The monarch butterfly travels 4,500 kilometres from the forests of Canada to a cluster of oyamel fir trees in central Mexico.
This has been happening for at least ten thousand years. Scientists have spent decades trying to understand the navigation, how millions of butterflies that have never made this journey before converge on the same few hectares of forest in Michoacán.
Here is what makes it extraordinary.
No single butterfly has ever completed the full route.
The one that leaves Canada in late August will die before the round trip is finished. It produces a generation that continues south. That generation overwinters in Mexico, the only generation to do so, and moves north in spring. They travel partway, reproduce, die. Their offspring continue north. One more generation reaches Canada in summer.
Four generations. One continuous route. No single traveller holds the whole map.
What each butterfly carries is inherited: a navigational system built from the sun's angle, the Earth's magnetic field, and something scientists cannot fully explain. A directional memory of a path no butterfly in the lineage has ever traveled in full.
They navigate using a compass they received.
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I have been thinking about this since I left the last role.
Not what did I build. How much of what actually worked was something I received and carried forward, versus something I originated?
The first time I held a senior leadership position, I thought the answer was obvious. You arrive. You see what needs changing. You change it. The organisation becomes a reflection of your decisions.
I now think this is a beginner's reading.
The organisations where something real got built, where it outlasted my time there, were the ones where I understood, eventually, that I was navigating using a map that was partly mine and partly inherited. The culture that formed before I arrived. The relationships between people that held things together in ways I couldn't see for the first year. The unwritten agreements that governed how things actually worked under the org chart.
I didn't create those. I entered them, learned to read them, added my segment, and passed them forward.
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This is not an argument for humility over impact.
The monarch butterfly's individual journey matters. Without each butterfly navigating its segment well, the whole route fails.
The more accurate question is three parts:
What did I receive?
What did I add?
What did I leave intact for the person who came after?
The organisations that collapse fastest after a leadership transition are the ones where the departing leader confused their tenure with the whole route. They treated the institutional knowledge, the culture, the trust, as things they had created. So when they left, they took them. Not deliberately. By treating them as their own.
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I remember sitting in a room early in a new role, watching a senior team handle a complicated situation with a speed I hadn't earned yet. They were using shortcuts I didn't have, shared language developed over years I hadn't been present for. They glanced at each other with an understanding I could not yet read.
I could have decided this was the problem. Too much history, not enough fresh thinking.
I watched instead.
Over the months that followed I understood what I was observing: institutional knowledge, the accumulated product of a hundred difficult decisions made by people no longer in the building. The team was navigating by a compass built from real experience, much of it predating me.
My job was to learn to read that compass before I started changing where it pointed.
Not every direction was right. Some needed correction. But understanding the route before redesigning it was the difference between leading and simply disrupting.
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EXCLUSIVE FOR SUBSCRIBERS
Here is something I want to offer you that I didn't put in the newsletter.
A practice. Fifteen minutes. A piece of paper. A willingness to be honest with yourself.
Draw a line down the centre of the page.
On the left side: everything you are navigating at work right now that you originated. Ideas, systems, relationships, ways of working, the things that would not exist if you had never arrived.
On the right side: everything you are working with that was there before you. The culture. The institutional memory. The trust between people. The rules nobody wrote down but everyone knows.
Most people, when they do this honestly, find the right side is longer than they expected.
That is not a failure of contribution. It is an accurate reading of what leadership actually is.
The next question is harder: of everything on that right side, the things you received, what are you actively protecting? What are you transmitting forward? What would survive your departure?
This is the work the butterfly does without knowing it. This is the navigation that keeps the migration running across generations that will never meet.
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There is a specific kind of wisdom you cannot accumulate personally.
You can only receive it. From the people who were in the building before you, from decisions made before your time, from the unspoken agreements that hold things together under the formal structure.
And there is a specific kind of contribution you can only make by staying long enough to understand what was there before you started changing it.
The monarch butterfly doesn't know the full route. It never will. But the migration has continued for thousands of years because each generation carries its segment faithfully, and produces the generation that will carry the next part forward.
What are you carrying that you did not personally build?
And what will the person who comes after you be able to navigate by?
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The Next Mountain is published every Sunday at 12:00 noon IST.
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