RAINFOREST

The Amazon rainforest borders nine countries and encompasses 2,100 square miles (5,500 square kilometers) of the South American continent. Brazil, Peru, Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and Cayenne (French Guiana), join to form the rainforest perimeter. It is an ecological masterpiece akin to a vascular system, nourishing the mountains, valleys, and dense foliage. The network of over one thousand rivers spread across the territories of the Amazon, breathes life into a complex organic canopy, sheltering the most diverse array of animal and plant life in the universe. Tiny frogs, strange lizards, massive rodents, frightening amphibians, reptiles, exotic mammals and birds, all live in a shifting harmony. The apparent incongruencies of each specie’s quest for birth, through metamorphosis, maturity and rebirth, converge in the ecological marvel that is referred to as The Lungs of the Earth.

The rainforest ecosystem is a rich metaphor for diversity in your organizations and its teams. Your organization’s mission is best realized in a polarity of agreement and disagreement. This metaphor underscores the necessity to engage in and resolve conflict in service of a complex whole that is greater than the sum of its parts and central to the viability of the whole system that makes up your brand and business.

Your organization, large, small, multi-national, regional, mature or start up, is a biodome of sorts. It requires interdependency, innovation and creativity necessary for viability within the context of a competitive market environment, which, in turn, is also a whole system with diversity and interdependent challenges.

Your teams can weave a fabric of organizational culture with tensile strength open to the opportunities, surprises, and requirements of the business environments. Marketing, sales, design, product, and engineering can flourish beneath an organizational tent built on the foundation of interdependence and inclusion. Optimization of creativity and innovation in talent and resources can deliver results that is accretive.  The diversity of teams, their capabilities, thinking styles, contributions and solutions to challenges, can unite to become The Lungs that breathe life and vibrancy into the complex organic system that is your brand and business.