You Can’t Work From the Limb If You Don’t Trust the Trunk
Picture this: People out on the limbs on a bright sunny day, curious and experimental. Creative risks happening everywhere. Then the wind picks up, and suddenly everyone’s clinging, terrified, to the trunk.
I saw this image while reading Brené Brown’s new book Strong Ground. She writes about the tension between operational excellence and creative experimentation, what James March famously called the “plumbing and poetry” that leadership requires. On calm days, she says, she might go out on a limb, ask questions outside her expertise, take creative risks. But when the wind starts whipping around? “I’m hugging the tree trunk.”
Brown’s question is the right one: how do we normalize working from the limb?
But my mind went somewhere else. I thought about my own orchard, the one I’ve been tending for five years, and the hard lessons those trees have taught me about what makes creative risk-taking even possible.
Here’s the thing: you can’t work from the limb if you don’t trust the trunk. And whether people trust the trunk has everything to do with how the tree has been grown, or neglected, or damaged, or forced into shapes it was never meant to hold.
Before we can answer Brown’s question about normalizing risk, leaders need to ask a different one:
What kind of tree (organization) are you growing and how are you growing it?
The Decaying Tree
When I got my property, two apple trees were already there. Established. Mature. Producing a large number of apples every season. I’d inherited something that was already working, and it felt like a gift.
But as the years passed, I noticed a pattern. One of the trees kept losing secondary branches. Every year, when the weight of the apples got heavy, a branch would snap off. The first year, I didn’t think much of it. Trees lose branches sometimes. But when it kept happening, year after year, I started paying closer attention.
I tried thinning the fruit, thinking maybe the load was just too much. It didn’t help.
Then I looked closer at where the branches had broken. Fungi was growing out from underneath the bark.
The tree was decaying from the inside. The trunk that looked solid, the tree that was still producing fruit, was actually being hollowed out. I wouldn’t know how bad it was until a branch broke under weight that should have been easy to bear.
Which it did. Every year.
This decay made me think of organizations I’ve encountered where the damage came from how power was used. Sometimes by the current leader. Sometimes by leaders long gone, but whose impact still echoes through how people learned to protect themselves.
It happens slowly, invisibly. From the outside, everything looks fine. The company has revenue. It has employees. It’s producing. But inside, trust has been hollowed out.
People learned, through watching how leaders react, through seeing what gets punished, through accumulating small betrayals, that the trunk isn’t safe. Maybe speaking up meant being shut down. Maybe asking for help was treated as incompetence. Maybe someone who challenged a bad decision was pushed out, and everyone else took note.
Here’s what this means for the people who work there: You can’t take creative risks when the very foundation might give way.
They’re not hugging the trunk out of fear of the wind. They’re hugging it because they’re not sure it will hold them at all. And no amount of encouraging them to “be more innovative” or “take smart risks” will change that calculation until someone addresses what’s rotting beneath the bark.
The hardest question for a leader who inherits this tree: Is the rootstock still healthy? Can you cut back to sound wood and start fresh? Or has the decay gone too deep?
And if you’re the leader who caused the decay, through misuse of power, through broken promises, through valuing performance over people, the question is even harder: Are you willing to do the long, humble work of rebuilding trust? Or will you keep expecting the tree to bear weight it can no longer hold?
The Transforming Tree
There’s a practice in orcharding called grafting. You take a cutting from one variety (the scion) and attach it to the rootstock of an established tree. The goal is to get the fruit you want while leveraging a root system that’s already mature.
It sounds elegant. Efficient. Smart.
Here’s what most people don’t realize: it’s delicate and unpredictable.
The scion and rootstock have to be compatible. The timing has to be right. The cut has to be clean, the cambium layers aligned, the graft sealed and protected. And here’s the part that catches people off guard: the tree will keep trying to grow from its old patterns.
You’ll see shoots emerging from below the graft line. The original variety trying to reassert itself. If you don’t prune those away, they’ll take all the energy. The new growth you wanted will starve.
If you’re leading transformation, you’re grafting new capabilities onto existing systems. New ways of working onto old culture. Innovation onto operational excellence.
And here’s what that actually requires: constant, disciplined attention. Not a one-time intervention, but ongoing pruning to redirect energy away from old patterns and toward new growth.
What makes it hard is that the old growth isn’t bad. Those shoots from below the graft line aren’t diseased. They’re the tree doing what it knows how to do. The systems that got you here. The processes that worked in the past. The cultural norms everyone’s comfortable with.
But if you let them run, the transformation fails. The new capabilities never establish. You end up with a tree that’s confused about what it’s trying to be, and people who are exhausted from the dissonance.
I’ve seen this play out in organizations that announce bold new directions while leaving all the old incentive structures in place. That talk about psychological safety while still punishing failure. That say they want innovation while rewarding only flawless execution.
The tree keeps trying to be what it was. And unless leadership is willing to do the patient, persistent work of pruning away the old patterns, even the ones that feel comfortable, even the ones that still work okay, the graft never takes.
Transformation isn’t graft and walk away. It’s years of tending the relationship between old and new until they become one system.
The Baby Tree
The third tree in my orchard is the one I planted myself.
I chose the rootstock (the foundation that determines disease resistance, size, and hardiness). I chose the scion (the variety that determines what fruit I’ll eventually harvest). I planted it, staked it, protected it from deer and harsh weather.
And then I had to decide: How would I tend it?
There are two schools of thought in orcharding. The traditional approach is control-based. Use chemicals to kill any bugs or diseases that threaten the tree. It’s effective in the short term. But it also kills the good bacteria, the beneficial insects, the ecosystem that helps the tree develop its own defenses. You end up with a tree that’s dependent on constant intervention, that can’t weather storms on its own.
The newer approach is resilience-based. Strengthen the tree’s own immune system so it can ward off threats itself. Feed the soil. Support beneficial organisms. Build the tree’s capacity to handle whatever comes. It’s slower. Less predictable. But it produces trees that can actually weather a storm.
I chose resilience.
Here’s what the research says about young fruit trees: the first four to five years are the most critical. This is when you train the structure. You prune annually, not dramatic interventions, but consistent, patient shaping. You never remove more than 20% in a year; any more and you shock the tree, set it back.
And here’s the hardest part: you don’t expect significant fruit during this time.
You’re investing before you harvest. You’re building structure that will hold weight you can’t yet see. You’re building resilience into the system itself. You’re making decisions based on what you believe will be true in year ten, year fifteen, year twenty.
The baby tree is the most hopeful scenario. It’s also the one that requires the most faith.
You’re doing the work without seeing results. You’re trusting that if you tend consistently, if you shape patiently, if you resist the urge to force early production, you’ll eventually have something strong and productive and sustainable.
Most leaders don’t have that patience. They want fruit now. And so they skip the structural work, push for early production, and end up with a tree that looks impressive for a few years but can’t sustain itself over time.
And when they tend, they tend through control rather than building resilience. They eliminate every sign of conflict. Remove every person who struggles. Intervene at the first hint of difficulty. They create organizations that look perfect on the surface but can’t weather storms because they’ve never developed their own capacity to handle challenge.
I think about this when I work with founders building something new. The temptation is enormous: to take any client, to say yes to anything that generates revenue, to hire fast and figure out culture later. The market rewards speed. Investors want traction.
But there’s also the temptation to over-control. To remove anyone who makes a mistake. To eliminate productive conflict in the name of “culture fit.” To protect people from struggle rather than building their capacity to handle it.
If you skip the structural work, if you don’t invest in clarifying your values, building systems that can scale, developing people who can lead, you’ll get fruit for a while. And then, when the weight gets heavy, when the wind picks up, something will break.
The baby tree asks a question most leaders don’t want to answer: Are you willing to invest years in structure before you harvest? And are you willing to build resilience rather than dependency?
Because if you’re not, you’re not actually planting a tree. You’re building something temporary and calling it a foundation.
The Cleared Orchard
There’s one more scenario. The one I find most troubling.
In established orchards, when growers want to change varieties (maybe the market has shifted, maybe a new apple is trending), they sometimes take a dramatic approach. They cut all the trees down to stumps. Then they graft the new variety onto what remains.
It works, in a way. The root systems are already mature, already established. The new growth comes fast. You can get to market quicker than if you’d planted from scratch.
But think about what this actually is.
It’s clearing the orchard without any assessment of what’s there. No evaluation of health. No consideration of potential. No curiosity about what these trees could produce if anyone bothered to tend them. Just: the market wants something different, so we’re cutting it all down and starting over.
The speed is real. The root system does support fast growth.
But something is lost that can’t be measured in time-to-market.
The knowledge embedded in those trees. The years of adaptation to that specific soil, that specific climate, that specific ecosystem. The relationship between the tree and the land that produces fruit with particular character, particular flavor, particular resilience.
The fruit that might have come if anyone had bothered to tend what was there.
This is the leader who sees the organization only as a means to an end. The people, the culture, the capabilities that have been built? None of it matters except as rootstock for whatever the market wants next.
I’ve watched this happen. Companies acquired and gutted. Teams rebuilt from scratch because the new leadership didn’t want to understand what was already there. People treated as interchangeable resources rather than as carriers of knowledge, relationship, and context that took years to develop.
It’s efficient, in a certain frame. But it’s also an admission: I’m not interested in tending. I’m interested in extracting.
And you can’t build anything lasting on extraction.
What Kind of Tree Are You Growing?
Brown is right that we need to normalize working from the limb. That the tension between poetry and plumbing is real, and that pressure makes us retreat to safety.
But you can’t work from the limb if the trunk is decaying from within.
You can’t graft new capabilities without years of tending the relationship between old and new.
You can’t harvest fruit you haven’t invested the patient years to grow.
And you can’t build anything lasting if you’re willing to clear-cut the orchard every time the market shifts.
Before you ask how to get your people to take creative risks, ask yourself: What kind of tree are you growing?
What has the tending been, or the neglect? What’s the health of the trunk they’re being asked to trust? What are you optimizing for? Speed to market or something that can hold weight for decades?
The wind will always pick up eventually. The question is whether you’ve grown something that can hold.
I stand in my orchard now, five years in, and I see all three trees clearly.
The decaying one still stands, for now. I’ve let it produce, knowing each season might be its last. But this summer, something unexpected happened. A new shoot emerged from the rootstock, a few feet from the original trunk. The root system, it turns out, is still healthy. Still strong. Still choosing to grow.
I’ve been protecting that shoot. Tending it carefully. When it’s ready, I’ll graft it (maybe even with a cutting from the original tree), preserving what was good while starting fresh from sound wood.
There’s grief in knowing I’ll eventually cut down the old trunk. But I’m heartened by this: the tree itself is showing me there’s life still in the foundation. That decay in one place doesn’t mean death everywhere. That something strong can grow anew from roots that were never the problem.
The grafted tree is thriving, but only because I prune those shoots from below the graft line every single spring. It’s tedious work. Essential work. The work that makes transformation possible.
And the baby tree? No significant fruit yet. Just strong branches, good structure, the patient promise of what’s coming.
Some days I wonder if I’m doing it right. If I’m investing in the right places. If the patience will pay off.
But then the wind picks up. And I watch which trees hold, and which ones don’t.
And I know.