Innovation Is Growth Management: Lessons from the Garden

We've been thinking a lot lately about how we talk about innovation. Too often, it’s sold as this flashy, disruptive thing—something you bolt onto a system to make it shinier, faster, or more impressive. But that’s not how it works in real life, at least not in the work we do.

Innovation isn’t a lightning strike. It’s growth management.

Let us explain.

Imagine an organization as a garden. You’ve got soil, seeds, sunlight, water—each representing different parts of your system: people, processes, leadership, tools, values. Innovation isn’t just planting new seeds and hoping for the best. It’s understanding the whole ecosystem.

Sometimes innovation is pruning.

You walk through the garden and see that something once beautiful is now overgrown and crowding out new growth. You don't throw the whole plant away—you shape it. You create space. You redirect energy.

Sometimes innovation is soil testing.

You notice some parts of the garden aren’t thriving. The seeds are good, the water’s flowing, but something in the foundation isn’t quite right. So you dig in. You test. You amend the soil. Maybe it's trust, maybe it's workflow, maybe it's a mindset that needs shifting.

And sometimes, innovation is letting something rest.

In a garden, you don’t plant in the same spot year after year. You let the soil breathe. You rotate crops. In organizations, that means allowing time for integration. For people to catch up. For the culture to metabolize the changes. Innovation isn't always more—sometimes it’s less but better.

Growth, when it's unmanaged, becomes chaos. It overwhelms. Weeds pop up. The garden stops feeding the people it's meant to nourish. But when growth is managed with care, intention, and respect for the ecosystem? That’s when innovation becomes sustainable. That’s when it sticks.

At the end of the day, innovation is less about introducing something new and more about creating the right conditions for what's possible to emerge.

So, the next time someone talks about innovation like it’s a quick fix or a shiny product, think of the garden. Real innovation is patient. It’s messy. It’s alive.

And it grows.