Making Haste Slowly—An Organizational Lesson from Plants

John Trexler takes the long, long-term view

Normally I wouldn’t expect an obscure botanical garden 40 miles outside of Boston to yield up some perspective shifting wisdom, but maybe I just don’t hang with trees often enough. An ever-so-brief break in the nasty winter weather recently led Lani and I to join some friends at a place called Tower Hill that sits on a hillside overlooking forests and a lake. It's a place that thinks about things in half-century increments.

Tower Hill has a bunch of botanical buildings with peaked roof that house orange trees, tropical plants and other inviting stuff. There’s a 200-year old farm house, and formal gardens with spouting fountains, that extend along the spine of a hill. The place’s motto is “make haste slowly” (or festina lente for Latin hounds). And taking a tour led by the head honcho of the place, a prickly 59-year-old named John Trexler, I began get an idea why. Instead of just pointing out what was there, he constantly talked about how the place would look 15 years down the road. That building would be replaced, over here a quadrangle would be complete, saplings would become full trees, and a row of small shrubs would become a thick wall of green.

Tower Hill is in year 22 of a 50-year master plan. Compare that to the time frame of most other things you come in contact with. Organizations have yearly or quarterly goals, and long-term could mean a few years away. People may plan a few years down the line, but we have a habit of getting caught up in the short-term stuff.

Lani, Cheryl and David check out the Orangerie

Two decades ago, each employee and volunteer at Tower Hill was working toward something that they were unlikely to live to complete. Not only that, but they couldn’t have foreseen all sorts of things that might get in their way (climate change, regulations related to handicapped access, changes in technology, etc.) What kept them there was sharing in very clear and specific vision...and a willingness to bet on the future working out. And to an extent, that’s still true of the employees we saw on Sunday.

Some thoughts

• Make haste slowly: There’s a place for balancing urgency and careful, slow-paced diligence.
• Bring on the Big Vision: Having a tightly defined big idea of where an organization is going—one that’s shared—makes it much easier for those involved to make incremental progress.
• The limits of the Big Vision: Let’s face it, for most people I know (including me) life often defies planning. As an individual it's too easy to get stuck on whether your own master plan is working out. For me, the personal change takeaway from Tower Hill is about pacing. Rather than pushing for change to happen immediately, you've got to allow it to develop in its own time frame, even if that's a period of years.