What’s your garden’s purpose?
🐝 Is it for the kids to play football on?
🐝 Somewhere to park the car?
🐝 To give guests a fragrant approach to your door?
🐝 To be come more self-sufficient and grow vegetables?
Every garden is different, based on what you need it to do for you.
If you intend to use it as a place to hang your washing out, you can’t have it as a holding pen for your wheelie bins.
Culture is exactly the same.
We need to understand what it is that we want our groups and organisations to be famous for. What is our purpose? Where are we heading?
We can then decide whether our metaphorical garden needs slabbing or turfing.
Whether it needs flower borders or veg planters.
How to spot when something is or isn’t working.
But we must also remember that your garden is going to happen – with or without your nurturing.
If it’s left to its own devices, you have almost no control over what it does; what grows where and what doesn’t.
Unpicking that overgrown, naturally-developed environment then becomes a huge endeavour, compared to if it had been constant, small nudges towards a specific goal.
If it had been designed and nurtured purposefully.
Like gardens, culture happens by design or by default.
Design is always better.
