Are we borrowing our organizational metaphors from the wrong places?

I was recently in a board meeting where someone said “stay in your lane” so many times it stopped sounding like advice and more like a tic.

Stay in your lane. …blah, blah, blah…

Stay in your lane. …blah, blah, blah…

Stay in your lane.

By the fifth repetition, I was annoyed. But I was also fascinated by the way a word starts to lose its shape when you repeat it enough.

It’s been weeks since, and I keep hearing the phrase. Maybe it is because that meeting made me hyper aware of it— kinda like when you are pregnant and suddently it seems like everyone is pregnant. 

But now, some of the people who are saying it weren’t even in the room.  Now, I am beginning to understand something else – this this quippy piece of advice wasn’t just the veiled threat I think it was meant as, but it is a contagious attitude.

“Stay in your lane” bothers me more than a phrase probably should. Partly because it’s dismissive. Its a folksy way of telling someone to shut up. But also, as a scientist by training and, probably, by temperament too—I have a penchant for taking apart metaphors to see if they really hold up. 

Why are we so comfortable thinking about organizations, institutions, communities, and even our lives and relationships as though they are highways?

The phrase works because it’s both literal and figurative. On an actual highway, lanes exist for efficiency and predictability. Highways are designed to minimize interaction and help drivers avoid collisions. If everyone stays in their assigned space, traffic tends to keep moving. It’s an elegant design, for traffic.

The trouble begins when we adopt that same model for other things. For example, is this really what we want from the institutions we build our lives around?

Ecosystems vs. Mech-o-systems

Gardens — and healthy ecosystems generally — don’t work that way. They’re not organized around separation. They’re organized around exchange. Spend five minutes watching a meadow and “stay in your lane” begins to sound almost absurd. Bees exchange pollen. Fungi exchange nutrients. Trees exchange carbon and chemical signals. Water exchanges heat, minerals, and life itself as it moves through the landscape. The remarkable thing about a healthy ecosystem isn’t that everything has a place. It’s that everything is in relationship.

Highways reduce relationships. Gardens multiply them.

I was reminded of that this spring in my own backyard. Voles destroyed many of my mature shrubs and every hosta I grew. At the same time, my rabbit problem — an implacable nuisance last year — has almost disappeared after a pair of great horned owls successfully raised two owlets nearby. I can’t know exactly how these changes are connected, but they almost certainly aren’t happening in isolation. Living systems are networks of relationships, many of which we struggle to see, much less predict. Change one part of the system, and the effects have a way of showing up somewhere else.

So much of the language we use to run organizations comes from somewhere else entirely. Highways. Pipelines. Factories. Machines. Landscapes become “projects.” People become “resources.” Governance becomes “lanes.” None of those substitutions feels especially dramatic, but together they begin to reshape how we think. The metaphors we choose don’t just describe our institutions. They become instructions for how we build them and think about them.

If “stay in your lane” is the highway model, what’s the gardening model?

I’s argue that it isn’t the feared chaos or unravelling of order. It’s stewardship.

Stewardship means caring for the health of the whole, not just your assigned piece of it.

What is the opposite of control?

Stewardship means caring for the health of the whole, not just your assigned piece of it. A good gardener doesn’t ignore an aphid outbreak because it’s technically the roses’ problem. She notices and then she looks for the conditions that produced it, for the lady beetles that may or may not arrive, for the weather that tipped the balance, for the ways her own choices ripple through a system she’ll never fully control. She understands that every intervention changes something else because everything is connected to something else.

Of course, not every system is a garden.

I spent part of my career at Raytheon, a company serving the military, where discipline, chain of command, and carefully defined boundaries weren’t just management preferences. They were operational necessities. Bridges, aircraft, supply chains, and classified information all depend on precision and control. Those are systems designed to eliminate surprises. Mechanical thinking is exactly what you want there — for the most part.

But many of the systems we build to address human and societal needs work differently. Universities, nonprofits, associations, movements, and creative organizations don’t simply produce things. Much of what they produce — knowledge, culture, trust, progress — emerges from relationships among people, ideas, and institutions.

These are living systems — complex, adaptive, and gloriously unpredictable. A small change in one place can cascade into big and unpredictable changes somewhere else. Relationships matter more than individual components. Diversity creates resilience. And collaboration can accomplish things that rules alone cannot.

Working within a living system requires more than obedience to following strict instructions. You have to pay attention, notice patterns, respond to change, and use judgment — often without knowing exactly what will happen next.

Manage a living system like a machine for long enough, and you risk killing exactly what you were trying to improve. Living systems need something else from us — judgment, creativity, adaptability, and the willingness to keep paying attention and changing with them. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow, because the system itself will not be the same.

That’s why “stay in your lane” has lingered with me.

Not because it’s rude, though it often is. And not because it’s always wrong. Obviously, highways depend on people staying in their lanes.

Every time we borrow a metaphor, we also borrow its assumptions. Sometimes those assumptions fit beautifully. Sometimes they quietly distort the thing we’re trying to understand.

Gardens have been offering us a different model all along. They remind us that healthy systems aren’t held together by rigid separation. They’re held together by networks of relationships.

The next time someone tells you to stay in your lane—or you’re about to say it yourself—it might be worth asking a different question.

What kind of system do you think you’re standing in?