The Organisational Substrate

“It has often been said that, as far back as we can trace man, we find him a tiller of the ground; but long before he existed, the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth-worms.”

— Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881)

I’ve used the term “organisational substrate” for years, and introduced it in previous Psych Safety pieces, I think the earliest of which is my ecotones one in 2022. But I have not, so far, actually defined or explored it in writing. This is the article that does so. But first, beavers.

I recently went swimming in St Mary’s Loch in Scotland, where, according to nearby signs, beavers have made their home. Beavers are engineers: not ones with dirty overalls, oily hands and big spanners, but ecosystem engineers, organisms that physically alter their habitat, affecting it for everything else that lives there. A beaver fells trees and drags them into a stream to build a dam, which slows the water and creates a pond behind it deep enough that the beaver’s lodge entrance sits safely underwater. The beaver doesn’t have a Gantt chart, Change Advisory Board or project managers, and yet their dam will outlast most organisational transformation programmes.

The beaver’s work outlasts the beaver. Over time, especially if a dam is abandoned, the pond gradually silts up, the dam breaks down, and the pond behind it drains away downstream, turning into wet, rich grassland. These are called “beaver meadows“, and they last long after the last beaver has left. The sediment the dam trapped becomes the soil that the grasses and wildflowers of the meadow grow in, and what the engineer built is no longer a structure and is instead the foundation of a habitat.

Ecologists call this base layer of a habitat the substrate: the soil, peat, sediment, water, rock or any combination of these things and more. It’s what everything else grows in, and its composition and stability determine what can thrive and what cannot. If you’ve read the indicator species piece or any of my ecological pieces, you’ll have come across the term a few times.

So what is an organisational substrate?

I define organisational substrate as the accumulated physical and non-physical matter that an organisation lives in and on: the power structures, tooling, incentives and punishments, memory and story that determine what can thrive and what cannot. We build the organisational substrate continuously by living and working in it, the way a willow tree’s roots hold a river bank together and sphagnum moss acidifies the bog. 

Some of our organisational substrate is as solid, though as brittle, as reef. The clunky old legacy software system that everyone works around, the office layout that determines who bumps into whom, and the capital reserves that influence the organisation’s appetite for risk. These things were all built (intentionally or not) by someone, for reasons that made sense at the time; the builders may have long gone and the thing might no longer be serving its original purpose. Beaver meadows.

The substrate is constructed

It’s tempting to think of substrate as the passive bit: the inert stage on which the interesting living things perform. Soil is just there, right? But soil is a lot of stuff, both living and not: minerals ranging from microscopic particles to boulders; water; and millennia of accumulated organic matter — every leaf that fell, every plant that died, every organism that died and decomposed (or got eaten, which is essentially the same thing). And soil has a very real structure: roots, fungi, water and burrowing creatures continually create and remake networks of pores and channels. The result is a complex, layered, sometimes fractal-like structure across multiple scales, worked over endlessly by animals, fungi, bacteria, and earthworms. As the ecologist Frank Egler put it: “Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, they are more complex than we can think.”

The same is true of our organisational substrate – it’s far from an inert, neutral background, but is something that was built over time, by people and things, and continues to be built every day, as we will see.

The soil outlasts the worm

Darwin’s final book, published six months before he died, was about earthworms: The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits (1881). He’d first raised the subject of worms at the Geological Society in 1837, a year after the Beagle came home, and it fascinated him for the rest of his life. He anticipated others might be less enthralled by the topic, conceding in his introduction that “the subject may appear an insignificant one”, but he carried on anyway. 

He kept worms in pots in his study, breathed on them, shouted at them and got his son Francis to play the bassoon at them and wife Emma to play the piano at them. On establishing they were deaf (the worms, not his family), he then put the pots on the piano and found they responded to vibration through their bodies. He tested their intelligence by offering them paper triangles and recording which corner they seized to drag leaves into their burrows: they mostly chose the efficient (sharp) end, which he took cautiously as evidence of something like judgement in an animal with almost no brain. 

His main field site for worm studies though was his lawn at Down House, where he spread a layer of cinders over the grass and then waited 29 years before digging a trench to see how far the worms had buried it. You can trust a man who spends twenty-nine years watching a lawn, partly because he isn’t going anywhere. By his calculation, the collective worms of an average English pasture pass about ten tons of earth per acre through their bodies every year, endlessly turning the country’s surface over. Worms are some of the most important ecosystem engineers on the planet.

“”All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”” — Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower.

We are all ecosystem engineers

Like the worm, a willow tree doesn’t intend to be an ecosystem engineer, but it is: it creates substrate stability. Bits of willow twig break off, float along the river, get stuck in the riverbank, and start growing. Its roots begin to bind the riverbank together against the incessant flow of water, the bank is held together more strongly, and a whole community of species gets a stable margin to live on and expand just because the willow is there. Ecologists call this niche construction: organisms don’t merely adapt to their conditions, they make them, constantly, as a side effect of being alive.

Sphagnum moss goes further still. It doesn’t just tolerate the acid bog; it manufactures it: pumping out acid in exchange for nutrients, holding water in its dead cells to keep the ground wet, creating the anaerobic conditions in which very little else can grow, decompose, or compete. Sphagnum makes the world more like sphagnum. There’s a wonderful paper about this called: “How Sphagnum bogs down other plants“.

We all do this at work too. Simply by being there, we’re altering the organisational substrate; in fact we’re very much part of it, inside it, altering it continuously, through our presence and actions. When we find ourselves in a substrate that suits us, we will often unconsciously reinforce that same substrate, potentially to the detriment of other people that it doesn’t suit very well. This is particularly true for people in power; people seldom dismantle the power structures that got them into power, for much the same reason that trees seldom destroy the ground they’re rooted in. 

The substrate would still remain if every one of us were replaced steadily one by one. Not because it can survive without us, but because it is passed to each of us in turn.

“A real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil.”
– Karel Čapek 

Whatever it is that we call “culture“, it sits on and within the substrate. If the substrate is the accumulated ground (the tooling, the incentives, the capital, the time pressure, the memory, the stories, etc), then culture (what we say and do, how we say and do it) is what’s currently growing in it: the living, human, present-tense expression of those conditions. Which is why culture-change programmes that address only culture, not the conditions that give rise to the culture, have the approximate effectiveness of shouting at a lawn.

There’s one more consequence of being in the system rather than above it, and it’s methodological. We have to be in the substrate in order to read it. There’s no remote observatory; the reading is done from ground level, by people who are themselves, inevitably, altering the ground just by walking it. This is the same discipline as reading the habitat before the indicator species, the context before the signal. It just reminds us of a need for a little humility: the reader is part of what’s being read.

Ground that never stays still

There’s a corollary to the idea that a substrate’s composition and stability determine what can thrive: if ground is disturbed frequently (if the substrate changes too often), it’ll be inhabited only by those suited to change: pioneer species like fast-growing, quick-to-seed nettles or willowherb. More mature communities (a word as contentious in ecology as in organisational dynamics, but still useful) need ground that stays still long enough for slow things like oak trees to establish, their acorns maybe present all along in the soil, just waiting for the right conditions to emerge and thrive.

In organisations that change very frequently (such as restructures every year or two), nothing sticks, and the constant new initiatives are colonised by the pioneer species of the politically nimble. Stability is the precondition for anything that takes longer than a planning cycle to grow: life rarely thrives on persistently unstable substrates. A counter example makes the point well: given enough stability, life can endure incredibly harsh conditions. A crustose lichen, Rhizocarpon geographicum, the map lichen, for example, can live for millennia, growing a millimetre a decade on mercilessly exposed, high altitude mountain rock, enduring weather that would kill most gardens in a day. Change can be good; but a stable substrate is precisely what makes successful change possible for those living on it.

Drained peat doesn’t come back

If we can build organisational ground simply by being in it, it’s tempting to assume we can rebuild it just as readily once it’s damaged. We can’t, or at least not in the way we imagine. Peat is an important example of this. Peat is almost nothing but past life: dead sphagnum accumulating at about a millimetre a year, so a ten-metre bog is ten thousand years of moss. Draining a peat bog happens quickly. Someone cuts drainage channels, water flows, the water table drops and the moss dries out and dies, as does the peat underneath. What follows is a loss rather than a pause, because exposed to air, the peat oxidises and releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide, and the entire substrate shrinks at rates that can reach centimetres a year.

You can go and measure this for yourself, in the Fens where I grew up. In 1851, before the great mere at Holme Fen in Cambridgeshire was drained, a post was driven down through the peat and anchored in the clay beneath, its top set level with the ground. Immediately after drainage a subsidence of nine inches a year in the soil level was recorded, and today it stands roughly four metres proud of the surface. Four metres of substrate, thousands of years in the making, gone in under two centuries; the land around it is now the lowest in Britain.

“Every layer they strip seems camped on before.” — Seamus Heaney, “Bogland”.

When restoration finally comes, rewetting doesn’t bring the old peat back. What rewetting does is restart the accumulation, at a millimetre a year, and the bog that eventually grows is a new bog: similar, perhaps eventually even better in whatever way we mean by better, but not the old one.

Organisational substrate obeys the same devastating asymmetry. It’s so much easier to destroy something than it is to create. Degradation is fast; a round of redundancies, a public shaming of a mistake, a broken promise by leadership, and trust that took years to accumulate can oxidise in days. Restoration is slow, and it is not resurrection. The organisation that does the patient work of rewetting does so in ground that now includes the memory of the draining, and the new growth carries the scar. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing; a bone grows back stronger from a fracture. 

Disturbed ground has another trick, too: real soil holds a seed bank, dormant seeds from earlier communities that can germinate the moment the ground is disturbed and conditions are right for them. If we tear things up in an organisation, we shouldn’t be surprised when what springs up first is not the new behaviour the redesign intended but the old stuff that we thought was long gone, whose seeds were just dormant in the substrate.

This is why “getting back to how things were” is the wrong ambition, and not only because the good old days were rarely as good as the folklore says. It’s the wrong ambition because it’s not available. What restoration offers, in bogs and in organisations, is the conditions for new and healthy things to thrive. They may resemble the old ones, or new ones, or they may be the otters that we thought were extinct. The honest version of hope is forward-facing rather than a longing for the past.

If there’s a single discipline to take away, it’s the beaver’s-eye view of every intervention we’re tempted to make. Before introducing the new practice, redrawing the org chart, or announcing rebranded company values, ask what ground they’re expected to thrive in. The answers to why our organisational change programme worked, or didn’t, are often underneath us.

A different way of seeing isn’t something one can be handed; it’s something we develop, over time, in the field. That’s what our Thinking Like An Ecologist workshop is for: not a new set of tools, but an exploration of a different kind of seeing.

References

Berger, J. (2018) Divine Polity: Religion and Re-Imagining the Role of NGOs in Global Governance. PhD thesis, University of Kent. The earliest use of “organisational substrate” I can find, there meaning an organisation’s underlying rationale, developed by analogy with DNA. My use is ecological rather than genetic: the shared ground built by past life that everything present grows in.

Darwin, C. (1881) The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits. London: John Murray. To the Victorian public’s credit, it sold 3,500 copies in its first month, rivalling the sales of On the Origin of Species.

Egler, F.E. (1977) The Nature of Vegetation: Its Management and Mismanagement. Norfolk, CT: Aton Forest.

Jones, C.G., Lawton, J.H. & Shachak, M. (1994) “Organisms as ecosystem engineers”, Oikos 69, 373–386.

Mars, M.M. & Bronstein, J.L. (2023) “Ecological Metaphors in Organizational Science: An Interdisciplinary Critique”, Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies 41(2), 15–46. Ecological concepts borrowed into organisational writing tend to drift from their source meaning unless they’re traced back to the ecology and held to it.

Odling-Smee, F.J., Laland, K.N. & Feldman, M.W. (2003) Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ramsay, A. (2024) My Dad Brought Beavers Back, illustrated by Abigail Little. Edinburgh: Scotland Street Press. The story of how the ecosystem engineers returned to Britain, by the family who brought them. Aimed at children, and better than many books aimed at adults.

van Breemen, N. (1995) “How Sphagnum bogs down other plants”, Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10(7), 270–275.