LF25 Part 3 of 3 - The Garden and the Gourd: Biophilic Wisdom in the Midst of Leadership Frustration

Jennifer Diamond
May 14
5 min read

From the Conference Room to the Garden Gate

I left Living Future 25 with a head full of systems, urgency, and disappointment—not at the event, but at the deja vu. The conversations were good. Some were great! The people were smart, and some were brilliant. The intentions were solid, the innovations real.

And still, the themes felt eerily similar to ones we’ve held for over a decade: persuasion fatigue, political delay, civic disinvestment.

So on the way out of Portland, I did something deliberate.

I went to a garden.

Specifically, I stepped into Lan Su Chinese Garden, a place where 16th-century design principles meet Pacific Northwest light. Nestled in the heart of downtown Portland, Lan Su offers something rare: an oasis of long thinking inside the city’s noise and edges. Following Jason McClellan's morning talk, I had just about two hours before catching my train back to Seattle—but in that time, the pace of my mind changed entirely.

It had been my plan to go. I went looking for nothing in particular. What I found was something I hadn’t realized I needed: a reframing.

I sat under the trees with a pot of ripe pu’er tea and a bowl of tofu congee, the kind you can only fully appreciate when your body is ready to slow down. The leaves shifted above me. A fat koi fish hovered on the bank of the tiny lake. I shot a full minute of footage of that fish, not because I needed content, but because I needed proof that stillness was still available.

This wasn’t a break from leadership. This was leadership, re-patterned.

Not just a change of pace. A change in posture. A deeper, older sense of what it means to lead in tension.

The Gourd-Heaven Concept: Awe as a Leadership Resource

Lan Su was built around ancient Chinese garden design philosophies, many of which are grounded in Taoist and Confucian principles. One idea in particular caught me: the concept of "gourd-heaven".

In traditional garden design, a gourd-shaped doorway often leads to a microcosm—a walled garden space, intentionally small, that opens into something expansive. The space is not meant to impress with scale, but with imagination.

It is designed to hold the awe of the infinite inside the constraints of the present.

That stopped me.

Because at that moment, I was feeling the exact opposite. The world felt vast in its crises and tiny in its momentum.

What would it mean to lead as though we were building gourd-heavens for others? To create microcosms of beauty, clarity, and imagination in a landscape where large systems are faltering?

Progress Denied, Awe Deferred

It’s hard to feel hope when forward movement gets delayed—or worse, denied. In the Pacific Northwest and more beyond, we are watching civic institutions struggle to uphold even the minimums, let alone the aspirations.

When governments say no to housing, no to public investment, no to transparency, it isn’t just a policy problem. It becomes a psychic one. Optimism starts to feel like naivete. Progress feels performative.

And that’s where biophilic wisdom reenters.

Biophilic design, at its root, is about connection to life and the living world. It is both aesthetic and elemental. It reminds us that:

Smallness can be powerful.
Indirect paths still lead somewhere.
The shape of a doorway can change the quality of attention.

Biophilic spaces aren’t just efficient. They’re immersive. And that immersion restores.

Maybe what we need isn’t more persuasion. Maybe we need more places to feel our stuckness without being consumed by it.

From Places to Practices: Biophilic Design for Life and Work

Stephen Kellert defined biophilic design through several key principles:

Repeated and sustained engagement with nature.
Reinforcement of our evolutionary connection to the natural world.
Emotional attachment to place.
Deepened responsibility for the health of human and natural systems.
Integrated, not fragmented, solutions.

But what if these weren’t just architectural or ecological ideals? What if these were guidelines for how we design our lives—and our work?

Imagine:

A workday that allows for rhythm and recovery, not just sprinting and collapsing.
A team culture that encourages emotional connection to place and purpose.
A leadership strategy that doesn’t just account for productivity, but also pattern recognition, reflection, and restoration.

Biophilic design of life and work would ask us to:

Create spaces (and schedules) that support sustained, non-extractive engagement.
Embrace organic growth over linear scaling.
Honor complexity without turning it into chaos.

This isn’t idealism. It’s physiology. It’s what we’re built for.

A New Metaphor for Sustainability Leadership

If legacy + longevity gives us the strategic frame, then gourd-heaven gives us the emotional architecture.

Can we create spaces—even brief ones—where awe is accessible?
Can we design work that restores, not just delivers?
Can we make space for people to see something vast, even in a constrained season?

Leadership is not just execution. It’s invitation. The garden doesn’t force you to feel better. It simply creates the conditions where awe might return.

And that’s what some of our most stalled teams need right now: conditions for imaginative optimism. A reason to believe again.

Closing Thought: Small Spaces, Big Possibility

It took 30 minutes in a garden—and a quiet bowl of congee—to remind me that space creates possibility.

We don’t have to convince everyone. We do have to cultivate something.

Even if the policies delay.

Even if the funding retracts.

Even if the systems stall.

There are still doorways to design. There are still small spaces to shape. There is still awe to be made available—and through awe, the optimism to keep going.

If biophilic design can shape gardens that transform us, it can also shape how we build teams, pace our projects, and lead ourselves.

The koi was still there when I left. The train came. And I remembered that even in constraint, there is still beauty waiting.

Leadership Reflection Prompt

Where in my work am I creating gourd-heavens for others—microcosms where the unimaginable can be briefly felt, and the beautiful can be safely imagined?

What would it look like to design my life, my team, and my leadership approach as a biophilic system—restorative, immersive, and alive?

Jennifer Diamond is a managing consultant, educator, and longtime change strategist with over 35 years guiding leadership teams through transformation across industries. Founder of Maypop Grove, she brings a human-centered, systems-savvy approach to sustainability, strategy, and resilience. Her work blends curiosity, clarity, and deep operational fluency—whether in executive sessions, university classrooms, or reflective garden paths.

"The Gourd Series" is her three-part exploration of leadership in a time of disruption: moving from exhaustion to renewal, and from resistance to clarity, with gratitude to the participants at ILFI's Living Future 2025 and the Lan Su Yuan in Portland.

Learn more at www.maypopgrove.com