A few years ago I found myself explaining Team of Teams to a room of R&D leaders, and one line stuck with everyone: the world isn’t complicated, it’s complex. And those are not the same problem.
General Stanley McChrystal makes the distinction well. A watch is complicated. Take it apart, study the gears, and eventually you master it — that’s what he calls a “complication.” But complexity is different. It’s the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon and somehow shifting weather patterns on the other side of the planet. Nobody masters that. You can’t take it apart and put it back together.
And that’s exactly what leadership looks like now. Your team, your customers, your competitors, the regulators — they’re all butterflies. Every move creates ripples nobody predicted, some that help you, some that don’t.
So here’s the question I keep coming back to: are we trying to be clock builders, when what the moment actually needs is a gardener?
A clock builder wants mastery — tighter tolerances, better specs, total control of the mechanism. A gardener can’t control the weather, the soil, or which pests show up this year. So they do something different. They build conditions for things to thrive, and they stay close enough to notice when something needs help.
A few things I think leaders can borrow from that:
Stop drawing mechanisms, start tending ecosystems. An org chart is a watch diagram — boxes, lines, gears. A garden doesn’t work like that. Every plant plays a few roles at once, and those roles shift with the seasons. The leaders I respect most spend their energy on the health of the whole system, trusting that people and teams will grow well inside it.
Shape more, control less. Watchmakers chase precision — exact tolerances, perfect tension. Gardeners mostly watch. They prune or feed only when something actually needs it, and they resist the urge to fiddle just because they can. That restraint is harder than it sounds.
Stay curious, always. Something is happening in a garden every single day, and a good gardener wants to know why — why this plant is struggling, why that one’s thriving. Over time that curiosity becomes real judgment, the kind you can’t shortcut. Good leaders build the same instinct: pattern recognition, paired with genuine curiosity about what’s different this time.
There’s something comforting about believing we can master and control a situation. But I’d argue the leaders who last are the ones who’ve let that go — who use their judgment and experience to nurture something alive, rather than trying to perfect something mechanical.
What’s your instinct — are you building a watch, or tending a garden?