It happened quite by chance, on a Sunday afternoon. The module I had just finished teaching was centred around managing international marketing teams. A great group of students, long hours spent together that are already becoming a memory.
The heat today is excessive — the heatwave shows no mercy — but you know what they say: it’s precisely in these moments that you bring out your best. So, to be useful, I set about pulling weeds in the garden.
Between one root and another, one thing struck me above all: how some plants came away easily, without effort, perhaps due to roots that were too shallow.
Maybe it was the heat, maybe the fatigue, but right then I recalled a lecture titled Roots of Trust – How a Forgotten Artefact Might Redesign the Future, where the first organisational map in history, drawn in 1855, was presented.
The Power Beneath
Today, when we think of organisations, we inevitably picture a pyramid: those at the top hold the most power. But that map was telling me something different. So I wondered: what if the people with the greatest power — those from whom we expect weight, responsibility, and accountability — were actually the roots of an organisation rather than the leaves at the top? After all, the strength of a plant, just like that of a company, should be measured by how deep its roots go.
And it was at that very moment that I remembered a recent webinar hosted by the Chartered Institute of Marketing, which I had the pleasure of attending, focused on marketing and inclusivity. When asked how to make inclusivity authentic, the speaker emphasised the importance of embedding sustainability at the very heart of the company, in its values.
How to do that? Well, I guess for the sap to circulate, you have to start at the roots. Perhaps from there, new narratives about sustainability could emerge — true, authentic stories we might come to trust again. Because, ultimately, one of the great problems in our society is this: we no longer trust.
Perhaps the time has come to overturn that pyramid of power, too schematic and one-directional to be true, too unreal to be authentic. Like the weeds in my garden, maybe organisations too could draw fresh strength from their roots — deep, invisible, yet capable of supporting everything.
Cover image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Oliver* - * People For Impact 