Ecological Organisations pt 2: Being Ecological (Edged and Edgeless, and Deeply Relational)

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I like to guide people into exploring organisations as ecological through exploring ourselves as ecological.

My preferred way of doing this is quite unhelpful for those of you that prefer to read Substack articles with your eyes open: inviting you to close your eyes so that you can investigate your lived experience.

If you would like to close your eyes and be led into your own experience as an ecological creature and how that experience leads us into experiencing organisations as ecological, I’ve uploaded a 10-minute visual narration of (The Story of) Humans and Organisations as Ecological onto YouTube.(You’re also welcome to keep your eyes open and go through the visual journey too!)

Humans as ecological: edged and edgeless, and deeply relational

As with so many good stories, we start with you, the reader.

Bring your attention to your body. Do you notice your heart beating? Can you feel yourself breathing in and out? Feel into the edges of your body. The top of your head. The outline of your skin. The balls of your feet. Now bring your attention to what you’re sitting or lying on. Investigate the place where your body meets another surface. Can you tell where that exact point of differentiation is? Now widen your attention to include more of your direct external environment. What sounds can you hear? What sensory sensations are you experiencing that arise from your environment? Are those sounds, those sensations, arising beyond the edges of you?

Now, let’s do some time travel together.

Bring your attention back to the start of your day. Again, slowly traverse your day, adding into your attention some of the objects or beings you interacted with. Maybe you woke up in a bed and you felt sheets on your skin or a pillow under your head. Maybe you felt carpet or floorboards under your feet as you made your way to your bathroom to freshen yourself. You likely interacted with substances like toothpaste to brush your teeth and water to wash your face. Perhaps you filled a kettle with water, pressed the on button, then drank a hot drink. Maybe you stroked a dog in greeting or touched some flowers or a tree. Revisit these interactions.

Have you eaten today? If so, take yourself back to that process of eating; the food being outside of your body, then inside your mouth, then being swallowed. What was the exact moment when the food was outside of you and when it was part of you? How about other people in your day. Did you wake up in bed next to someone and were you aware of their body being theirs and your body being yours? How about sitting next to someone else, or walking past them on the street, or making direct eye contact with them? Can you find the edges of you in those interactions, distinct from the edges of them?

Through all of this, from the moment you woke up to right now, did you feel like you were a complete entity, with clear and discoverable edges, a singularity moving through a world of other singularites? I know I can, as I potter about my day.

We host multitudes

Let’s investigate if that singularity is true.

Revisit your day, and now include the estimated 39 trillion microbial bacteria, fungi, and virus’ in or on the human body. We have microbes in our gut, on our eyelashes, on our skin, up our nose, in our belly buttons, in our lungs, on our genitals, and in our bladders. (It could be said that we might well be more microbes than human cells.) Not only that, but scientists are discovering that microbiome organisms might well hop from person to person like people are the London tube system and they’re travelling across the entire city.

We are reliant on these immense, lively microbiomes not only for our physical health, but likely our mental health as well. Imagine that, that these bacteria we rely on for our wellbeing might also be moving between us. How can we be singular entities, with clear and distinct edges, when we rely on living organisms to keep us alive and well, organisms that might well be part of someone else before they become part of us?

What about our hair. Is our hair part of us? As soon as our hair breaks the skin surface, hair cells die. However, nuclear and mitochondrial DNA can be recovered from hair if the hair is kept stable. The same as skin cells, we shed our hair continually as we move about our days. Is your hair not a part of you when it leaves your body if it can hold your DNA?

Perhaps, after all, we aren’t complete entities, with clear and discoverable edges, singularities moving through a world of other singularites, but creatures that are a multitude, dependant on other beings living within and on us for our physical and mental wellbeing.

Living of and through our environments

Let’s further our exploration of our edges.

Our reliance on relationships and interactions with what-is-not-us is a matter of life and death. We breathe in air and utilise the chemicals so that we don’t suffocate. We eat food and convert it to energy because otherwise we’d starve. We drink water and are hydrated because otherwise we’d die of thirst. Where are the lines between food, water, air being outside of us and becoming part of us?

Perhaps, after all, we aren’t complete entities, with clear and discoverable edges, singularities moving through a world of other singularites, but creatures that are living of and through our environment?

Now extend your edges to include the ways we’re rearranged by (and are rearranging) relationships with family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, the more-than-human; from the most intimate relationships, to the person on the street you only pass by once. Now include how we are daily reliant on manmade systems and structures and tools: the computer or mobile phone you’re reading this on, the written word even existing. Now include that our ideas aren’t even our own: we are inspired and rearranged by books, articles, podcasts, others’ ideas, natural laws, natural sciences, sitting on a bus, or a moment sitting by the sea, eyes closed, breathing in the smell of the sea, feeling the wind on our skin. Not only our ideas; our emotions are deeply relational, often arising within and by relationships and interactions.

Add into that the immensity of current events that we humans are affecting and are affected by: weather systems, politics, war or peace, where we live and how we live. Now add place. Our lives, our behaviour, our thoughts are informed by place: where we live, the history of that place, how that place is being related to; city or countryside, ecologically healthy or ecologically unhealthy.

We are daily rearranged by and through relationship.

Now hold more relationality

Where are the edges of you, this human being? Perhaps you aren’t a complete entity, with clear and discoverable edges, a singularity moving through a world of other singularites, but a creature that is a multitude, formed of and informed by relationship, by interaction (and maybe by intra-action). Perhaps you are a creature that is deeply and irrevocably enmeshed within living relationships. A creature constantly rearranged by so much that it’s impossible to point to where you end and everything else begins.

Now include every other human being who’s reading this article or will read this article: each one of us an aliveness that’s only possible through a multitude, a universe, of living relationships.

Finally, bring your attention not just to the horizontal, to all of the occurances and relationships playing out in the here and now, but also to the vertical, the occurances and relationships of the past and the future: histories, ancestral lines, cultural stories, as well as the possible futures that lay before us and our future decendants (personal and collective).¹

What I find so extraordinary about the edgelessness of being human is not just that we are being so deeply informed by, but we are informing too: our actions, our choices, our way of being will ripple out into the world around us in ways we cannot see or fully understand.

This, it seems to me, is what it is to be human: you are you, I am I, we can clearly point to where you end and I begin. And yet, when we investigate it, we find that the human body is actually dispersed, a constant shedding and regrowth, our very selves constantly arranged by (and arranging) our environment. When we close our eyes, we can know both the edges and the edgelessness of being a human being and we can ask the question: do we really know where we end and everything else begins?

When you’re ready to step back into your singularity, feel free to open your eyes. I am not a biologist, and this is not a biology lesson, but when I was thinking about how best to bring people into a story of organisations as ecological, I realised that it’s my knowing of myself as ecological that has enabled me to see the ecological nature of organisations. Without the personal, lived experience of being ecological, a story of ecological organisations is lifeless. And nothing ecological is ever lifeless.

Now that we have a lived experience of humans being both edged and edgeless, we can investigate organisations as edged and edgeless.

Organisations as ecological: edged and edgeless, and deeply relational

Most of us could easily give a definition of what an organisation is.

An organisation is a group of people, such as employees or members, with a shared purpose or goal and with a specific legal status. It often has a head office; at the least, a public address we can write to. What an organisation is seems pretty obvious, as do the edges.

Just as we did with human beings, let’s investigate if these edges are true.

When the members or employees of an organisation go home at the end of the working day, or when they stop working on organisational tasks, does the organisation cease to exist for a while? What about at weekends, when an organisation’s members are (hopefully) with their families, or hiking mountain trails, or flying to a new city, or watching TV? Has the organisation become somehow dissolved at these times? And if every single original member or employee leaves an organisation, does it stop being an organisation?

If we define the edges of the organisation as being members vs non-members, a very reasonable way to define an organisation’s edges, we know that people aren’t complete entities with clear and discoverable edges, singularities moving through a world of other singularities. We therefore know that organisational members aren’t ever just organisational members: they’re human beings that are deeply enmeshed in their environment and that cannot be separated from a multitude of living relationships, daily interactions, and daily reliances.

Finding blurred edges

When I look there for an organisation’s edges in something I can touch or see, I still find blurred edges. For many organisations, I can touch, or at least see, walls, floors, ceilings, lights, desks, electricity (don’t touch this), the internet (or this). This is true even for those of us that work remotely, it’s just more dispersed. Yet, any one of those elements can be replaced and an organisation is still the same. Where is the physical divide for an organisation in a shared floor or building? When do I know when I'm standing in an organisation or outside it? Post gets delivered, visitors come and go, but the organisation isn’t drifting off with its visitors like its a mist clinging to their clothes. Besides, internet, electricity; these are usually plugged in to much larger networks.

What happens when an organisation expands into multiple locations, perhaps in different countries? Has the edges of the organisation changed? Many of us are members of organisations that don’t even have an office, working from home with people from all around the world: what does that mean for organisational edges if I’m looking for edges I can touch or see?

I then look to legal status. An organisation is most often a non-profit, a limited company, a church, a school, an institution, or a purpose-led enterprise. At the very least, most organisations are named. Still, I struggle to find its edges. The organisation isn’t in the computer file or the piece of paper that affords it a certain legal status.

The impact of really good stories

When I investigate an organisation like this, I find myself feeling a little self-concious. It’s so obvious that an organisation isn’t actually a thing that it’s a bit embarrasing to investigate an organisation’s edges so literally.

We know that an organisation is really an idea that we all agree to share. It’s a story. Still, even if we land at organisations as an idea, as a story, with edges I could never touch or see in the same way that I could touch you and say, ‘look, there you are, within the boundaries of your skin’, we know that organisations exist and we act as though organisations have clear and definable edges.

The impact of organisations on our lives is irrefutable. Many of us are members of an organisation or will be at some point in our lifetimes. We might rely on them for our income, and therefore rely on them for our and our family’s (and community’s) wellbeing. If we’re a member of an organisation, we have a wide range of relationships and interactions with fellow members, from intimate to knowing someone only by name. All of us humans likely have relationships and interactions with someone who’s a member of an organisation. We humans rely on organisations to pay taxes, keep promises, provide us with things, deliver our daily needs, and take care of services.

We have daily, lived experiences of organisations and their impacts.

Take Amazon as an example. I know Amazon the organisation exists. I can point to Amazon delivery centres, Amazon delivery trucks, customer service team members. I can buy products from Amazon. I can divide people into those who are Amazon employees or work for Amazon, and those that aren’t. I can even likely track the peripheral relationships - supply chains, who does business with them, who their stockholders are.

It gets trickier, though, to divide people into those that are impacted by (and therefore in connection with) Amazon, and those who that aren’t, since at this point it doesn’t feel like a huge leap to guess that we’d find that every single person on this planet is affected by - and connected to - Amazon. It gets even trickier to divide the more-than-human that are affected by the actions and output of Amazon and those that aren’t. Again, it doesn’t seem to be a huge leap to guess that we’d find that everything on this planet is in some way or another affected by - and connected to - Amazon.

Now hold more relationality

Investigate any organisation and I’ve found that it becomes incredibly challenging, impossible even, to view organisations as singularities with clear, definable edges.

We still need to define an organisation though, and differentiate an organisation from what’s not an organisation, as well as identify one organisation from each other (as we do with us human beings).. We need to know who works for an organisation and who doesn’t, which office to go to or who to have async conversations with. We need to know who’s paying us, what tasks we’re responsible for, what goal we’re contributing to. We need to know who to hold accountable for organisational behaviour and who to ask questions of. My work is hugely inspired by commons and I’m especially excited by organisations as commons. And, the first step in creating and governing a commons is to define a common’s edges, so that we can understand who and what is within that commons, and who and what is without.

When investigated, an organisation is as enmeshed in relationship, made of relationship, as a human being is.

Just as with human edges, organisations are rearranged by (and are rearranging) each members’ relationships with family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, the more-than-human; from the most intimate, to the person on the street each member only passes by once. Now include how organisations are daily reliant on manmade systems and structures and tools: the computer or mobile phone you’re watching this on, the written word even existing. Now include that organisational ideas aren’t even their own: organisations are inspired and rearranged by books, articles, podcasts, ideas, natural laws, natural sciences, an organisational member sitting on a bus or sitting by the sea, eyes closed, breathing in the smell of the sea, feeling the wind on their skin.

Add into those edges the immensity of current events that organisations are affecting and are affected by: weather systems, politics, war or peace, where we humans live and how we humans live. Now add place. Organisational behaviour is informed by place: the places members live, and a head office resides; the history of that place, how that place is being related to; city or countryside, ecologically healthy or ecologically unhealthy.

Organisations are daily rearranged by and through relationship.

We now have a choice

If we didn’t create stories of definable edges, organisations wouldn’t exist. But, we need to remember that these edges - like most edges - are a story that we co-create and keep on co-creating.

To believe that organisations are singularities, separate from their environment, is, I believe, a deadly serious mistake. Conversely, knowing organisations as ecological, as edged and edgeless, and deeply relational, could mean that organisations choose to take responsibility for - and be responsive to - ecosystem, social system, and planetary health.

In closing, may organisations know themselves as ecological, and, from that knowing, be activated.

Continue the story with ‘Ecological Organisations pt 3: An Enquiry That Brings Us Nowhere’.

1. You can dive into horizontal and vertical relationality in my previous article Staying Closer To Ourselves: A Relational Understanding of Embodiment.