Business is a lot like farming.  Both require patience, resilience, and a willingness to invest up front with no guarantee of return.  Both are influenced by unpredictable external forces and ever-changing market conditions.  

In the mid 20^th century, both business and farming became more industrialised.  The global industrial food production system is now complex and intertwined across continents and commercial networks. (This infographic provides a useful if daunting image).  The modern ‘Green Revolution’ has improved yields and increased access to nutrition for billions of people.  However, some unintended consequences include environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, and increased exposure to chemical fertilizers and pesticides.  

To counter the toxic side effects of such large-scale industry, many people are turning to sustainable agriculture approaches.  Terms such as ‘regenerative agriculture’, first introduced in the 1980s by Robert Rodale, and more recently ‘adaptive stewardship’, coined by Understanding AG, refer to the practice of nurturing farmland so that it retains and improves its vitality and soil health, leading to better outcomes for grazing animals or crops.  These approaches are being applied to industrial farming as well as to small-scale organic farms.  

Understanding AG identifies ‘three rules of adaptive stewardship’: 

1. The rule of compounding: positive effects create more positive effects; consider both short- and long-term effects of decisions to maximise positive impacts and minimise negative impacts. 
2. The rule of diversity: monocultures are less healthy and resilient than environments with a broad diversity of species; consider ways to attract a variety of organisms and species to build a stronger eco-system over time. 
3. The rule of disruption: nature is robust and challenges to the environment can stimulate new life and greater productivity; consider constructive ways to disrupt the environment to build strength and endurance through adaptation.

Reading these, I was struck by their relevance to organisational life:

1. Strong businesses compound their positive outcomes: Like the soil, organisational culture can be renewed or destroyed by the compounding effects of leadership and behaviour – for better or worse. Leaders must take deliberate actions to maximise positive cultural traits and address negative ones. Companies must steward their internal environment so that people can flourish.  
   
2. Successful businesses cultivate diversity: Monocultures, whether in agriculture or business, are less healthy and resilient than diverse environments. Like soil health, organisational health must be nurtured through fostering diversity of thought, life experience, skills and aptitudes. 
   
3. Sustainable businesses innovate continually: Constant and unrelenting stress isn’t good for anyone, whether humans or cattle.  At the same time, just as exercise builds strength by challenging muscles, thoughtful organisational disruption can build resilience and creativity through creating opportunities to test new ideas.  

A recent article applied the term ‘adaptive stewardship’ to the role of directors in providing for an organisation’s future, citing research conducted by the Adelaide Business School.  Boards and senior executives must be prepared to adapt to changing circumstances to ensure sustainable long-term outcomes rather than short-term gains.  

Much like nurturing the soil to ensure ongoing crop yield, directors must consider what needs to be nurtured in the organisation to ensure its ongoing performance and effectiveness.  

We will continue to need industrial agriculture to feed the expected 10 billion people who will inhabit the earth by the late-21^st century.  There is an imperative to develop sustainable practices that steward the earth’s bounty.  We will also continue to need large corporate structures to provide the goods and services we need.  There is an imperative to develop sustainable organisational practices that retain space for human ingenuity.   

Businesses, like farms, exist within an environmental system. Systems thinking is required to adapt to environmental challenges and to steward organisations into the future.  Here are three ways to apply this to your organisation:

1. Undertake an environmental scan: what is healthy and thriving within your organisation? What threats or disruptors outside your organisation are emerging, and how can you minimise their impact and maximise the potential for growth?
   
2. Expand the diversity of voices contributing to strategy: who is missing around the table when strategy is being designed?  Whose voice could provide a new insight or a different perspective? 
   
3. Consider creative disruption: in what ways can your organisation exercise its intellectual and creative muscles to develop new ideas or practices?  How can your business sharpen its resilience through curated risk-taking?

Wendell Berry once wrote of the potential for regeneration:

… the soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest,
And under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.

Consider how you, as an organisational steward, might harness the potential within your own enterprise to create an environment conducive to growth.  What potential is lying under the pavement of your organisation, dreaming of what it could be? 

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