Ecological Organisations pt 3: an Enquiry That Brings Us Nowhere
Like all good travellers, it’s useful to stop at times and review the path we’ve trodden before we continue on our way.
We started this series diving into why good stories matter (and are so deadly serious) in Ecological Organisations pt 1: Worlding Through Really Good Stories. Here, we introduced the story of ecology and why this story can give us a view of organisations that is ‘relatable, and personal, and deeply important’.
In Ecological Organisations pt 2: Being Ecological (Edgeless And Edged, And Deeply Relational), we met our ecological selves. Knowing ourselves as edged and edgeless, we then met the edged and edgeless nature of organisations; just like with us human beings, organisations are infinitely rich in horizontal and vertical relationality and irreparably interweaved with ecosystem, social system, and planetary health.
In these final steps, we’ll explore where the story of ecological organisations brings us and where this work might be heading in the future.
Through awareness, we can choose
The story of ecological organisations asks us to hold two knowings. All organisations are ecological. And, through the awareness of organisations as ecological, and being curious about how each organisation’s ecological-ness unfolds, we might choose organisations as radically responsive and responsible ecosystem, social system, and planetary health stewards.
As we’ve discovered in the previous article, it’s impossible for any organisation to exist in complete isolation from its environment. All organisations are ecological, even if we don’t realise it. This is the same with us human beings: we are deeply ecological, even if we never give it a moment’s thought. (You might not think about the web of interbeing that brings your morning coffee into your cup, but you wouldn’t be drinking the coffee without it.)
However, the awareness of organisations as ecological brings us into a new way of relating with organisations (and, a new way of relating with ourselves as organisational stewards). Paying deep attention to how an organisation’s relationships look and feel, what impact the relationships create, and what information the relationships carry, might well ignite a personal and collective care for how those relationships are. We might start caring about how healthy or unhealthy these relationships are for each person, community, region, being, or ecosystem within its web.
This is what, it seems to me, it is to be human: we can move about our days oblivious to the impact of our choices and worldviews on the people, communities, regions, beings, and systems we are in daily relationship with; or, we can pay attention to our own relationality and care deeply about how healthy or unhealthy the relationships we’re webbed into are.
A loving organisational enquiry with nothing to measure…
The story of ecological organisations brings us to a realisation that there is no way to exactly measure how ecological an organisation is. To try to do so is not only missing the point of what this story is inviting us into, which is a state of ongoing enquiry, but would likely ignite unhelpful behaviours. For example, I can easily see a future where organisations vie to be branded as ‘more ecological’ than other organisations, where organisations display a badge of certification that signals that ‘this organisation is a responsible and responsive ecosystem, social system, and planetary health steward’. Yet, would that future really be one that takes us where we’d like to go?1
The uncomfortable truth of organisations as ecological is that once we start attuning to the immensity of relationality, we quickly meet an impossibility: there is no discernable end point to that relationality. Relationality is fluid, anyway, not static. Take a single organisation (or single human being) and try and trace the end point of any one of the daily interactions in their webs of relationality and all we find are lines of interbeing so intricate and extensive that to measure them is impossible. Besides, how would we judge or measure or separate each strand of interbeing? Or exactly how much an organisation, or a human, is informing or being informed by each strand or individual interaction?
We can either hold this immeasurable nature of an organisation’s ecological-ness as contracting; frustrating or unhelpful for organisations that already deeply care about being responsible and responsive ecosystem, social system, or planetary health stewards. Or, we can hold the immeasurability as expansive; an invitation to be in awe with how rich complexity is, what it means to attune to relational complexity, and what it means to be an organisation (and to be an organisational steward).
I hold it as the second.
… and no end goal.
There’s also nothing in the story of ecological organisations that brings us to an end goal we can strategise toward or that holds any kind of completion. There are many things in this world that we can strategise towards and meet completion with, and that’s to be celebrated. Designing and building homes that are not only carbon-neutral but ripple out benefits into their communities is to be celebrated - and we know when the building stage is completed because it’s safe for people to inhabit it and make it a home.
Complexity, however, is neither static nor concrete and is in constant flux. If there even was a way to utilise the EO Framework in a way that would signal a completion, the thing we’ve found completion with will have already shifted shape. The story of ecological organisations is a story of messiness, incompleteness, the unanswerable, the complex, and what’s beyond human reach to comprehend or capture. I celebrate this. So does the story of ecological organisations (at least, as it lands in me).
Does all of this mean that I don’t see ways that the story, and the accompanying EO Framework, can be useful now, beyond utilising the EO Framework to ignite ongoing organisational self- and shared-enquiry? No.
Here are just some of those ways…
Travelling into different future timelines
As a person who spent much of their childhood soaking up books, books, and more books, it surprises me that it’s taken me this long to realise the power of storytelling. Now, the power of storytelling is sinking into my bones and rearranging my cells.
I am deeply grateful to RADAR’s invitation (an invitation given voice through Keely Adler) to be their first Events with Friends guest. RADAR is an online community of amazing mind-hearts ‘thinking about and building better futures’ and they invited me to share about ecological organisations and then be taken into a 2034 where organisations are ecological.
My mind and heart were blown away by the imaginary journey we took together and you can dive into the open Miro board here and soak it in yourself. Some of what would be in that 2034 are extraordinarily moving and exciting.
Thanks to RADAR, I now see what opens up when we visit possible future timelines, spend some time there, and bring that experience back to the present day. What we’ve imagined saturates how we think and behave now because new possibilities have opened up and are burrowing into our cells.
This experience changed my view of what might be possible for this work and I can see future timeline wisdom-gathering being a wonderful, enlightening, embodied part of this work (and I’m excited to start integrating this).
Journeying into our ecological nature
This story and the EO Framework were birthed from time spent in exuberant nature, from moorlands to river valleys to coasts and mountain regions. These are the places where I have found I can be in the strongest connection with the mysterious wild, the poetic and the unknowable, living systems and self-balancing ecosystems, the more-than-human and all that’s of the Earth. Through these, I more and more know myself as nature, myself as the mysterious wild, myself as the more-than-human and of the Earth, myself as poetic and unknowable, and myself as a living system.
It is this ongoing discovery of what it means to be ecological that birthed the EO Framework and carries me into this deepening EO story. That discovery also holds within it the knowing that I do not have an embodied imprint of what it is to truly be stewarding, what it is to truly be in and of the commons, what it is to truly be seasonal. These ways of being human are an unknown experience for me, as I know they are for so many of us, and I suspect that it’s only through embodied imprints that we can really steward ecological organisations.
I am therefore strongly pulled towards exploring how we might facilitate meaningful and depth-full personal and communal journeys that bring us into embodied knowings of stewardship, commons, relationship to place, lines of ancestry, storytelling, relationality, seasonality, interbeing, animism, and right relationship. Personal and communal journeys designed to bring us into knowing our ecological-ness so we can carry these imprints into the organisations we’re a part of. Personal and communal journeys informed by exuberant nature, the mysterious wild, the more-than-human and all that’s of the Earth, and the poetic and the unknowable.
Communally-discoved and -tended edges
A common question that arises with this work is along the lines of: ‘If relationality is that complex and that extensive, where do we begin? How can an organisation take responsibility for, and be responsive to, relationships if they are edgeless and infinite?’ It’s a smart question, and for a long time, I was troubled by the only response that arose: ‘I don’t know. Perhaps each organisation needs to decide where the edges of their responsibility lie, depending on their capacity, and then tend to that and that alone’.
Then, recently, I realised that I was looking at it through a worldview that is saturated in individualism. Intentionally step out of that worldview, and a pathway shows itself: organisations can’t possibly be responsible for, and responsive to, ecosystems, social systems, and planetary health alone. But something changes when we realise it doesn’t have to be - and cannot be - an individual carry.
Imagine a network of organisations committing to communally discovering and tending to the fluctuating, co-created edges of responsibility for each organisation. Each organisation being responsible for what it has capacity to hold; larger organisations taking ownership of a wider co-created space of responsibility, and smaller organisations taking ownership of a tighter co-created space of responsibility. Information - feedback and feedforward - flowing through the network, so that wider arcs of responsiveness and responsibility are possible.
Now that’s a future timeline and network I’d like to be a part of.
A stewarding council
Sitting where I sit, six months after the birth of this story, there are different paths I can see this work travelling down.
The path that keeps tugging at my heart-mind-gut attention is the one where I’m part of an EO stewarding council. With a wisdom/elder council guiding our work; humans from different backgrounds and cultures, holding different worldviews, each giving voice to the EO Framework elements.
I can see this stewarding council tending to different EO threads. One thread: research and research partnerships. One thread: different types and depths of facilitated journeys into the story of being ecological, gently rippling out facilitators that bridge others into the story through their embodied imprints. One thread: supporting organisations as they form relationships with this story and the EO Framework. One thread: stewarding EO as a creative commons, protecting this work while making it as useful as possible. One thread: soaking up framings, needs, and asks of organisational leaders from different countries and cultures, so we can play our small part in this wonderfully diverse and unknowable world that’s unfolding at this particular time.
That path calls to me.
Birthing the reimagined
At the same time, where this story might travel might not even be imaginable yet. Maybe it will soon be composted so it can make good soil. Maybe it’ll morph into a new form. I find all these possible futures reassuring and I’ll follow whichever one arises with curiosity and appreciation.
When we are birthing the reimagined, what’s being reimagined can feel like it’s not grounded in reality. But perhaps that says more about our current state of reality, or how we perceive reality, than what’s being birthed? Worlding is a mystical thing; perhaps that mystery gifts us more than we’ll ever know.
In closing, may the story of ecological organisations find its place in the bigger story of deep time, the story of worlding, and the story of the more-than-human, the human, and all that’s of the Earth.
I realise that organisational signalling can be a useful tool to help us decide where to spend our money (because who we give our money carries a larger weight of support). If you’re seeing how to realise this kind of signalling without the signalling twisting the story of ecological organisations into something it isn’t, I’d love to know. From my view of how signalling gets twisted, I can’t see a way.