Ecological Organisations pt 1: Worlding Through Really Good Stories
It’s been nearly six months since the reimagined story of Ecological Organisations and the accompanying Ecological Organisations Framework tentatively but curiously hopped out of my hands and started wending its own path into the world.
It’s been a strange, sometimes startling, and always-joyful thing to follow this work’s path and see it start to matter to people and their work. Under its creative common licence, the framework’s already travelled to more countries that I have ever visited (or likely will). It has been introduced to university students in the USA; been overlaid on various landscapes, so that it becomes a living compass informed by what’s being read from the different directions1; and helped shape an ecosystem mapping. Even more extraordinary, to me, have been the times I’ve listened to someone sharing about the immediate kinship they had with the story of ecological organisations and/or with the framework, the kind of immediate kinship that is of old friends meeting for the first time: we’ve not met them before but somehow we know them.
So now it’s the six-month launchiversary and I find myself reflecting on the depths I’m discovering the story of ecological organisations holds within it, my role as the source of this story and the EO Framework, and how other people meet and form relationships with this work.
This series of articles is in response to a growing realisation that the story of ecological organisations needs some more anchoring before it continues its travels. I’m therefore doing something I’ve not done before here in my Substack: creating a series, with each article being a stepping stone to the next one. Together, I hope that these articles will create that anchor and become foundational stepping stones into and for this reimagined organisational story.
The EO story stepping stones
We'll start at the foundation stone: why the story of ecological organisations is a story, and why really good stories matter. Here, we’ll start by exploring one story in particular: the story of ecology.
Then we'll explore the story of us humans as ecological; edged and edgeless, informed by - and informing - so much else that the entirety of all we are informed by and inform is impossible to trace. From our lived experience of being ecological, we’ll explore the story of organisations as ecological: edged and edgeless, informed by - and informing - so much else that the entirety of all an organisation is informed by and informs is impossible to trace.
We'll then discover that the story of ecological organisations holds two knowings: all organisations are by their nature ecological; and, the enquiry into an organisation’s nature as being ecological can dramatically shift the way that organisation behaves within social systems, ecosystems, and as a member of our planet (for the better).
Lastly, we'll arrive at the story of ecological organisations being a story with no end goal and nothing to measure. Just as with humans, where the exploration of the nature of ourselves is a land so vast that we’ll never reach the edges of the map, so it is with organisations: there is no final landing place where we realise the full nature of ourselves, only an ongoing process of organisational self-reflection and self-awareness. In this way, we cannot say there are ever ‘ecological organisations’, but only more ecological organisations.
These steps bring us the full story: a story of organisations as edgeless and edged, full of relationship and relating. A story with no end point and nothing to measure. Just a beautiful, loving organisational enquiry that might ignite a desire for an organisation to become a radically responsive and responsible ecosystem, social system, and planetary member because they now recognise just how informed by - and informing - ecosystems, social systems, and the Earth. (The kind of beautiful, loving, ongoing enquiry I’d hope for us human creatures.)
As with all good stories that take us on a journey, we’ll need some aids to help us along the way.
First, we’ll hold truth as a lower-case t, truth that is formed of living questions that open up new questions. Second, we’ll adopt different lenses to look through, including an Animist lens. Third, we’ll hold the we that I speak of as a we that’s of the whiteness-dominated, European-centred, neo-capitalist worldview that I inhabit and not as a reflection of all people and all perspectives.
Worlding through really good stories
So much of the time we see stories as what’s alive between the opening of the story and the close. But stories are as much of the space outside their edges as they are of what they hold within. By its very act of being, a story holds space for all the other stories. A plurality of stories. A multitude of them. Each story takes its rightful place in the liminal space that holds all stories. And that, I believe, is a very good thing.
Stories are powerful creatures because the impacts of a really good story are so very, very real. Capitalism is a story. Whiteness is a story. Nations are stories. Community is a story. As is social hierarchy, ancestry, politics, time, cities, commons, stewardship, humanity (and so much else). We are irreparably arranged and rearranged by stories and their impacts.
When we pay attention, we can choose to step into the universe-sized liminal space that’s filled to bursting with stories.
Seeing our perspectives, ideas, and worldviews as stories helps us not only hold our perspectives more lightly but also see and honour the myriad ways of looking at and being with (and being changed by) the same thing. After all, it’s the plurality of worldviews and perspectives that makes this such a glorious and fascinating, as well as challenging and heartbreaking, world to live in and through. Recognising a story as a story helps us be curious about the story we’re telling while helping us be within the liminal space that holds all stories, so bringing into our sight the rich multitude of stories that exist at the same time.
The beauty of stories is also that stories combine, and this combining enriches both our understanding of each individual story as well as enriching how we more fully navigate the world around us. The story of ecological organisations is enriched by so many other beautiful stories and frameworks, from Doughnut Economics, to Biomimicry, to Theory U, and so many more.
The story of ecological organisations and the accompanying framework were never meant to be received as the only way of being in relationship with organisations or held as being ‘better than’. It was also never, ever meant to be alone. (Stories are too relational to ever be alone.)
The real-world impact of so many of our stories is deadly serious. The same is true of organisational stories: the impact that organisations have on land health, neighbourhood health, livelihood health, educational health, community health, more-than-human health, social system health, ecosystem health, and the health of planet Earth is deadly serious.
It is therefore deadly serious that we imagine and reimagine really good organisational stories. Through stories, we are worlding the world2.
The story of ecology
The story of Ecological Organisations rests on another story, the story of ecology.
The Mirriam Webster dictionary gives us a definition that I find poetic, and which I have based my understanding and explorations of what it means to be ecological on:
I love this definition because it gives me, someone without an academic background in biology or environmental science, a doorway into exploring intricate and complex systems through relationality. And since we humans are relational creatures in all sorts of wonderful ways, ‘ecology’ becomes something relatable, and personal, and deeply important.
In other words, ‘ecology’ gives me a lens through which I can bring my explorations of myself as an organism in deep relationship with my environments, as being ecological; and affords me an animist lens to explore the nature of organisations as deeply relational, as ecological. When I view an organisation as an organism in deep relationship with its environments, the relationality of an organisation (both within and without the organisation) becomes just as personal, and relatable, and deeply important as recognising this for ourselves.
Daniel Christian Wahl, in Designing Regenerative Cultures, writes that:
We are moving from separate organisations and businesses to interconnected ecologies of collaboration that weave businesses and organisations into mutually beneficial partnerships.
I love this story too, that of ‘interconnected ecologies of collaboration’.
In closing, may all who are called world this world through really good stories.
Continue the story with ‘Ecological Organisations pt 2: Being Ecological (Edged and Edgeless, and Deeply Relational’.
Sparked by Tabitha Jayne of Earthself Community Interest Company.
The terms world and worlding are utilised by me as described by Bayo Akomolafe in These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home:
… everything begins in the middle. There are no beginnings that appear unperturbed, pristine and without hauntings. And there are no endings that are devoid of traces of the new, spontaneous departures from disclosure, and simmering events that are yet to happen. The middle isn’t the space between things; it is the world in its ongoing practices of worlding itself.