to plant and what to pull, what to nourish and what to let die. A garden that is never pruned becomes a thicket. It does not mean abandoning strategy. Gardeners have intentions for their gardens. They select varieties, design layouts, plan for seasons.

The difference is where the work happens.

For technical problems, the work belongs to the expert. For adaptive challenges, the work belongs to the people with the problem. The gardener's job is to create conditions in which that work can occur. This is Heifetz's most counterintuitive claim. The leader's task is often to give the work back.

What does this look like in practice?

Regulate the heat. Adaptive work requires discomfort. If people are too comfortable, they will not change. But if the distress is too high, they shut down, flee, or turn on each other. The gardener's job is to keep the temperature in the productive zone. Enough heat to motivate change, not so much that it overwhelms the system's capacity to learn.

Protect voices from below. In most organizations, the people closest to the problem have information that leadership lacks. But speaking up is risky. The gardener creates cover for dissent, amplifies marginal voices, and resists the pressure to silence discomfort. The signal often comes from the person everyone wishes would stop talking.

Get on the balcony. Heifetz distinguishes between being on the dance floor, caught up in the action, and being on the balcony, observing patterns from above. The gardener moves between both. Close enough to sense what is happening. Far enough to see what it means.

Resist the pressure to provide answers. When anxiety rises, people want the leader to tell them what to do. The pressure is immense. The gardener holds steady, reflects the question back, and lets the discomfort do its work. This is not abdication. It is discipline. The moment you provide the answer, you have taken the work away from the people who need to do it.

Knowing Which Mode You're In

The carpenter is not wrong. The carpenter is limited.

For genuine technical problems, you want decisive expertise. Clear direction. Efficient execution. The surgeon in the operating room should not be facilitating a dialogue about whether to make the incision. The blueprint should be followed precisely.

The failure mode is applying carpenter logic to adaptive challenges. And the signal that you are in adaptive territory is that the technical fixes keep failing.

A few diagnostic questions:

Is the problem solvable by experts, or does the organization itself have to change? If you could hire someone to fix it, it is technical. If the people inside the system have to learn new ways of working, it is adaptive.

Are you treating the same problem repeatedly? Recurring problems that resist expert solutions are almost always adaptive. The recurrence is the signal.

Are people waiting for you to provide the answer? If the room falls silent when you enter, expecting you to decide, consider whether you have been colluding in a technical fiction. Sometimes the most important thing a leader can do is disappoint people's expectations at a rate they can absorb.

Is there conflict about the problem itself? Technical problems have shared definitions. Adaptive challenges often involve disagreement about what the problem even is. The conflict is not a barrier to progress. It is the work.

The Work Ahead

Most new leaders arrive with momentum to prove themselves. They want to show they can deliver. The pressure, internal and external, is to act. Make decisions, set direction, demonstrate control.

But the first question is not what should I do? It is what kind of problem am I facing?

If the challenges are genuinely technical, be the carpenter. Provide expertise, set clear expectations, and execute the plan.

If the challenges are adaptive (and the most important ones usually are) then the work changes. Your job is not to have the answers but to create conditions in which answers can emerge. To regulate heat. To protect dissent. To resist the seduction of the quick fix. To give the work back.

This is harder than carpentry. The results are less visible. The timeline is longer. You cannot point to the blueprint and say, look what I built. You can only tend the conditions and trust that the living system will find its way.

Gopnik's research on children ends with a similar insight. The parents who try hardest to shape their children often produce adults who are brittle, anxious, and poorly adapted to the unexpected. The parents who create rich environments and then step back, who tolerate mess, who allow exploration, who resist the urge to optimize, produce children with the resilience to handle a future no one can predict.

The gardener plants for harvests they may never see. This is not passivity. It is a different kind of faith. The conditions matter more than the blueprint, and living systems, given room, will grow toward something better than anyone could have designed.