You cultivate a healthier ecosystem by pruning what's choking it.gettyMost leaders treat culture as a problem to solve by addition: a refreshed values statement, a new belonging initiative, one more all-hands about psychological safety. Abi Adamson, author of Culture Blooming (the Substack and book) starts somewhere more uncomfortable. When clients ask her how to make their culture better, her first question is, “For whom?”It’s a deceptively simple redirection, and it reframes the entire project. In a recent conversation, Adamson, whose TEDx talk "Who Owns Culture?" and book both turn on this idea, put it plainly: your culture is already growing the way you designed it. Leaders tend to resist that. She answers with a Nigerian proverb: you cannot plant a seed of one fruit and expect another fruit to grow.The data backs the discomfort. In a widely cited MIT Sloan Management Review study, researchers Donald and Charles Sull found that a toxic corporate culture was the single strongest predictor of attrition during the Great Resignation: roughly ten times more powerful than compensation in explaining why people left. Pay, the presumed villain, ranked sixteenth. By one earlier estimate the authors cite, turnover driven by toxic culture had been costing U.S. employers close to $50 billion a year. That reframes culture from dull background noise to a core retention strategy.Here's where most leadership advice runs backwards. The dominant instinct is extractive: get as much as possible out of people, then patch the damage with perks. Adamson's framing is regenerative – culture as a garden rather than a construction project – and her central move is subtractive. You don't cultivate a healthier ecosystem by piling on programs. You prune what's choking it.Adamson has the experience to validate this method. Early in her career, frustrated that internships at a film studio kept going to the children of executives and family friends, she was eventually handed eighteen months to fix the company’s hiring. She didn’t launch an initiative. She went into the job descriptions and removed the elements that reinforce bias, such as the requirement to have attended a particular university, a credential that screens for privilege more than capability. MORE FOR YOUShe fired recruitment agencies that had no real stake in inclusion. Subtract the filters, and the under-recognized talent walks in. By the time she left, she had rebuilt nearly 65% of the workforce, and all came from widely-varied backgrounds, rather than having interchangeable resumes. "If you look where you always look," she said, "you're going to get what you always get."That is regenerative leadership in a single example: not a new value bolted on, but a biased system taken out. It tracks the subtraction sequence I use constantly: stop, drop, roll. Stop long enough to gather data about what your culture is actually rewarding, not what the values poster claims. Drop the filter, the tolerated bad manager, the "this is how we've always done it." Then watch the returns compound, well past the one role you set out to fill.Because the cost of not pruning is cumulative and easy to miss. Adamson describes organizations that look healthy from the street while wilting at the root: "you pop open the bonnet," she says, "and it needs some serious servicing." The status quo is comfortable precisely for the people it already serves, which is why genuine merit can feel threatening: it exposes who hasn't been earning their seat. Meanwhile, the people a leader most wants to keep are quietly doing the math. They won't remember what you said about your culture, Adamson notes; they'll remember how you made them feel, and how nourishing the soil actually was.This is what her TEDx talk means by asking who owns culture. The answer Adamson arrives at is everyone, which makes culture less a thing leaders control and more a thing they either cultivate or neglect. The encouraging news for anyone staring at a disappointing culture is that the diagnosis doubles as the prescription: you designed this, which means you can redesign it. Redesign is not a project of layering inclusion theater on top, but by subtracting the structures producing the results you don't want.So the regenerative question is closer to Adamson's own: for whom is this culture currently working, and what would I have to remove for it to work for the people I say I want to engage and serve? Her TEDx talk "Who Owns Culture?" and her book Culture Blooming are useful places to take that question next. It's worth sitting with before the next values statement goes up on the wall.