Organisational Indicator Species: being an Organisational Ecologist

A Practical Guide To Looking At Things Properly 

“A scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.” — Wonko the Sane (Douglas Adams)

Organisations spend a great deal of time and effort trying to understand themselves, through engagement surveys, benchmarks, maturity models and more. And yet many leaders will admit that they don’t feel like they know enough: the dashboards and the metrics aren’t quite the full picture. Many of the things that matter most in an organisation are the things that are hardest to measure directly: things like alignment, buffer capacity, expertise, safety, and ambition. 

The more elaborate and expensive our system for understanding something, the less we may actually understand it, because we end up paying attention to the numbers instead of the actual organisation. This is worse than simply not knowing, because it doesn’t feel like not knowing. It feels good, it feels like control.

Ecologists have spent a very long time on the same sort of problem: we usually can’t measure and quantify the health of an ecosystem directly either; there’s no eco-mometer that we can put in a stream to give us a measure of its health. So ecologists instead read these things indirectly, through what’s present or absent, what is thriving or struggling, what’s changed and what persists. In “Five Ecological Concepts for Working in Organisational Change” I described one of the ecologist’s most useful tools, the indicator species: organisms whose presence or absence reveals the health of a habitat in ways that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to measure directly.

And this is why I think ecology isn’t just a metaphor for organisational dynamics, but one of the richest lenses we have for them. Organisations are complex adaptive systems, and reading complex adaptive systems is exactly what ecology has spent centuries learning to do. When we borrow from it, we’re borrowing practices from a mature discipline built for precisely the kind of thing an organisation is.

And it is a discipline, which is important. Reading organisations ecologically is not a method or a tool. It’s a practice. The difference is that a method can be written in a manual or explained in a training session, whereas a practice has to be developed. What I’m describing here is closer to what an experienced field ecologist does when they walk a habitat — a kind of trained, attentive seeing that draws on their experience and everything they know without consulting a checklist. That takes time, and exposure to many different habitats. And it takes someone occasionally pointing at the thing you walked past and saying: oh, did you see that? This piece describes that way of seeing, not a checklist of things to look for.

First Sight and Second Thoughts, that’s what a witch had to rely on: First Sight to see what’s really there, and Second Thoughts to watch the First Thoughts to check that they were thinking right.
Terry Pratchett – The Wee Free Men

What do we mean by indicator species?

Bear with me through a few plants and freshwater invertebrates; because every one of them is teaching a habit of attention we’ll take back to the workplace. All species can tell us something about the habitat they occupy. Even very common species carry information. Nettles (Urtica dioica) typically indicate nutrient-rich, recently disturbed soil and often signal human activity — a place where things were moved or the ground was disturbed. Rye grass, hardy and tolerant of compaction, can suggest grazing or trampling pressure. Rosebay willowherb is sometimes called fireweed, because it will rapidly colonise burnt ground, telling us something about the history of the land – during WW2 it was also known as bombweed, because it thrived in bomb sites. Fruticose lichens, and some fungal diseases such as sycamore tar spot, are particularly susceptible to air pollutants (classically, sulphur dioxide), so we tend to only find them where the air is clean, away from heavy industry and traffic. All these tell us something about the habitat they’re in, and by identifying multiple species in one place, we can triangulate a fairly precise picture of the local conditions without actually measuring anything. 

(Note, I’m using primarily British examples throughout — the specific species will be very different in other parts of the world, and that is, in fact, kind of the point.)

Some species are more discriminating than others. The organisms that ecologists find most useful as indicators tend to be those with narrow tolerances — sensitive to specific conditions in ways that make their presence or absence genuinely informative. Among the most useful are the “EPT” taxa: Ephemeroptera (mayflies), Plecoptera (stoneflies), and Trichoptera (caddisflies). These freshwater invertebrates are highly sensitive indicators of water quality: they require high oxygen levels and low levels of pollutants. A single kick-sample from a healthy stream, containing stonefly nymphs and caddis fly larvae, tells an ecologist more about water quality than laboratory tests (and far more quickly too), because these organisms are living indicators of conditions, not just a metric analysis of nutrient and pollutant levels.

Now, consider Tubifex tubifex, a small and ostensibly very boring aquatic worm. Also known as the sludge-worm, or sometimes, if it’s feeling fancy, the sewage worm. In a fast-flowing stream that we would expect (and hope) to be oxygen rich, the presence of tubifex could be a warning: it tolerates low oxygen and organic pollution that most other invertebrates cannot, and its presence signals that the conditions might be too degraded for more sensitive species. The same organism in the sediment of a large lake is entirely unremarkable and somewhat reassuring — those conditions suit it fine, and its presence there tells us relatively little. The same species in different contexts tells us different things. 

This is the first thing to understand about indicator species, biological or organisational: context precedes reading. There is no universal indicator; no signal that means the same thing in every habitat. In organisations we often forget this: we read a behaviour, a metric, a structure, and assume it means what it meant somewhere else. It doesn’t, necessarily. The same signal, in a different organisation or a different stage of the same one, can mean a different or even opposite thing. So the first move is never to interpret the signal. It’s to read the habitat.

Reading organisational indicator species

Let’s explore what that might look like inside an actual organisation. I was once part of the senior leadership team of a fast scaling tech startup and in the very early stages, we had very few managers (we also didn’t have heating, and our primary server was one we pulled out of a skip). Everyone just did stuff, made decisions quickly, rarely asked for permission, and we moved fast. But as we scaled, we hit the usual issues that rapidly scaling organisations do: work got more complex and interdependent, and as a result, tasks and deliverables would more often collide and conflict with each other, which meant that we needed increasing alignment and oversight to make sure we weren’t getting in each other’s way. We needed team and product managers to provide oversight, coordination and prioritisation. This growing concentration of managers as an indicator species was a healthy organisational signal: structure was emerging where there had been early productive chaos, processes were forming around the places where coordination at scale was breaking down, and the indicator species of governance roles were doing what they do — stabilising the substrate so that more long term and mature species could take root. However, two years later the project management layer had thickened beyond what the work required; handovers had become excessively elaborate and approval boards had become blockers rather than enablers. What had been a healthy response to early-stage complexity had begun to signal high institutional anxiety: a defensive response to an environment that felt fearful of failure and far more brittle than it once had.

The same species at different stages of an organisation result in a different reading.

This is where ecological succession matters as a companion concept. We can’t read an indicator without understanding where the system is in its developmental trajectory. An ecologist doesn’t look at pioneer species on recently cleared land and conclude that something is wrong — those are exactly the species we’d expect to see at that stage. The same species on an established woodland floor might be cause for concern: it would suggest a recent disturbance, a localised regression to an earlier successional stage.

A caution, though, about pushing this metaphor too far. Succession in a woodland tends towards something we can broadly predict, because the conditions are somewhat stable and we have repeatedly watched many woodlands do it. Organisations are not like that: there is no fixed end-state they’re heading for, arguably no climax community, and the trajectory can stall, reverse, or branch. The organisation now is as different to the past organisation as it is to another organisation, so restoration never means turning the clock back to some idealised point; it means asking how to move towards a better future.

Whilst succession doesn’t tell us the end state, it still tells us something important about order. A disused pasture does not become woodland in a single step; it has to pass through stages like scrub first, because some states are preconditions for others. We can’t skip them, however much we desire the end result, because the later stage is not merely later; it’s dependent on what the earlier stage builds.

Organisations work the same way. The mature thing cannot be installed before the conditions that make it possible actually exist. We will not (for very long) get people openly challenging senior decisions in a place that hasn’t first built the more basic conditions that make challenge safe and survivable; we cannot introduce otters into a river that cannot yet support them. So succession is useful here not as a ladder with a known top rung, but as a reminder of two things: that the same signal means different things depending on where a system has come from, and that some things simply cannot happen before others.

Presence isn’t establishment

One of the subtler lessons from ecological restoration work is the difference between presence and establishment. A conservation project might introduce specialist species (for example, round-leaved sundew [Drosera rotundifolia] to a recovering peat bog) as part of a restoration programme. To a passing observer, their presence looks like success: the specialist indicator species are there, therefore the habitat must be recovering and healthy. But an ecologist must look more carefully: are these plants thriving and reproducing? Is the substrate actually supporting them, or are they merely persisting on the back of the intervention, dependent on continued artificial implementation and support to survive?

Organisations do this constantly. Fixating on “what worked there” instead of considering “what will work here?”. Adopting the “Spotify model”, implementing 360 degree reviews, putting a poster up telling employees we have a “Just Culture”. These are introduced species. Their presence may tell us relatively little, because the question we need to ask is whether they are self-sustaining: whether the conditions in the substrate actually support them, whether they are spreading and reproducing without continued top-down mandates, whether they’re actually the right species for this habitat at all. If the answer is no, what we have is a display, not a thriving habitat. The trap is flipping causality, in thinking that because many healthy organisations run regular team retrospectives (for example), that running regular retrospectives means we’re a healthy organisation. 

“The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect (an intricacy that has its astonishing moments, as when sundew and butterwort eat the insects), the more the mystery deepens. Knowledge does not dispel mystery.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

This is where “rewetting organisations” comes in. In environmental restoration of a peat bog (incidentally, from the Gaelic bogach, meaning soft), we don’t begin by introducing specialist species. We begin by restoring the substrate: slowing down change, raising the water table, allowing sphagnum moss to re-establish, so that the conditions exist in which native species can return and thrive of their own accord. The specialist species come last, not first, and their arrival is evidence of recovery rather than its cause. Organisations that naively introduce practices they’ve seen others do, carry out restructures that mirror a different organisation, or apply goals and targets without attending to the substrate that supports them (including capabilities, power structures, incentive systems, institutional memory, and more), are at risk of planting sundews in dry, drained peat. They may, if we’re lucky, persist for a while, but they will not thrive. 

What are we actually looking for?

An ecologist asked to assess a habitat doesn’t arrive with a fixed checklist to tick items off. They arrive with a trained capacity for attention, developed over years of looking at many different habitats in many different conditions, and they read what is in front of them against everything they know about what could and should be there, what has been there, and what the current conditions suggest about where things are heading.

Some signals are generalist: ubiquitous enough that their presence tells you relatively little. Others are discriminating: their presence or absence in this habitat, at this stage, under these conditions, is genuinely interesting. The skill is knowing which is which; and that knowledge is inseparable from knowing the habitat. Organisational “seeing” means looking at, and doing our best to understand, the context first – before interpreting what the signals may be telling us. If we read the signal without reading the organisation first, we risk confidently misreading it.

With that caveat stated, some organisational signals tend to warrant attention:

A proliferation of committees and change advisory boards often (but not always) indicates an institutional fear of failure: we’d rather not do anything than try something that incurs risk, and the accountability sink of decision-making is distributed so widely that responsibility becomes impossible to locate. Heavy, bureaucratic handover processes between teams frequently signal low inter-team trust: paperwork and process act as a surrogate for trusting relationships. An abundance of individual metric targets for performance, particularly where they are tracked publicly and tied to reward, often suggests that leadership doesn’t trust the workers to be intrinsically motivated, and tends to suppress exactly the lateral knowledge-sharing that collective performance requires.

But (and this is the tubifex point) none of these signals means the same thing in every habitat. Individual targets are appropriate in some cases where there is little interdependence between people. Heavy duty approval boards and signoff may be appropriate in safety-critical, highly complex contexts such as nuclear power. Read the context first. Always read the context first.

The positive organisational indicators

What’s the organisational equivalent of otters?

Otters returned to many British rivers as water quality improved — because the conditions finally supported them. They sit near the top of the freshwater food chain, and their sustained presence signals that the entire system beneath them is functioning: clean water, healthy invertebrate populations, plenty of fish, stable bankside vegetation. We cannot fake otters. We cannot introduce them into a degraded system and expect them to hang around for long. Their sustained presence is evidence of genuine, systemic recovery.

The organisational equivalent is the signal that could only exist if everything beneath it was working. Not the signal that has been managed into existence and kept on life support, but the one that emerged because the conditions were finally right. A junior team member openly disagreeing with a room full of senior leaders and being thanked for it, not “performance managed” afterwards. Genuine productive dissent surfacing in formal meetings rather than only in corridors and car parks. Lateral knowledge-sharing and ideation across teams that are nominally in competition with each other for resources or recognition.

These things cannot be “performed” sustainably. They can’t be introduced by policy – we cannot simply tell people to “speak up”. These signals are the otters: evidence that the substrate has genuinely changed, that the water is clean, that something has actually been restored rather than imposed or mandated. If we are regularly seeing these things, they are typically very good signs of organisational health.

The measurement-industrial complex

We’re all familiar with organisational surveys — the engagement survey, the pulse survey, the psychological safety survey. Ecologists do surveys too, but the two things share little more than a name. When an ecologist surveys a habitat, we’re exploring, looking, seeing, sensing: reading what is present and what is absent, what is thriving and what is struggling. A staff survey, by contrast, is a snapshot, abstracted from the habitat, often in language that doesn’t quite fit the context.

There is by now a substantial industry built around the measurement of organisational health — engagement platforms, culture diagnostics, psychological safety scales, maturity frameworks, and benchmarking services of all kinds. Much of this is well-intentioned. Some of it is useful, particularly when applied carefully, longitudinally, and in combination with richer and more qualitative reading. But the industry as a whole rests on an assumption that the ecological approach exposes as problematic: that the same indicators mean the same things across contexts, and that the path to understanding an organisation runs through the consistent application of validated instruments.

This isn’t true. At least not primarily. The more elaborate and expensive our system for understanding something, the less we may actually understand it: because the apparatus of measurement tends to substitute for the discipline of attention rather than supporting it. When we have a dashboard, we watch the dashboard. When the dashboard tells us that engagement is 7.2, we manage towards 7.8. And in doing so, we invoke Goodhart’s Law in its most destructive form: the indicator becomes the target, and in becoming the target, it stops being an indicator. We end up improving nothing, or, in many cases, actually making it worse (you may already be thinking of cobras as indicator species!). The sludge worm at the bottom of the dashboard keeps trying to tell us the actual conditions, but nobody is paying any attention to it because it’s boring and small.

The measurement-industrial complex trades in what Aristotle would have called episteme: systematic, generalisable, transferable knowledge. The kind that (at least claims that it) can be packaged, certified, and applied by someone who wasn’t there and doesn’t know the habitat. What the organisational ecologist¹ develops over time is closer to phronesis: practical wisdom that is irreducibly situated, inseparable from experience and context and judgement, and not available as a downloadable checklist. We can learn the names of the EPT taxa in an afternoon. Knowing what their presence or absence means, in this particular stream, at this particular time of year, given what happened upstream last year, takes much longer, and it takes practice.

What the organisational ecologist actually does

An ecologist doesn’t “fix” ecosystems: we work to restore the conditions in which the system itself can recover, and then we pay attention to what emerges. Organisations are complex adaptive systems, not machines to be upgraded by swapping a component in the right place.

The capacity of being an organisational ecologist, of “seeing things properly”, develops over time, through practice and attention and the accumulation of many habitats read carefully. It is not a generic framework to be applied or a checklist to be ticked off. A real woodland restoration plan is a strange document to an organisational eye. It works across decades, sometimes with no end point at all, and contains almost no deadlines. Its phases overlap rather than run in sequence. Its operations are conditional: we fell trees only if they’re diseased, we intervene only where needed, and we support regeneration where it appears. A phase is complete not in Q3 but when the assessment suggests it is — when the system itself says so. The plan describes conditions and directions, not dated milestones, because habitats don’t consult plans. Neither do organisations.

None of this resolves into a simple organisational checklist, and it would betray the whole argument if it did. But there are dispositions, habits of attention, that the organisational ecologist develops.

• We read the habitat before the signal, because the same signal means different things in different places.
• We consider where the organisation is in its own development, because a structure that is healthy in a young system may be pathology in an old one.
• We implicitly distrust the introduced species: the practice imported because it worked elsewhere, and ask whether it is actually thriving or being propped up.
• We triangulate across many weak signals rather than trusting a single strong number, because a number is the feeling of knowledge and rarely the thing itself.
• We look for the signals that can’t be faked: the ones that could only exist if the conditions beneath them were sound.
• And we attend to the substrate, because we’re working with a living system that will not consult our plan, and the most useful thing we can do is often to make the ground more hospitable and pay attention to what grows.

Most of all, we keep looking. The habitat changes, the stage moves on, the indicator that meant one thing last year means another now. We’ll never stop trying to look at things properly, because the work is never finished.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first.

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

1* Note: Through all of this I should be clear that I mean something quite different from the sociological field of “organisational ecology” (Hannan and Freeman), which studies why whole populations of businesses are founded and die under impersonal environmental selection. In this piece I mean something smaller and almost opposite in spirit: reading and tending the living dynamics inside a single organisation, on the premise that its conditions can be shaped.