Working in the Gaps
Author: Todd Hoskins Issue: 2023-05-03
Working in the Gaps
by Todd Hoskins
The question I often get asked when sharing that we’ve moved to Central America is, “What type of work do you do that allows you to live in Costa Rica?” I may take a walk through the jungle each morning, but I spend all day on my laptop and phone, on Zoom and in Slack, like most of the Plex readers I know.
Canopy Gap, the name of the company I launched in 2009, is a phenomenon that happens in forests. Somehow the light must penetrate the top of the canopy for growth to occur on the forest floor. The forest as a system, facilitates growth in the canopy and the understory at the same time, partly because of canopy gaps. Gaps form because of tree death, crown shyness, and creatures like the monkeys here that break off branches and eat leaves. Some science suggests that mycelial networks also encourage growth limitations for the sake of the forest.
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I love the metaphor that systemic growth requires coordination, and this growth is not one-dimensional, as trees must root down as well as stretch into the gaps. Beneficial, mutual growth serves the individuals and the whole. I love forests, and getting to live in dry forest jungle gives me a different appreciation for their complex interactions.
Canopy Gap as a company was originally intended to be a strategy consultancy, looking for those spaces for growth. But then after a few years, I started to become disenchanted with strategy. It seemed like the best ideas, the best plans, and the best people did not always lead to the best results.
This disenchantment coincided with a correlating curiosity in living systems, network science, and interpersonal dynamics. Without even recognizing it, I became less of a consultant–guiding people on what to do, and more of a facilitator–assisting with process, and discovering new ways of working and relating. I eventually found the industry that we had stumbled into–Organization Design–was a perfect place to build capacity in people and teams, and put into practice all of my learning and experiences.
If you don’t know much about Organization Design, I would encourage you to check out what’s happening, especially on the edges of the industry. I have a lot of respect for Percolab, Opus, Innate Motion, Whole Partnership, August, Nobl, and The Ready. They are making the world of work more adaptive, creative, and in sync with life.
I recognize I have a tendency for telling people what to do, a quite common trait of consultants. But I didn’t want to be a consultant anymore. Especially as a white, straight, middle-aged man, it’s not my ideas or plans that are needed or best. We need more participation and more voices. We need more facilitators for building diverse capacity in people and systems.
It hasn’t been an overnight change from consultant to facilitator, from pushing and pulling to walking alongside (just ask my wife), but it is more deeply satisfying.
The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock—more than a maple—universe.–Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
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