Going Dormant
Last week, I watched Jane Goodall’s Famous Last Words episode on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it, the show records intimate interviews with well-known people, then keeps them sealed until after they die. Jane’s was released after she passed in October 2025 at age 91.
A lot of what she said will stay with me. But I’m trying to make a habit out of one thing in particular.
She talked about watching nature in ordinary places. A worm washed out during a rainstorm, making its slow way across the pavement back to soil. Birds in a train station — singing, swooping, mating — while humans hustled past below, not noticing them for more than a moment. She wasn’t making a case for “slowing down.” She was describing what becomes visible when you stop looking for what you need and simply, actively, observe.
Since listening to her, I’ve been observing. And finding.
The Problem With Productive Attention
Most of us spend our waking hours in a state I’d call productive attention — scanning for what matters to the task. It’s focused, filtered, efficient. It’s also blind. Productive attention is a seeing-being trap.¹ It shows you what you’re looking for and hides everything else.
Jane’s observation practice is something different. It’s not unfocused — it’s unfiltered. She wasn’t looking for the birds. She noticed them because nothing in her attention was telling her not to.
This might sound like a wellness tip. It’s not. It’s a methodology with real consequences. Jane’s impact on our understanding of the natural world is proof itself.
When you only see what your filter lets through, you miss the signal that doesn’t match your model. In innovation, that’s the adjacent possible you never explore. In leadership, that’s the early indicator you dismiss because it doesn’t fit the dashboard. In life, it’s the thing that’s been trying to get your attention for months.
Old-Growth Forests
Jane’s unfiltered observation has a parallel in ecology — systems that stay productive not by pushing harder, but by periodically going quiet.
A landmark study in Nature found that forests as old as 800 years are still accumulating carbon — still, after centuries, taking in more than they release.² The long-standing assumption that old forests go carbon-neutral turned out to be wrong. They just do their work differently than young forests do.
And winter is when a lot of that work happens.
When the visible forest goes quiet — bare branches, no green, everything apparently stopped — the underground system stays active. Mycorrhizal fungi, the networks connecting tree roots, continue cycling nutrients through the cold months.³ Soil bacteria keep metabolizing below the frost line.⁴ Seeds sit in the frozen ground undergoing stratification — a process where cold exposure literally restructures their chemistry, breaking down germination inhibitors so they can sprout when conditions are right.⁵ Seeds that skip this step? Less resilient. Less likely to survive what comes next.
The forest isn’t resting. It’s doing a kind of work that can only happen while the canopy isn’t consuming all the energy.
Ecologists call this dormancy. Not rest. Not recovery. Not the absence of productivity. Dormancy is when the substrate itself regenerates.
Three Kinds of Dormancy
I didn’t have this language at the time, but reading the ecology this week, I realize I’ve been going dormant at significant moments in my life. And each pause was doing different developmental work — the same way seed dormancy changes based on what the seed needs to become.
Dormancy as departure. After college, I sold everything that didn’t fit in a backpack and bought a one-way ticket to nowhere in particular. I’d been on a conveyor belt since I was too young to decide otherwise. The pause was about leaving a system to find out who I was apart from it. Some of my greatest adventures ever are from this time.
Dormancy as release. After leaving Johnson Controls — which had acquired the company I’d helped build over 12 years — I spent my favorite year yet watching clouds with my dog, reading, and drinking tea at my neighborhood café. I wasn’t escaping anything. I’d loved the work, my team, the learning. But the pause was about letting 12 years of identity as “Dash” — a builder, runner, achiever — go long enough to see what else was there.
Dormancy as integration. Right now, I’m writing this from a week-long “no plan” stay in the mountains with my family. I didn’t need a break. I’m not departing or releasing. But because of Jane, I’m deliberately observing life in a new place. This kind of pause is the version that corresponds most closely to what old forests do — not a fire or a clear-cut, but the seasonal quieting that allows the substrate to rebuild.
We are conditioned to believe any pause is either vacation — a reward you consume, a withdrawal from an account you’ll have to replenish — or laziness.
There’s no mainstream frame for “I went dormant, watched clouds for a while, and came back structurally different.”
You see it in PTO policies that treat rest as something you accrue through labor, sabbatical programs that require a deliverable, the unwritten rules of parental leave (when we focus our energy on someone else’s growth) that delay promotions and opportunities. The metaphor is battery, not seed.
But ecology tells a different story. Dormancy is how long-lived systems stay long-lived. The oldest forests on earth spend more of the year metabolically quiet than visibly growing — and that quiet is when complexity increases in the soil, when seeds are restructured for germination, when fungal networks redistribute what they’ve gathered.
In my experience, each time I rejoined the working world after a dormant period, I was (counter to cultural conditioning) further ahead. Not just recharged — expanded. More curious, more capable, more excited. Each return brought more opportunity, more reward. I wish I could say these pauses were strategic — but it was really just instinct (and a bit of rebellion). And it turns out my instincts were aligned with what old forests already knew.
The Third Term
In Piece #7, I wrote about the generative-to-maintenance ratio⁶ — the balance between creating new value and sustaining what exists. I missed the third term, dormancy. The conditions under which the system beneath growth and maintenance can regenerate.
If the longest-lived systems on earth require periodic quiet to maintain their complexity, what does it mean that we’ve built careers, organizations, and cultures with little to no dormancy cycle at all?
It’s a question worth sitting with — especially now, when everything seems to be moving faster than ever and most of us, individually and organizationally, are scurrying to keep up. Dormancy isn’t just undervalued. It’s further away than it’s ever been.
Jane Goodall watched the birds in the train station because after 91 years of paying attention, her filters had worn thin enough to let everything in. That’s not a technique. It’s a capacity — one that only develops if you give it the conditions to develop.
I wonder what we’d see, and what would come to be, if we did.
Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft:
Adaptive Cycle of Innovation (Pattern #2) — The book’s lifecycle model includes the rigidity trap — systems too inflexible to survive disruption. Dormancy is what prevents it. It’s the phase the Adaptive Cycle doesn’t name: the periodic quiet that keeps the system adaptable enough to regenerate rather than collapse.
Create Mutualisms (Pattern #4) — Mycorrhizal networks appear in both the book and this piece. The book uses them as a metaphor for partnerships. The ecology reveals what the metaphor actually does in winter — the network keeps working when the visible system stops. Mutualisms don’t pause; they redistribute during dormancy.
Biomimicry as Mechanism, Not Just Metaphor — The book uses nature’s adaptive cycle as an organizing metaphor for innovation. This piece goes further — old-growth forest research, seed stratification, and winter mycorrhizal activity aren’t analogies. They’re the source science the metaphor was pointing toward.
Fit People with Phase — The book matches people to innovation phases: pioneers, settlers, town planners, boundary crossers. The three kinds of dormancy suggest each type needs a different kind of pause. Departure is what pioneers need. Release is what settlers need after a long build. Integration is what boundary crossers need to stay permeable. Does your organization recognize that different people need different kinds of pause?
Sources:
“Seeing-being traps” — Innovating Out Loud, Piece #1
Luyssaert, S. et al. “Old-growth forests as global carbon sinks.” Nature 455, 213–215 (2008). https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07276
Tedersoo, L. et al. “How mycorrhizal associations drive plant population and community biology.” Science 367, eaba1223 (2020). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba1223
Lubbe, F.C. et al. “Winter belowground: Changing winters and the perennating organs of herbaceous plants.” Functional Ecology 35, 1492–1504 (2021). https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2435.13858
Willis, C.G. et al. “The evolution of seed dormancy: environmental cues, evolutionary hubs, and diversification of the seed plants.” New Phytologist 203, 300–309 (2014). https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12782
“Generative-to-maintenance ratio” — Innovating Out Loud, Piece #7
AI Disclosure: This piece was developed with AI assistance for research, structural drafting, and source verification. All ideas, direction, and editorial decisions are mine.
Reminder: Tune in March 26th for our next live recording of Innovating Out Loud with our guest Daniel Aronson of Valutus. We’ll be talking about finding the submerged value in innovation - a method of 5-10X’ing your ROI. Register at www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud
