Plant metaphors: A framework to visualize organizations for systems thinking

A conceptual framework to understand social and financial systems using the anatomy of a plant. Inspired by Wyatt’s metaphor of DNA, trees, fruits, and structural thinking.

🌱 Structure – The Plant

The physical form and configuration of the plant mirrors structural conditions in human systems. How are decision made? When is communication accepted, when is it rejected (Luhmann’s take on society)?

Systems thinking application: “Structure conditions behavior; how we act in a social system. Therefore very important to visualize decision making or structures of power.

🌼 The Garden – Collective Stewardship of Living Projects

Beyond individual plants lies the shared garden — a space where seeds, plants, and relationships coexist, cross-pollinate, and evolve. This garden is not owned, but tended together.

We act like bees, moving between flowers, supporting growth through gentle attention, connection, and care. We pollinate ideas, cross-share nutrients, and help each other’s ecosystems flourish.

The garden holds the seeds of the emerging future we want to grow (Otto Scharmer’s way of phrasing it in Theory-U).

🧬 Ontological Primitives – DNA in the Seed

Projects carry an embedded 🔮 code or essence that unfolds over time, shaping what they become — like DNA that defines the plant’s potential and pattern of growth, structure, and (!) builds the DNA for the plants that are seeded by this very plant.

🌾 Resource Connectors – Roots

The capacity to draw in and distribute resources maps to root depth and reach. Social systems grow differently depending on the density and direction of their resource channels.

🥔 Endowment – Underground Storage Organs

Bulbs, tubers, or nutrient balls below the surface represent long-term stored assets and the capacity to endure, pause, or fund future cycles. These structures embody resilience and slow capital.

🍃 Revenue – Leaves and Canopy

The visible surface that absorbs sunlight — a metaphor for how projects gather attention, generate income, and interact with the broader environment. More surface = more intake.

🔁 Autopoiesis – Living, Self-Recreating System

The plant, as a living being, captures the essence of autopoiesis — systems that sustain and recreate themselves, responding to their environments and internal feedback loops.

–> See 🔮 AUTOPOIESIS-A

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