Unfoldment: The Art of Leading Without Control

I recently had a conversation with the Giving Lab community at Tenacre Foundation and a colleague from the Euphrates Institute. It was a rich exchange about leadership, trust, and what it means to release control.

A significant part of my leadership journey has been learning to let go, to trust my teams, to recognize their innate capacity for excellence, and to shift from directing outcomes to nurturing conditions. During our conversation, we explored an image that has stayed with me: leadership as gardening.

Imagine tending to an orange tree. You don’t teach it how to bear fruit; it already knows. Your role is to ensure fertile soil, steady sunlight, and the right nutrients. When those are in place, the tree will, inevitably, give oranges.

And yet, as leaders, how often do we hover anxiously around that tree, checking every leaf, adjusting every branch, as if our interference could accelerate nature’s rhythm? We know it’s counterproductive, but still, we cling to control. In doing so, we stifle the very unfoldment we claim to want.

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The Struggle to Let Go

This tension between control and unfoldment isn’t limited to leadership. It runs deep in our systems, even in education. Kenya’s shift from the teacher-centered 8-4-4 curriculum to the learner-centered CBC (Competency-Based Curriculum) is a powerful case in point.

On paper, CBC celebrates learner agency and curiosity. In practice, many teachers, long conditioned to command authority, find it hard to relinquish control. The result is a system designed for freedom and agency, still operating on control. That dissonance must be exhausting for both teacher and learner.

I’ve lived that tension too. When I moved from operations lead to executive director a year and a half ago, I had to unlearn the comfort of detail and certainty. Strategy demanded a new posture, to guide without gripping. I often caught myself inspecting the team’s “oranges,” comparing them to the ones I would have grown. Thankfully, our team culture, and wise counsel from mentors and coaches, helped me see that leadership wasn’t about replication, it was about trust.

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Why We Cling to Control

As I reflect on what pulls us toward control rather than unfoldment, four themes stand out:

1. The past. Many of us grew up in cultures where authority equaled obedience. Teachers, parents, and leaders were infallible; questioning was rebellion. That imprint runs deep. Leading through unfoldment requires intentional unlearning, to guide rather than dominate, to invite rather than instruct.

2. The pace of trust. Everything moves at the speed of trust. When I feel the urge to control, I now pause and ask: Do I trust my team to deliver? If not, how can I express my concern in a way that supports rather than constrains? More often than not, the issue isn’t capability, it’s my own anxiety. Trust becomes the lens that reveals what’s really going on.

3. Exhaustion. Hustle culture glorifies control. When I’m tired, I lose patience, and unfoldment feels too slow. But rest is not indulgence, it’s infrastructure. Without it, I default to micromanagement. Leading through unfoldment requires energy, curiosity, and presence, all impossible without rest.

4. The illusion of power. Control gives a false sense of strength. Real power, I’ve learned, is not the ability to direct every move but to create an ecosystem where others thrive even in your absence. Control looks powerful; unfoldment is powerful.

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Trust as the Soil for Organizational Unfoldment

Unfoldment doesn’t just apply to individuals or teams; it applies to organizations, too. Yet so many local organizations never get the chance to truly unfold because the systems meant to support them are built on control, not trust.

Too often, funding comes with tight restrictions, short timelines, and rigid deliverables that leave no room for reflection or adaptation. This kind of support may produce activity, but rarely growth. It’s like asking an orange tree to bear fruit while keeping it in a pot too small for its roots.

For organizations to flourish, they need what many funders still hesitate to offer: multi-year, unrestricted funding. This kind of trust-based support gives teams the freedom to experiment, learn, and course-correct, to respond to reality, not to a proposal written 18 months ago. It acknowledges that those closest to the work often understand best how to nurture it.

When organizations are trusted in this way, they can breathe. They can pause when needed, shed what no longer serves, and rebuild from a place of alignment and purpose. Seasons of contraction and renewal produce deeper, more grounded growth, programs that are smaller in scale but richer in substance, and innovations that let teachers focus on learners rather than compliance.

These milestones aren’t merely organizational; they are profoundly human. They represent educators reclaiming hope, learners rediscovering joy, and teams learning to trust their own unfolding.

Just as organizations need trust and space to grow, so too do the people within them, leaders, teams, and communities alike, and the same principles that allow an orange tree or a hickory to bear fruit apply to those we guide: create the right conditions, then step back and let unfoldment take its course.

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The Courage to Let Things Grow

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. But be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.” Leadership, at its best, is the art of tending, nurturing both the pine and the shrub, creating conditions for each to unfold into its fullest expression.

So I keep returning to this question: Am I leading for control, or am I leading for unfoldment?

Every time I choose trust over tension, rest over rigidity, and patience over panic, I remember: the orange tree already knows how to give oranges. My task is to tend the soil, and then, to let it grow.

-Muthoni Gakwa - Executive Director, Metis

The Metis team during a partner visit