We believe that ‘how’ we are together, informs, nourishes and inspires ‘what’ we can achieve.
Our Philosophy
We believe that a healthy group culture is the ground from which successful projects and thriving communities spring. Formed in the subtle interplay of its attitudes, expectations, and behaviours, and interweaving with its systems of communication, governance, and decision-making, a group’s culture is its life blood, nourishing, inspiring, and empowering its actions throughout its lifespan.
We chose the name "Culture Garden" to describe the practice of creating a supportive environment for groups in which a diversity of healthy cultural forms can grow — as our Mother Tree metaphor supplying extra nutrients, sending messages about changes, and enculturating seedlings to thrive in their particular soil, through their extensive root systems.
Partnership vs Domination
Partnership is an emergent philosophy of leadership, which understands that the best outcomes for any endeavour are the ones that benefit everyone involved. This is based in the synergetic alignment between the multitude of interdependent roles, requiring group cultures to understand how to include and engage their members’ diverse perspectives, priorities, and strengths, in a robust and effective manner.
Many of the cultural systems we have evolved in the West are not rooted in Partnership, but instead have grown from a worldview that creates winners and losers, that enables the fruits of success to be hoarded by the few at the expense of the many, and that inherently resists and fears difference. This worldview is called Dominance. We believe that, in order to truly meet the challenges of our changing world and to become more successful in our group initiatives, we must consciously un-learn Dominance-based patterning and integrate the skillset for Partnership instead.
Challenge & Opportunity
At this moment in time, many of our group cultures are sick. They have become the repositories for outdated relational patterns such as scapegoating, bullying, hierarchy, domination, and separation, which persist unconsciously in our groups’ relational fields despite our best efforts to evolve. Instead of supporting innovation, unhealthy group cultures keep us stuck in old ways of thinking, feeling, and doing. Instead of making us more effective, they create unproductive conflict, role confusion, and anxiety. Many of us feel these impacts in our workplaces and communities, and yet we can have difficulty naming and understanding the source of the problem.
Growing Healthy Cultures
In today’s world, the need to respond to complex social, economic and environmental challenges is bringing people together across lines of difference, and calling for new ways to organise and act together in service of our local communities and the world. The need for practical and versatile skillsets for collaboration – with our friends, families, colleagues, and communities – is greater than ever. However, cultural expectations are developed and carried beneath our conscious awareness and are often more “felt” than “known.” These invisible infrastructures require our attention.
Culture Garden helps groups to learn the skills and practices required to understand and engage with this hidden landscape: to identify the dynamics, needs, and issues at play in their cultural field; to compassionately release patterns that no longer serve their wellbeing; and, to become active participants in co-creating healthy group cultures that express their values and empower their work in the world.
Simultaneously, we support groups to plan and enact the structural and systemic changes over time which allow their healthy group cultures to flourish. This is a multi-dimensional process which can include governance and decision making systems, strength based mapping of the organisational assets and needs, action planning, and role/task descriptions & supportive review processes to name a few structural supports. A healthy culture functions best when it is in a reciprocal and harmonious relationship with these more formal group processes.
We call this practice Culture Gardening.
Our Values
Here at Culture Garden, we are committed to being a testing-ground and showcase for these very skills, and to providing and hosting programmes and events that make them accessible to individuals, groups, and communities across the UK, Europe and North America.
Our own experience has shown us that the hallmarks of a successfully partnering group are connection, creativity, and collaboration; we foster these qualities and values in everything we do.
connection
Connection is like an invisible root system, which links each individuals’ inner journey of self-actualisation with the interactions and activities of the whole. Practicing connection ensures that a group’s outer activities and initiatives support its members’ inner wellbeing – and vice versa – which invokes the powerful synergy of mutual benefit. We’ve seen the ways that this synergy is an invaluable source of energy, inspiration, and guidance for any group.
collaboration
Collaboration is about sharing intelligence, effort, and leadership. This doesn’t mean that every decision or action must be taken collectively; rather, it means we believe that every member of a group has valuable input which can be engaged in different ways in different contexts. We believe that groups are more alive and make better decisions when they use flexible, collaborative systems which draw from the intelligence of the whole.
creativity
Creativity is the process of giving shape, energy, and intention to the vast field of possibility that exists within and around us. By attending to how it nourishes, receives and directs its creative energies, a group ensures that what it creates is well-formed, rooted in its deepest intentions, and responsive to the ever-evolving needs of the world. It can also include its partners, community, and the other-than-human realm in its creative process, unleashing the joy and generativity of a co-creative flow.