I've been noticing something this week that keeps showing up across different parts of my work and life and when something shows up that many times I've learned to pay attention.

The theme, if I had to name it, is ‘measurement’. What we measure in our lives, why we measure it and whether the measures we've inherited actually serve us or just make us easier to manage?

It's well and truly exam season in our house. My younger son has started his GCSEs and my older son his A Levels. Between them they've spent over 20,000 hours in education and during that time I've watched them grow from little, cute humans into amazing young men.

So if I was going to measure them on anything, I think I'd measure them on their capacity for self compassion, on the way they've treated the people around them or on what they've learned about themselves along the way.

But the exams they're sitting this week are mostly testing their ability to remember facts, quotes and calculations. I'm not saying that's not useful, I'm just sitting with the question of who decided that was the most useful measure of a human being's development and why we've never really stopped to ask?

And when we look at a broader societal lens, we can see that many of the measures we operate within are actually sending us in the wrong direction.

Systems thinkers would recognise what's happening here. Donella Meadows (who wrote Thinking in Systems), identified the goals of a system as one of its highest leverage points.

What you measure is what you optimise for and everything else is deprioritised. So our societal systems aren't broken, they're doing exactly what its measures tell it to do.

It's producing people who are good at being measured and economies that prioritise greed and injustice. Which is useful if what you need is a legible, sortable, controllable system. Less useful if you're hoping to produce fully alive human beings.

I think this is one of the saddest things about the measures we've inherited and are managed by - they weren't designed with natural flourishing in mind.

They emerged from industrial logic, from the need to make people comparable and ultimately, divided from themselves, others and nature. And we've internalised them so thoroughly that most of us apply them to our lives without even noticing. The performance rating at work doesn’t define you, the follower count is not your worth and the exam grade is not your intelligence or any indication of what you'll do with your one wild life.

Maybe that’s why The Natural Network gathering at Four Acre Farm last week felt so significant. Me and Kate shared two prompts on a reflection worksheet I’d prepared.

“What have you been measuring yourself against that no longer serves you?”

and

“If joy were a compass rather than a reward, where is it pointing you right now?”

It feels to me that some of us are still pressing someone else's measuring stick against ourselves - a parent's definition of success, an industry's idea of status or maybe a platform's version of ‘influence’.

So we inevitably come up short (and always feel like we’re never ‘enough’) not because that’s true, but because we're using the wrong instrument entirely and encouraged to measure and compare questionable things.

But joy as navigation rather than destination changes the whole question. It’s what we see in the wilds of nature, which when left alone, evades measurement.

Ecosystems are unfathomably complex and the moment you try to reduce them to a single metric, yield per acre, carbon stored, biodiversity score, you lose most of what makes them alive.

The same is true of people. The richest parts of a human being, the parts that love, grieve, wonder, create and connect are exactly the parts that break every measuring instrument we've ever invented. And I don't think that's a problem to be solved, I think it's a reminder of what we actually are.

As a gift from us and the farm, you can download a copy of the worksheet we used which is based on the principles of a bumble bee finding their reciprocity with the flowers and plants in their life.

So here's the practical invitation, because I don't want to just leave this as a philosophical observation:

What would it look like to build your own success metrics?

Not the ones you inherited, not the ones your industry handed you but the ones that would actually tell you whether you were living well.

For me they include things like:

• Did I have a conversation this week that genuinely changed something?

• Did I create something I'm proud of?

• Did I spend time where I feel nourished?

• Did I show up honestly for the people I care about (and myself)?

None of those fit in a spreadsheet or impress a board. But they're the ones that, when I'm meeting them, make me feel like I’m enough.

The act of choosing our own measures is not a small thing. In systems terms it's a high leverage intervention because you're changing what the system optimises for. You're refusing to be sorted by someone else's criteria. And that, as our inspiration for this newsletter Buckminster Fuller would probably agree, is a very good place to put a Trimtab (the place we apply minimal pressure for maximum outcome).

Upcoming Events

Making sense of the measures we place on ourselves is more effective when we spend time with others. So, we’ve got two wonderful events in the diary with more launching soon:

The Natural Network at Patch

28th May: 10am - 12pm at Patch. Tickets here

We’re really getting in to our rhythm with these gatherings - always the last Thursday of the month between 10-12.

This month our guest speaker is Dr Sukanya Ayatakshi-Endow from Bournemouth University. Sukanya’s passion for social entrepreneurship aligns deeply with our philosophy of building flourishing, diverse perspectives with lived experience and reciprocity at the root. Come and join us.

The Natural Network at Four Acre Farm

26th June: 9.30am - 1.30pm at Four Acre Farm. Tickets here

Time in nature, good conversation and the kind of nourishment that's harder to find than it should be. If you've been wondering what it might feel like to be part of a genuinely connected community doing meaningful work, this is a good place to find out.

If you’d like more information, please reply to this email and we can arrange a no pressure chat about the day. Plus, as a newsletter subscriber you get a £20 discount using the code - Naturalnetwork20

Wrapping up

I'll leave you with this. The things that matter most - love, belonging, the feeling of being genuinely known by another person, have never fitted inside a measuring system and I don't think they ever will.

The metrics we're handed are, at best, signs pointing toward something real. And somewhere along the way, many of us started worshipping the signs rather than walking toward what they point at.

So maybe the question isn't how to continue measuring what we already have (with increasing amounts of data, technology and inputs)? Maybe it's time we started with what truly matters to us and build the measures from there?

Until next week, keep tending to those roots,

Nick

Well that’s it for another week. But we don’t have to stop there.

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