The past few months I have been working with a great group of leadership development colleagues to help me finish my book that will help people to innovate and develop better leadership programs. My metaphor to describe this innovation or development process is “root down and branch out.” It is also the title of the book on best practices for leadership development programs. We root down in the best practices that work and continually branch out from these practices with new ideas that we enact for a desired effect. We will be designing the book cover soon using this image.
I really like this image because it actually shows an acorn rooting down and branching out in it’s first moments to become a great oak tree that has the potential to create a whole forest of oaks with it’s acorns. Amazing. I’ve always felt that innovation, developing for the better, and improvement is something that comes natural to people. I was amazed to see that even in it’s infancy, the oak acorn roots down and branches out. Wow! Could it be that we just need to follow what happens in nature, what the oak does from the start as an acorn and continues to do even as it is over 100 years old? What lesson can you learn from this acorn? How can you root down and branch out?