I really love this and damn, I wish I'd come up with heartwood metaphor!
I want to add one thing - the heartwood doesn't just get cut. Poor soil starves the sapwood, the living outer layer that is constantly forming. Stop the healthy outer growth and you stop the formation of new heartwood. The existing core persists for a while, but nothing is being added to it. The tree is living off its structural inheritance while the conditions for renewing it have gone.
The soil - the conditions under which an institution grows new layers of genuine judgment and relational memory - has been quietly depleted for years before anyone notices.
By the time the loss shows up, the formation process was already interrupted long ago. The tree looks fine. It just isn't growing inward anymore.
I've just been working with a behavioural science client on topic of large organisations + transformation programmes. Change management. Culture initiatives. Leadership development. Digital transformation. AI deployment. The programmes are often well-designed and honestly delivered. The people running them are good. The people going through them engage, nod, fill in the feedback forms, leave on a modest high.
Twelve months later the organisation is doing what it was always doing because the soil wasn't right - you can plant the most carefully cultivated rose in the world, but if the soil is compacted, nutrient-depleted, or simply wrong for that plant - it won't take.
Now add your convergence point: every major organisation is currently feeding its soil the same inputs. Same models. Same vendors. Same deployment playbooks. Same benchmarks. You can only grow what everyone else is growing. The conditions that produce distinctive heartwood - the particular character of an institution's judgment, the specific texture of its relational memory, the way this organisation reads a situation that no other organisation reads quite the same way - require soil that has been cultivated over time, with its own particular nutrients, its own history of what grew and what didn't.
Monoculture is efficient - it is also catastrophically fragile - one bad season and there is nothing left.
The implication isn't just for creative agencies - it's existential for consulting firms. Indeed anyone whose competitive proposition depends on the quality of human judgment rather than the efficiency of process execution - which, in a world of commoditised intelligence, is increasingly everyone.
The question - what are we doing to keep the soil alive that makes our use of it distinctively ours?
Love this. But if the whole argument is that heartwood can’t be documented, that it lives in the doing, then how do you build infrastructure around it?
Bravo Zoe, this is fantastic. The heartwood metaphor is perfect, and I love the way it continues the metaphor from your mycelium layer piece. It begs the question: what happens to an agency whose clients are all running the same intelligence?
Love this. Strangely having codified a lot of our beliefs into behaviours and tools long before AI came along i am now building our institutional brain that doesn’t think for us but helps us think sharper. Finding the weak spots and pushing us to go deeper. A lot of that works has been helped through you writing and this give what we are doing a name. Thank you.
Spot on, and you explained it perfectly. Few people really understand the value of the heartwood and know when they are drifting from it. Everyone tries to keep up with the AI advancements - I am using it as a tool to sharpen, as you say, but also placing myself apart from it enough to see the similarities in everyone else's offerings/products/hooks, etc...
This is so on the money, Zoe — and told with grace and flare, which is why I love reading your letters.
I think when you strip it all back, agencies have two things of value that can't be replaced: their creativity (in the broadest sense) and their relationships. Every conversation I have with a business starts with the pains of process and ring fences creativity and relationships — it's defensive. When in fact, it should be offensive on how to enhance and advance the very reason the business has delivered and grown so far.
I really love this and damn, I wish I'd come up with heartwood metaphor!
I want to add one thing - the heartwood doesn't just get cut. Poor soil starves the sapwood, the living outer layer that is constantly forming. Stop the healthy outer growth and you stop the formation of new heartwood. The existing core persists for a while, but nothing is being added to it. The tree is living off its structural inheritance while the conditions for renewing it have gone.
The soil - the conditions under which an institution grows new layers of genuine judgment and relational memory - has been quietly depleted for years before anyone notices.
By the time the loss shows up, the formation process was already interrupted long ago. The tree looks fine. It just isn't growing inward anymore.
I've just been working with a behavioural science client on topic of large organisations + transformation programmes. Change management. Culture initiatives. Leadership development. Digital transformation. AI deployment. The programmes are often well-designed and honestly delivered. The people running them are good. The people going through them engage, nod, fill in the feedback forms, leave on a modest high.
Twelve months later the organisation is doing what it was always doing because the soil wasn't right - you can plant the most carefully cultivated rose in the world, but if the soil is compacted, nutrient-depleted, or simply wrong for that plant - it won't take.
Now add your convergence point: every major organisation is currently feeding its soil the same inputs. Same models. Same vendors. Same deployment playbooks. Same benchmarks. You can only grow what everyone else is growing. The conditions that produce distinctive heartwood - the particular character of an institution's judgment, the specific texture of its relational memory, the way this organisation reads a situation that no other organisation reads quite the same way - require soil that has been cultivated over time, with its own particular nutrients, its own history of what grew and what didn't.
Monoculture is efficient - it is also catastrophically fragile - one bad season and there is nothing left.
The implication isn't just for creative agencies - it's existential for consulting firms. Indeed anyone whose competitive proposition depends on the quality of human judgment rather than the efficiency of process execution - which, in a world of commoditised intelligence, is increasingly everyone.
The question - what are we doing to keep the soil alive that makes our use of it distinctively ours?
Protect the heartwood by tending the soil. 🌹
I listened to this at the fictional Board meeting. I was one of the 1000. It was the talk that moved me the most. Thank you for sharing it.
Agreed, what a privilege to have been in that room!
Brilliant read as always. Amazing storytelling too - and hopeful given the context!
I like this a lot. You call it the 'heart wood' . I term it the 'soul'.
The words you can give to something I couldn't grasp yet are liberating and devastating at the same time. Thank you.
Love this. But if the whole argument is that heartwood can’t be documented, that it lives in the doing, then how do you build infrastructure around it?
This. I think the challenge started with naming it AI. Artificial Processing would be much more accurate
right on the money; kuddos
Spot on! In a similar way, it reminds me of the Verge piece from 2024 that demonstrated how every website was starting to look the same, because of Google's influence. Let's preserve our souls and human randomness https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization
Thanks for putting your thoughts out in such a profound, well rounded and thought-sparking way. Also, the heartwood metaphor is perfect!
Bravo Zoe, this is fantastic. The heartwood metaphor is perfect, and I love the way it continues the metaphor from your mycelium layer piece. It begs the question: what happens to an agency whose clients are all running the same intelligence?
Like playing on the craps table. Good the first time, but not thereafter.
Love this. Strangely having codified a lot of our beliefs into behaviours and tools long before AI came along i am now building our institutional brain that doesn’t think for us but helps us think sharper. Finding the weak spots and pushing us to go deeper. A lot of that works has been helped through you writing and this give what we are doing a name. Thank you.
Spot on, and you explained it perfectly. Few people really understand the value of the heartwood and know when they are drifting from it. Everyone tries to keep up with the AI advancements - I am using it as a tool to sharpen, as you say, but also placing myself apart from it enough to see the similarities in everyone else's offerings/products/hooks, etc...
This is so on the money, Zoe — and told with grace and flare, which is why I love reading your letters.
I think when you strip it all back, agencies have two things of value that can't be replaced: their creativity (in the broadest sense) and their relationships. Every conversation I have with a business starts with the pains of process and ring fences creativity and relationships — it's defensive. When in fact, it should be offensive on how to enhance and advance the very reason the business has delivered and grown so far.
and yet Tim Ferris has been shouting to the internet to never answer 7
https://overcast.fm/+BRv_zxXr_Q/17:30