What heathland ecology taught me about complexity, monocultures, and resilience.

Are we accidentally creating monocultures?

Anyone who’s been following my work for a while will know this already, but I want to name it explicitly.

I’m deeply proud of the fact that I work on the Ashdown Forest.

Not as a backdrop. Not as a wellbeing add-on. But as an active presence in the work itself.

Choosing heathland as my nature co-facilitator was no accident.

Heathland is complex, ancient, and often misunderstood. It’s layered. Interdependent. Slightly unruly. It refuses neat solutions. And it only works when multiple, sometimes competing needs are held at the same time.

Which makes it an unusually good environment for thinking about leadership, organisations, and human systems.

I spend my days working with complexity. It makes sense to do that work inside a landscape that embodies it.

Before I go any further, one thing to say clearly: for the purposes of this piece, I’m going to talk quite a lot about diversity and inclusion. But this principle applies far and wide. It applies to leadership, culture, strategy, change, ecology, economics, and how we organise ourselves more broadly.

This is really a piece about what happens when we simplify living systems — and what we lose when we do.

I’m going to ask you to bear with me while I geek out a little on heathland management. This isn’t a metaphor. It’s a lesson in how systems survive.

Heathland isn’t about maximising one thing

When people hear “Ashdown Forest conservation”, they often assume it means planting trees.

More trees. Taller trees. Denser woodland.

Because it’s called a forest, after all. (Side note: forest doesn’t actually mean woodland — it comes from ancient hunting land.)

In heathland management, that assumption is simply wrong.

Lowland heath is one of the rarest habitats in Europe. It locks in significantly more carbon than woodland. And many of the species that give places like the Ashdown Forest their protected status cannot survive if woodland is allowed to take over.

So a surprising amount of conservation work here involves actively managing woodland back to stop it encroaching on heath.

Not because trees are bad. Not because woodland doesn’t matter. But because no single habitat is more important than the system as a whole.

This can look counterintuitive. Even destructive, if you don’t understand what you’re seeing. But heathland doesn’t function if one element dominates. Optimising for one variable collapses the conditions the wider system needs.

No part of the system is optional

Healthy heathland is not one thing. It’s a mosaic.

Low heath. Mid-height scrub. Open, disturbed ground. Woodland edges. Wet patches. Dry, exposed areas.

Different species need different conditions. Some need cover close to the ground. Some need height. Some need edges. Some need disturbance.

And here’s the part that matters most to me.

Dartford warblers rely on stonechats to flush insects. Silver-studded blue butterflies rely on ants to complete their life cycle. Woodcock rely on disturbance, grazing, and the right soil conditions to feed and breed.

Insects rely on plant diversity. Plants rely on disturbance, grazing, and soil health.

You get the idea.

Everything relies on everything else.

Nothing thrives in isolation. No one part is more important than another, and you cannot strengthen one without attending to the rest.

This is often misunderstood in conservation. People assume we’re prioritising certain species over others. In reality, the work is about creating the conditions in which all of them can coexist — because without that, none of them survive.

Sometimes in heathland management, a project looks like it has “failed”, only for something else something we weren’t explicitly targeting to thrive. That isn’t failure. That’s the system responding.

Where in your own work have you written something off as failure, when it may have been adaptation?

Management is not control. It’s relationship.

Another misconception is that conservation is about preserving nature as it would exist with no human intervention.

It isn’t.

Heathland, in particular, is a human-shaped landscape. Historically, it existed because people interacted with the land in ways that created variation and disturbance.

Bracken was pulled for fuel. Cattle grazed and trampled the ground. The land was compacted, opened up, reshaped.

Those interactions created difference. Different heights. Different conditions. Space for life to adapt.

Today, we’re trying to mimic some of that complexity in a world that no longer behaves that way. We intervene not to impose order, but to stop the system collapsing into something simpler, poorer, and less resilient.

There is no final “right” state. Only ongoing adjustment.

This is where my thinking about organisations begins.

Monocultures are seductive

In nature, monocultures can be beautiful.

Uniform woodland. Symmetry. Predictability.

Think pine plantations. Vast single-species forests. Fields of a single crop stretching to the horizon. Landscapes that photograph beautifully and look calm, ordered, and productive — while supporting surprisingly little life.

They are also fragile.

More susceptible to disease. Less adaptable to change. More vulnerable to collapse when conditions shift.

And to be clear - monocultures are not inherently wrong.

In nature, they can make sense for a time. After disturbance. During recovery. When a particular condition needs stabilising.

The same is true in human systems.

In organisations, focus can be necessary. Simplicity can be kind. Shared language can help people move quickly or feel safe.

The problem isn’t monoculture itself.

It’s forgetting that it is a phase, not a destination.

Where is simplification genuinely helping right now — and where might it be limiting resilience?

Monocultures in organisations

In organisational life, monocultures are everywhere — often invisible to the people inside them.

Sometimes accidentally. Sometimes in the name of efficiency. Sometimes in the name of culture. Sometimes in the name of clarity.

One leadership style. One way of communicating. One definition of confidence. One idea of “gravitas” or “executive presence”. One proof point of success.

Teams where everyone has followed a similar educational path. Leadership groups that reward speed and certainty, but quietly sideline reflection, dissent, or care. Cultures that value fitting in over thinking differently.

Even when organisations talk about diversity, they can still end up optimising for sameness — just with different faces inside the same narrow conditions. Many teams do the equity work, but never get close to inclusion.

It looks functional. It feels aligned. Until it isn’t.

What behaviours are being selected for in your system - and which ones are being squeezed out?

Where this thinking was forged for me

This isn’t abstract.

When Emma Plowman and I created the The Diverse Directors Programme, one principle sat at the heart of everything we designed - and it has flowed into everything I now do through Thorp Coaching.

We didn’t want to build something for a single group.

We wanted to create a space for anyone who felt othered in board and leadership environments.

That included women, yes. But also people navigating multiple, overlapping differences at the same time.

Gender identity. Neurodivergence. Race. Socio-economic background. Career background. Accent. Visibility. Invisibility.

Identity doesn’t arrive in neat, single-variable boxes.

Someone might be female and neurodivergent (hello). Or non-binary in a deeply traditional sector. Or highly competent and still perpetually on the margins because they didn’t go to a red-brick university.

Our intent was not to simplify that complexity, but to hold it together in one room.

Not because it was comfortable. But because that is the reality people were preparing to step into.

Boards are mixed spaces. Power is mixed. Difference does not politely queue.

The design question for us wasn’t “who do we exclude to make this feel safer?” It was “how do we create a space that can hold difference without flattening it?”

And I won’t pretend that was easy.

People triggered each other. Assumptions were challenged. Discomfort was real.

But they also came out stronger. With more empathy. A deeper understanding of difference they may not have lived experience of. And better prepared to face the monocultures of the world as it actually is.

That has stayed with me.

When complexity became inconvenient

Emma and I are not currently delivering the group Diverse Directors Programme.

Not because the work didn’t matter. Not because the outcomes weren’t powerful.

But because holding that level of complexity - properly, ethically, and with care is hard. And without funding or meaningful support from larger organisations, we couldn’t continue to make it happen in the way it deserved.

If I’m honest, it’s hard not to experience that as a failure at times. And still, I stand by the decision.

When it became clear we couldn’t continue to run it ourselves, and we weren’t able to secure the funding needed to support it, we offered the programme to several large organisations with the scale and resources to take it on.

They declined.

For a variety of reasons. But what I’ve come to understand is this:

this level of complexity — the kind that genuinely shifts systems — rarely sits at the heart of organisational priorities.

As much as we may wish otherwise, sometimes the sticking plaster is all that can be tolerated.

And that’s okay.

It’s okay to want something simpler. Cleaner. Easier to explain. Easier to contain.

But we need to be clear about the outcomes of those interventions and honest about their wider impact on the system they sit within.

Choosing simplicity doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act. It doesn’t mean the intervention has no value.

But it does mean we hold an awareness of the trade-offs.

In ecological terms, we wouldn’t intervene in one part of a landscape without considering the knock-on effects elsewhere. The same is true in human systems. Every choice sets off a chain reaction.

We can absolutely choose a more contained, single-focus approach.

We just need to be conscious of what it strengthens, what it weakens, and who or what it may leave behind.

That’s not judgement. That’s systems thinking.

Because this is how monocultures form.

Not through bad intent. But through quiet decisions to simplify what feels hard to hold.

Is isolating difference really preparing us for the real world?

This is where my certainty drops away and something more uneasy takes its place.

So much work around diversity and inclusion focuses on isolating one dimension at a time. One identity. One shared experience.

Sometimes that is necessary. Sometimes protected space matters.

But if we have the opportunity to create a heathland, why create a monoculture?

If the environments people are expected to operate in are mixed, complex, and full of competing perspectives, is learning in single-intersection spaces actually preparing them for that reality?

Or are we rehearsing leadership in conditions that don’t exist outside the room — conditions that might feel supportive at the time, but teach very little about how to stay present, influential, and human in the real system?

In ecological terms, it would be like trying to protect one species by removing all the others — then expecting it to thrive when reintroduced.

That’s not how resilience is built.

When does protection become an echo chamber?

I’m increasingly unsure about how helpful it is to keep designing development experiences that separate people into ever-narrower categories.

Not because identity doesn’t matter. Not because lived experience isn’t real.

But because systems don’t change in isolation.

When we group people only with those who share a single intersectionality, we remove friction. Challenge. Misalignment. Difference that forces adaptation.

We also remove the opportunity to practise something essential: staying present and influential in mixed spaces.

If coaching or training is meant to prepare people for the real world, is doing that work only in protected environments always the best place to practise?

I don’t think the world needs leaders who feel confident only in rooms that mirror them.

We need leaders who can create heathland — who can hold difference, model inclusive leadership, and stay engaged when things feel messy.

Diversity without interaction is still fragile

This is the thread I keep returning to — in the forest and in organisations.

Protected species do not survive without unprotected ones. Heath does not survive without woodland. Woodland does not survive without disturbance.

Nothing survives without relationship.

And yet, so much of our diversity work removes relationship in the name of safety or simplicity.

We create neat containers. Clear categories. Controlled environments.

They can feel supportive. They can feel affirming. They can also become echo chambers.

I believe every intervention we design should also ask: who and what might this leave behind?

Everyone matters. Everything matters.

Yes, this is harder. Yes, it’s messier. Yes, it’s dreadful for marketing copy.

But it’s important.

Complexity isn’t the problem. It’s the reality.

I work with leaders who are already inside complexity. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help them.

Nature doesn’t optimise for neatness. It optimises for adaptability.

It doesn’t solve by simplifying one variable. It survives by holding many things at once.

Which brings me back, again, to the question I can’t quite let go of:

Where are we accidentally creating monocultures?

I don’t have a neat answer.

But I think learning to ask that question and staying with it might matter more than we realise.