Ecology

Lens ball with a view over mountainsDespite much insistence, organisations are not machines, and the machine metaphor fails us in fairly predictable ways: if we tune the parts, if we optimise for one function or component, the whole suffers. Doing the same thing in a machine works the same each time; this is not true for organisations.

Ecology offers a different set of questions. Ecologists have spent centuries learning how to understand systems they can’t control or measure directly, and can’t take apart to see how they work. That is more or less the position we are in with organisations.

These articles put ecological concepts to work rather than using them as ornament. Substrate, succession, emergence, indicator species, ecotones, selection pressure, self-organised criticality, the adaptive cycle: each one changes what we look at, not just how we describe it. And most of them point the same way. Improve the substrate – the conditions, and the system does much of the organising itself.

Otter at the British Wildlife Centre, Newchapel, Surrey by Peter Trimming, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Organisational Indicator Species: being an Organisational Ecologist

The more elaborate and expensive our system for understanding something, the less we may actually understand it. Ecologists face the same problem — you can’t measure the health of an ecosystem directly — and solved it by learning to read indicator species instead. This piece asks what those look like in organisations, why the same signal means different things in different habitats, and why nobody’s listening to the worm at the bottom of the dashboard.

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Safety organised criticality

Safety-Organised Criticality

Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) During my ecology degree, whilst studying ecosystem and habitat change, I learned about Self-Organised Criticality (SOC), and I was fascinated by how it explained the precursors to seemingly dramatic changes. We first discussed Self-Organised Criticality in this

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peat bog in derbyshire

Rewetting the Organisational Substrate

Rewetting Organisations by Tom Geraghty Allowing the system to self-organise by improving the substrate: creating the underlying conditions for change. When I was studying ecology at university, one of the activities we undertook in our field trips was helping to

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ridge and furrow fields, leicestershire

Efficiency versus Resilience

Efficiency vs Resilience By Tom Geraghty Standardisation is often used as a way to increase organisational efficiency and scalability. Through reducing variation, we can standardise our tools, training, processes and more, enabling us to optimise systems and better achieve our desired

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selection pressure

Selection Pressure and Psychological Safety

Selection Pressure and Psychological Safety Why has it taken so long for some industries to recognise the importance of psychological safety, whilst others have been doing it for decades? One possible answer: selection pressure. Over the past few decades, the

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ecotones and the edge effect

Ecotones & The Edge Effect

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses Ecotones and the Edge Effect, as well as polarisation at work, relational contracts and internal conferences. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks

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