A Good Time to Die
How organisational stewardship might mean giving your organisation a good death
When viewed as living, self-organising ecosystems, organisations are so fascinating.
Again and again, we humans come together, moved by the start of an idea, putting out to the call to others to come and share intention, curiosity, energy, passion, and creation. Through us, again and again, an organisation comes to life. Again and again, there’s a beginning, a germination that carries within it seeds of possibility: this organisation as a gift to the world; or, this organisation as harm.
This article is a love letter to the organisation as a living ecosystem, and the vital and enlivening role death plays in living ecosystems. It’s an appreciation and recognition of organisational stewards, those that have the courage to consider questions of an organisation’s appropriateness, right relationship, and dissolution. It’s a call to all of us to see the urgency of approaching organisations not as dead entities that we have the right to control, but as living forms that we have the honour to steward (for a certain amount of time). And it’s a celebration of what opens up for us when we recognise that seasonality is not something that is of the woods, of the air, of the Earth alone, but is inherent in everything.
Where there is birth, there is death.
May we all find the depth of humility and care it takes to acknowledge when it’s the right time for an organisation to die.
May Your Organisations Be In The Rock
[…] the rock record of the Earth […] is an encyclopaedia of the possible, of landscapes that have disappeared […]
To consider the landscapes that once existed is to feel the draw of the temporal wanderlust. My hope is that you will read this in the vein of a naturalist’s travel book, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space, and begin to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous yet familiar.
Otherlands: A World in the Making, Thomas Halliday
So finishes Thomas Halliday’s introduction, Otherlands then unveiling the layers of rock beneath our feet so we can time travel into the vast eons, eras, periods, and epochs that form 500 million years of life on this planet (meeting horses the size of house cats and watching species and ecosystems arrive and depart along the way).
I cannot truly fathom the seasonality of life on Earth, hold 500 million years in my view, or comprehend such vast cycles of birth, existence, and death, much in the same way that I cannot fathom the ecosystem that is every atom. Perhaps it is as First People’s Law holds, that “nothing is created or destroyed because of the infinite and regenerative connections between systems. Therefore time is non-linear and regenerates creation in endless cycles.” (Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk)
I cannot truly fathom it. Yet, when I walk in old growth forest, or along an ancient coastal path, or sit at a lake’s shore, I sense it. When I clamber over fallen trunks, and am passed by a bee from a colony somewhere far from my view, and the autumnal leaves squelch underfoot, I understand that one day everything will be another layer in the rock record.
It seems to me that we have mostly tried to separate organisations from nature, when nothing is separate.
Ecologically-inspired Organisations
There’s such a rich array of experimentation and learning underway on what are now often labeled ‘regenerative organisations’.
From organisations that are adopting and developing self-organisation practices, to organisations adopting facilitation and role-led hierarchies in place of traditional management and top-down hierarchies to open up a world of organisational member satisfaction and purpose achievement. In some organisations, we are experimenting with compensation approaches and purpose-over-profit goals, in others we are implementing stewardship-ownership and ‘mission locks’ or centring tools like the Doughnut of Doughnut Economics in our internal and external strategies. We even have organisations like Patagonia showing us that the Earth itself can be the only shareholder for a global organisation!
Better yet, there’s a wonder of freely-available information and maps to inspire us to find our personal route into becoming a better internally rooted and ecosystem-placed organisation, including:
🦠 These wonderful core principles of Regenerative Communications by the Sympoiesis Experience and Design Lab that I think summarises the core principles that all regenerative-intentioned organisations would benefit from adopting:
🦠 The nature-born Biomimicry Design Lens: Life’s Principles from the bio-inspired consultancy Biomimicry 3.8, principles that I recently became aware of and which are so well aligned with how I approach organisational design.
They describe these principles as
[…] design lessons from nature. Based on the recognition that Life on Earth is interconnected and interdependent, and subject to the same set of operating conditions, Life has evolved a set of strategies that have sustained over 3.8 billion years […]
By learning from these deep design lessons, we can model innovative strategies, measure our designs against these sustainable benchmarks, and allow ourselves to be mentored by nature’s genius using Life’s Principles as our aspirational ideals.
🦠 The stunning Imagination Sundial by Rob Shorter, Communications and Action Lead at DEAL, that highlights the ripeness of possibility when we pay attention to space, places, practices, and pacts:
But where is death in these? Where is the composting, the mulching, the ‘making good soil’ that Sophie Strand points us towards?
It’s not here.
An Ecologically-inspired Organisation is one that understands that at some point it will die, actively listens for the the time that the organisation tells us that now is the right time to die, and stewards that death with care and respect.
The Role of Death In Thriving Ecosystems
In most ecosystems up to 10% of existing organic matter is consumed by animals and incorporated into their bodies. (The remaining 90% remains uneaten and tuns into decomposed organic matter called detritus).
A new, small ecosystem forms around the carcass, with the body at its center. […] These carcass-based mini-ecosystems are dynamic. Different organisms visit a carcass at different stages of decomposition, so one dead animal can support great diversity over the course of its decay. […] Ecosystems are really a circle of life and death.
Soil microorganisms shape global element cycles in life and death.
Living soil microorganisms are a major engine of terrestrial biogeochemistry, driving the turnover of soil organic matter — Earth’s largest terrestrial carbon pool and the primary source of plant nutrients […] Remnants of dead microbial cells serve as fuel for these biogeochemical engines because their chemical constituents persist as soil organic matter. This non-living microbial biomass accretes over time in soil, forming one of the largest pools of organic matter on the planet.
Life and death in the soil microbiome: how ecological processes influence biogeochemistry, Sokol, Slessarev, Marschmann, Nicolas, Blazewicz, Brodie, Firestone, Foley, Hestrin, Hungate, Koch, Stone, Sullivan, Zablocki, LLNL Soil Microbiome Consortium, & Pett-Ridge
The world's forests not only provide essential ecosystem services to humans, including the storage of vast amounts of carbon, but also support most of the planet's terrestrial biodiversity. […]
The importance of deadwood as habitat for insects was recognized early on, including by naturalists searching for previously undescribed species in the late 19th century (Wallace 1869) and ecologists in the early 20th century (Graham 1925). […] Deadwood can promote diversity at higher trophic levels by increasing food resources, facilitating accessibility to those resources, and providing shelter and resting sites (Kortmann et al. 2018). […] Deforestation imperils biodiversity worldwide, but forest degradation through the removal of deadwood and old trees is a widely neglected threat that results in considerable additional loss of biodiversity and alterations in ecosystem processes.
The living dead: acknowledging life after tree death to stop forest degradation, Thorn, Seibold, Leverkus, Michler, Müller, Noss, Stork, Vogel, Lindenmayer
A few weeks ago, I was in a meeting at one of the organisations that I am a partner in, and the person that is acting as Source instigated a round of reflections on their intention to radically shift the strategy for how the organisation aligns with its purpose.
After we had each shared our thoughts, they summarised what they had drawn from listening to us, including the realisation they’d had about what is and isn’t our organisational purpose, and the realisation that if the our purpose was better served by other organisations, and we would therefore have to end, then we would be achieving our purpose.
My heart sang.
More often than not, the subtext of every organisational meeting, strategy, and decision is: How do we keep this organisation alive? How do we make it bigger? How do we do more?
But what if that’s not the approach that will best align the organisation with the intention that the organisation was founded on and/or currently holds?
What if organisational purpose was better achieved through intentional dissolution? Becoming deadwood, and living soil, and organic matter, so playing our part in feeding the larger ecosystems we’re a part of? What if the route to our organisation being a gift to the world includes noticing when we are causing more harm than good, or noticing when we are not the organisation best placed to achieve our purpose?
Perhaps organisational stewardship is knowing when we have completed our work in the world in this exact way, with these people, in this organisational form.
Perhaps the biggest gift we can give the world is to recognise when it’s a good time for our organisation to die.
That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.
A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.
The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.
The Overstory, Richard Powers
I work with clients that are interested in discovering ways to become ecologically-inspired organisations, implement healthy and rooted self-organisation, and access embodied facilitation.
I share my learnings for free here on Substack and on social media because I believe that knowledge and learnings should be free to all of us. If you find value in my writing and can afford to support me as a writer, I am immensely grateful for paid subscriptions.
I steward the small, donation-dependent non-profit Seaspray Collective. Through Seaspray, I can bring my services to groups and projects working on community-led and environment-focused initiatives, along with groups and communities harmed and devoiced by our current systems. Donations enable me to offer my time at no cost to these projects, and in return I receive the UK’s current living wage outside London: £10.90ph.
Much needed and timely, speaks volumes to me, and relates centrally to how to place oneself, and displace oneself, in a collective.