In ecology, the substrate is the material organisms live and grow on. Its properties, like nutrient levels, texture, composition, stability, moisture, etc determine which species can establish themselves and which cannot. We don’t plant a specific species and just hope it’ll thrive; we look at what the substrate will support.
We use the term “substrate” for organisations because the same relationship holds. The organisational substrate is the set of underlying conditions from which behaviour emerges: how power is distributed, how time is allocated, what gets rewarded and what gets punished, how much slack exists in the system, who is permitted to speak and about what. It sits beneath Schein’s underlying assumptions, which describe what people believe; the substrate describes the conditions that made those beliefs sensible in the first place.
This matters quite a lot in practical terms. We cannot “install” a culture, any more than we can install a mature and healthy woodland. What we can do is change the conditions and let the system organise itself around them. Improve the substrate, and much of what we usually try to mandate arrives on its own.
Organisational substrate is 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.
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.
Emergence, substrate, succession, indicator species & ecotones. I started my career in ecology, as an experimentalist working in a research station’s wonderfully named “Weed Science” department – a title that sounds more like a kooky 80s film than a scientific
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
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
The Adaptive Cycle This is a great paper for the ecological and complexity geeks, like me. The adaptive cycle: More than a metaphor. Thanks to Christina Bowen for sharing. The adaptive cycle is a conceptual framework used to understand the dynamics
Ecotones and The Edge Effect My first degree was in the field of ecology and environmental management, and I loved it. I learned about complex ecological systems, population health, economics and more, whilst also going on field trips to Snowdonia to
