There's something about being in nature that clears our head in a way conference rooms never do. I've asked myself that question many times: what is it about a forest, a riverbank, a windswept hill that invites clarity? Why do our offices never feel like that?
Then it hit me: Nature is coherent in a way organizations rarely are.
When we step into that non-performing, non-pretending space, something softens in us too. We become more porous, a little more vulnerable, and paradoxically, a lot more brave. The same mountain edge that makes you feel small also invites your biggest questions: Where am I headed? What am I building? What would I do if I weren't afraid?
The same environment that makes us soft enough to reflect actually makes us brave enough to risk.
Over the years I've come to call this observation The Nature Principle — and it has everything to do with how we lead, how we build teams, and how we treat failure.
When systems are coherent, honest and functional, people stop performing and start being present. And that presence with softness, curiosity and courage turns out to be the exact soil leadership needs to grow resilience, creativity and sustained execution.
Below I'll unpack what that looks like in practice, why most organizations don't look like forests, and how you can begin to build this culture — with a real example from what we experienced ourselves at Invincible YOU.
When I walk into a forest I notice three things almost immediately:
1. Everything has a function and most parts know it.
The fern doesn’t pretend to be an oak. The moss doesn’t rehearse being a flower. There’s no performance, no image management. There’s a specific function for each, and function folds into flow.
2. Competition and collaboration coexist without posturing.
When nothing is staged and nothing is theatrical, the walls come down. Even we become more porous, vulnerable even. Nature holds both the permission to be fragile and the invitation to be bold. This sets a rhythm where complex beings can co-exist.
3. Failure becomes fuel.
Fallen leaves become soil. Dead trees become new homes. Waste gets repurposed. Nothing is wasted. Everything is compost.
Now imagine bringing that to your organisation. Imagine teams that operate without constant performance anxiety, organisations that treat failures as fuel, leaders who invite the messy truth without punishing it. That’s a radically different operating model to what most of us live in.
In cities and corner offices the opposite tends to happen. There are reasons for this: measurement pressures, investor scrutiny, promotion politics, number projections.
We rehearse. We iterate. We curate. We perform. Yet the behavioral outcome is the same: people hide, they gloss, they defend, and the organization invents workarounds to keep the show going.
When that happens, three things follow:
1. Innovation dies.
People stop experimenting because experiments that fail are seen as missed targets. So teams imitate the known rather than invent something better.
2. Trust thins.
If admitting a mistake costs you status, you'll avoid saying it aloud. Transparency becomes rare.
3. Drift grows.
Decisions are revisited, handoffs break down, ownership disappears, timelines get padded, and the organisation loses its edge — silently and steadily.
That's why "high performance" can feel brittle. It looks good on a dashboard until it collapses under the weight of unspoken friction.
If we took The Nature Principle seriously, a healthy organization would:
• Have clear roles and honest functions, not in formality but in practice. People know their remit and where they add distinct value.
• Build rituals that turn failure into fuel (not blame). Failure becomes compost, feeding the next growth cycle.
• Create safe spaces where inconvenient truths can be named without fear. This is a point where people feel comfortable enough to discuss the uncomfortable.
• Reward experimentation and curiosity instead of "safer" routes that slowly fade away your organization's competitive edge.
• Foster leaders who inspire action rather than command visibility.
Important caveat:
This is not about lowering standards or foregoing accountability. It's the opposite. Standards & accountability becomes higher, as the path to them becomes more cohesive, more inviting, and more creative.
As a starting point, try this small, repeatable ritual:
The Compost Review (monthly, 30–45 minutes)
Purpose of the Ritual:
Surface learning from failed bets and turn them into material for what comes next.
Structure:
STEP 01
Invite leaders to share an objective description of an experiment that missed the expected mark from last month: We tried X. We expected Y. We observed Z.
STEP 02
Encourage others — including the leader who shared — to give their two-minute insight on that experimentation: What did we learn?
STEP 03
You now share one action based on the exchange of thoughts:
How does this feed the next experiment? Who will take the lead?
Rules:
• No defensiveness or blame as the idea once shared belongs to the group, not any individual.
• CEO or leader opens with a failed bet first. That signals permission.
• Keep it short. Keep it practical. Keep it focused on next steps.
The Trust Outcome:
People stop hiding mistakes. They iterate faster. The system gets sturdier because truth is no longer a threat. It's fuel.
I want to make this concrete with something from our own journey at Invincible You.
About 18 months ago we decided: if we're serious about scaling trust and alignment, we need technology. An app could reach more leaders, more teams, in a more persistent way. So we started with what felt right: a long list of future competencies, learning pathways, modules, the whole playbook.
One of the rockstars on my team researched, prototyped, and began stitching ideas into the product. Everything was shaping up as we had planned.
But at an offsite, two smart team members (including the one who was working on the project) said: "We don't feel confident about what we're building."
My first reaction was pure founder indignation:
How can you not see what I am seeing?!
But no. I instead chose to take my own medicine — take a step back, and do what I ask other leaders to do: listen to the team.
I asked:
What would make you believe in this?
Their answer:
"We want to hear voices. We want to actually know what the users want. We want to hear from customers."
So we did. We reached out to many leaders who'd been a part of our coaching sessions, workshop participants, other brilliant coaches & colleagues from the field. We tested prototypes, iterated, listened, and tried again. Slowly, the product evolved — not as our clever vision, but as a response to what real people said they needed. We called the emergent product InSee.
Along the way, every pivot felt like a small death. The team had poured hours into earlier drafts. I felt the weight of their labor. But none of that work vanished. The early competency research found a home in our Coherence Code offering; experiments informed assessments; failed UX ideas inspired better micro-learning techniques.
In short, the effort from the product pivots became the raw material for growth.
The key learning: We were tempted by our own brilliance — building what we thought was smart — instead of fixing the customer's real problem. When we switched to listening, we found traction.
More importantly, when we treated failure as compost, the organisation learned faster, and people stopped fearing the next pivot.
Forests grow stronger over time because they don't waste what went wrong. They recycle it. A fallen leaf or a dead branch simply shifts states and feeds what comes next.
Contrast this with organizational life, where a failed project is quietly buried, or worse, weaponised. People learn to protect the image, not the ecosystem. And ecosystems built on image don't innovate — they imitate. They play safe.
• If you punish failure, you encourage camouflage. Camouflaged problems become crises.
• If you celebrate learning (not failure for failure's sake), you create a bias toward action.
• If you create a structured way to surface what didn't work, you reduce the cost of future pivots.
Instead, seeing failure through nature's lens changes the game:
• Failure becomes organic matter, not organisational shame.
• The system strengthens because it absorbs reality instead of filtering it.
• Teams move from "Who messed up?" to "What does this make possible now?"
This isn't softness. This is ecological intelligence applied to leadership. It's how evolution works — small experiments, repeated variation, and selection.
If you liked The Nature Principle but want next steps, here's a simple checklist to begin your culture composting:
1. Run one Compost Review this month. Go first. Share a small failed bet, and what you learnt from it with your leadership team. See what happens.
2. Declare a no-blame rule. Make it explicit in at least a meeting every month to discuss no justification, only learning.
3. Create a "failed bets" file. A short, searchable list of context, constraints, experiments and outcomes. Over time this becomes the organisation's soil.
4. Model vulnerability publicly. Share one small professional regret at the next town hall. Watch people breathe easier.
5. Pair experiments with accountabilities. Safety doesn't mean no consequence. It means constructive consequence: learn, adapt, apply, share.
There's a layer here that's often missed: the inner work. You can build rituals, but if the leadership team doesn't model inner steadiness, rituals become performative.
This is where we need to pair outward rituals with inward practice.
A leader's capacity to notice bias, own failures, hold ambiguity, and stay calibrated under pressure: Without this, teams learn to hide. With it, teams experiment safely.
It's important to model the behavior you wish the team to mirror. With leaders I've coached, I have noticed this ripple effect where inner coherence built not just stops with the leader, but goes on to inspire the leadership team, and eventually transform the entire organization.
So embed inner-coherence practices for yourself. Get started with weekly reflection, coaching, or silent moments observing the systems thinking at play in nature. It will give you the edge only 2% CEOs will choose to have. It strengthens your "inner trunk" that holds the system together.
In nature nothing is wasted. Fallen leaves are not shameful; they're serviceable. The dead tree is not a funeral; it's a nursery. Failure becomes new life.
If we can build organizations that behave the same way, of serene systems where parts know their function, where decay feeds growth, where leaders model humility and clarity, then work can become a place that adds to us rather than taking from us.
Please know: when we practice this, it doesn't make life easier. Just like scaling a summit, the effort to trek to it is real. But once the rhythm is set, it makes work richer. It makes teams braver and coherent. It makes leaders steadier. And — slowly — it turns the sterile metrics of "output" into the resilient currency of thriving systems.
So my ask: pick one small experiment this week. Run a compost review. Tell your team one thing you got wrong. Then watch what grows.
I'll look forward to hear your experience.
The article is just the starting point. If you're exploring how to apply these insights inside your organization, our team can help you translate the ideas into measurable leadership and culture outcomes.
