My obsession started when I was very small: trying to figure out the leverage points that could flip humanity into living more like other animals do. Why did we put them in circuses and scrape their homes bare for freeways and parking lots? I didn't see the coyotes or rabbits ruining other animals' futures. And yet they were clearly our relatives, as Jane Goodall showed. We were animals like any other. I spent many sleepless nights over it. Where did we go off track? How could we find our way again? What could I do? For that matter, what could anyone do? Nothing I thought of would work. Everything was connected to everything else. It would just make matters worse. But my father was an architect. He pointed out the geodesic domes sprouting along the 1970s California coastline. A set of simple rules of connection adding up to a strong, flexible structure. Like Tinkertoy. He also told me how the same kinds of simple rules, if properly aligned with human nature, could guide people to do what the architect intended. That idea stayed with me, and I set out to find the simple rules by which other organisms live—how they “create conditions conducive to life” without thinking so hard. In retrospect, possibly an overly ambitious career goal! But someone had to do something. Well I've broadened my passions over time, but my interest in life's deep patterns stuck around. They've been honed by four billion years of challenge, after all. From Hawaiian island plant biogeography to whale distributions in the Bering Sea to baboon hybridization and speciation in Ethiopia. How does life grow itself? How does it organize intelligence? How does it create conditions conducive to life for its descendants? At every scale, the same patterns: the simple rules of growing possibility despite uncertainty, change, and challenge. The same patterns organize our own lives—the many ways we live and think, design, and lead– as I've noticed in groups from Indigenous communities, to teams in companies,, nonprofits, and other institutions.