The Forest Lens: How I See Everything, All at Once
Forget managing trees; the deeper opportunity is understanding the forest ecosystem. "The Forest Lens" equips you with "Biome Intelligence" to listen to a system's heartbeat, not just its outputs, and sense shifts before they become crises. It's about seeing the living story of an organization and its greater biome, allowing for ecological foresight
Most people see a product. A team. A roadmap. A quarterly metric.
But what if, instead of just a company or a product or a market, we saw a forest?
Not a purely metaphorical one. A living, breathing biome. One with old oaks and tiny seedlings. With bear trails and fungal networks. With broken branches, brittle roots, and new growth pushing through moss. Some see their job as managing the trees. But the deeper opportunity is to understand the ecosystem.
Organizations are living systems with memory, trauma, potential, and interdependence. This lens - the one that sees not just parts, but patterns - is what I call Biome Intelligence.
What Biome Intelligence Is
Biome Intelligence is the capacity to perceive an organization - and its products, people, history, habits, health, and future - as an interconnected ecosystem.
It draws from pattern recognition, systems thinking, cultural anthropology, and strategic sensing. But it's not academic. It's embodied. It’s a way of listening to the system’s heartbeat, not just its outputs.
And the forest doesn’t end at the tree line.
Biome Intelligence also listens beyond the boundary - into the terrain that surrounds the system.
The markets shifting like seasonal winds.
The customers migrating in groups, searching for safety, clarity, or better nourishment.
The regulatory changes, the economic droughts, the technological wildfires just over the ridge.
Because the forest may be healthy, but still unprepared for what’s coming next.
When this intelligence is activated, we stop asking, "What’s broken?" and start asking, "What wants to grow here? What’s failing to thrive - and why?"
This isn’t about fixing systems like a mechanic. It’s about tending them like a forest caretaker who knows which saplings need shelter, which trees are dying for a reason, and where the bears go when the salmon don’t return.
A Crisis Averted: The Y2K We Didn't See Coming
It was our own little Y2K problem. Silent. Hidden. Months from impact.
While onboarding at a tech company with a public sector integration, I reviewed legacy spec documents that defined how record identifiers were structured. There, buried in plain sight, was a 7-digit number; a primary identifier that would roll over to 0000000 once it hit 9999999.
At first glance, it might have seemed like a technical detail. But Biome Intelligence doesn’t just read specs - it reads origin stories. And the stories I’d gathered from early team members, about anything from old engineering choices to ops hacks, all pointed to a foundational truth: the original builders hadn’t anticipated this system living long enough to encounter rollover. Their priorities had been different. The soil they planted in was thin.
Plenty of smart, capable people had read those same specs. But the combination of product archaeology and pattern inference led me to suspect the problem wasn’t accounted for. So I dug deeper.
By tracking growth rates and querying system usage, the risk became undeniable. A failure event was coming. One conversation with engineering confirmed the absence of safeguards. When the executive team learned what was looming, they were stunned.
This wasn’t luck. This was Biome Intelligence in action: sensing something before it's visible. Preventing a crisis that would've looked like "nothing happened" to anyone else.
What This Lens Reveals
Biome Intelligence invites us to ask questions most people skip:
Who built this product? What were they optimizing for?
Who thrives within the system? Who quietly suffers?
What does the codebase whisper about its past?
What do the campfire stories reveal?
Where does the system resist change? Where is it already evolving?
This lens maps:
Product, people, process, and power
Origins and outcomes
Morale and mythology
Decision patterns and delivery breakdowns
What’s visible, and what’s held underground
And then it listens.
It listens for weather patterns in morale. It traces root rot back to organizational trauma. It notices the overgrowth where no pruning was done, and the scorched earth where pruning became purging.
It knows the old oak that still holds the forest together. It knows which rabbits keep the energy moving. It knows which fungi are more valuable than anyone realizes.
This is how we begin to see the living story of an organization.
And we also begin to see how that story fits within the greater biome: the customers it serves, the pressures it absorbs, the opportunities it’s not yet rooted to reach. Because an organization doesn’t just live - it adapts. Or it doesn’t.
Why It Matters
Most dysfunction isn’t malicious. It’s unseen.
When we see a company as a machine, we try to fix what’s broken.
But when we see it as a forest, we recognize: some things are decaying for a reason.
And some roots need mending, not replacing.
Biome Intelligence lets us:
Diagnose without blame
Forecast without fearmongering
Align teams without coercion
Find leverage without force
It’s not about control. It’s about stewardship.
What Comes Next
The next essay in this series explores foresight.
Because when we understand where a system began, and where it stands today, we can draw a line.
And that line? It shows us where the system is headed.
Foresight isn’t magic. It’s ecological and basic geometry.
Written for the stewards who sense the shift in the soil before the storm.
Explore the Full Series
The Forest Lens: How I See Everything, All at Once
Living Systems Foresight: How to Draw the Line to the Future
Published on:
Jun 9, 2025