Somewhere along the way, we started treating everything as a problem to be solved. A brand: solved. A team: solved. A customer: solved. A life, optimized, hacked, fixed. And when the fix doesn’t hold, we assume we simply haven’t solved it hard enough yet.
But some things were never problems. They’re gardens.
Systems scientists draw the line sharply. Sending a rocket to the moon is complicated. Enormous, but solvable: master the parts, follow the plan, and it runs the same way twice. Raising a child is complex. As Sholom Glouberman and Brenda Zimmerman put it, raising one child gives you experience but no guarantee with the next. Expertise helps and is never enough because every child is singular, and has to be met as one.
A watch is complicated. A garden is complex. And almost everything we truly care about, a brand, a business, a culture, a person, a city, is a garden. You don’t solve a garden. You don’t debug it, ship it, close the ticket. You tend it. It answers back, changes, surprises you. Cultivate is a verb, and it never finishes.
Here’s what fascinates me, after decades doing this: reaching for the wrong tool isn’t stupidity, it’s built into how attention works. The psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist argues that the brain’s two hemispheres attend to the world in two different ways. Not the pop “logical left, artistic right,” but two modes of attention: one narrows in to grasp and manipulate the parts, brilliant for the rocket, while the other opens out to the living whole, the only mode that can meet the garden. A healthy mind uses both. But our institutions, our metrics, our tools reward almost only the first. So we bring rocket-thinking to a child, and call the child broken when it won’t comply. In the last essay I called that designing for half a human being.
No wonder branding ends in -ing: it was always a verb. And it’s where I watch this hurt a lot. Treated as a complicated problem, a brand becomes a deliverable: “solve the logo, solve the palette, ship the guidelines, done.” But a brand isn’t a noun you deliver. It’s a verb you cultivate, the slow, living thing that grows between a company and the people who come to trust it. The architect Christopher Alexander called it the “quality without a name,” the aliveness a place has when its parts fit in harmony. He wrote that when you build in the timeless way, a town “will grow under your hands, as steady as the flowers in your garden.” He meant buildings. He could have meant brands, teams, or a well-lived life.
None of this means abandoning rigor. You still need the rocket-mind to build the trellis: the budget, the operation, the numbers that keep a living thing alive. It means knowing which one you’re holding, and in what order. The trellis serves the vine, never the other way around. In decades of this work, the question I’ve been asked most often is some version of: when will it be done? And that is the whole confusion, in five words. The most expensive mistake I see, over and over, is a garden handed to someone who only knows how to solve. Whatever is human, and for humans, needs synapses to be complete.
So maybe the real question, before any strategy, is the quiet one: is this a watch to be solved, or a garden to be tended? You can solve a watch. A garden, you can only grow. That isn’t a limitation. It’s the whole art.
Just me, thinking out loud, from the garden.
Written and designed by humans, for humans. 💜
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Referências:
• Sholom Glouberman & Brenda Zimmerman. Complicated and Complex Systems: What Would Successful Reform of Medicare Look Like? Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, 2002.
• Iain McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press, 2009.
• Christopher Alexander. The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford University Press, 1979.
• Zorzo, L. Independent researches, classes and ZORZO® proprietary materials.