From Being Ecological to Organisations as Ecological
Talking to the Active Inference Institute community about ecological organisations
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of talking to Daniel Friedman of the Active Inference Institute about Ecological Organisations, and why I believe that this reimagined organisational story helps us activate organisations as radically responsible and responsive organisations; and, us humans as radically responsible and responsive organisation, ecosystem, and social system stewards.
After my introductory talk, Daniel generously hosted a lively conversation that included questions from the live stream listeners. Exploring where my personal path into relating to/with an organisation meets an active inference path into relating to/with an organisation was activating and fascinating and full of life! The 90 minutes flew by.
The way that Daniel absorbed and reflected back the different aspects and elements of Ecological Organisations left me with new and fascinating avenues into them and into related areas. He also left me with wonderful new questions to ponder, such as: What would it look like/mean if the experience of people that met an organisation’s ‘edges’, in any sort of way, was a positive visceral and emotional experience?
I'd love to bring this talk about Ecological Organisations into more institutes, organisations, groups, or for any other gatherings that would be interested. Please reach out if you and your colleagues, friends, or collaborators would like that. And, if you're in easy travel of Exeter, UK, perhaps we could do it in person.
An Introduction to Ecological Organisations
Watch the livestream recording on YouTube here.
(I’ve also included the talk as written text, below, if you prefer or need to read it. Unfortunately, there isn’t a transcript from the discussion).
INTRO
During today’s talk, I’m asking you to join me on a journey into exploring and examining the nature of an organisation as a co-created story and why this story matters, in particular to how we view the role of organisations. We’ll set off on our journey by investigating the story of our body as a singularity, a complete and separate entity with clear and discoverable borders, take what we learn about our bodies into investigating the story of an organisation as a singularity, a complete and separate entity with clear and discoverable borders, and, with these investigations as our signposts, we’ll arrive at Ecological Organisations as a co-created story that asks us to radically reimagine the role of organisations in the world.
As with all good stories that centre 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 ‘world’ that I inhabit and not as a reflection of all people and all perspectives.
I believe that the time has come for us to reimagine stories of organisations as ecological; and, through co-creating the story of Ecological Organisations, become radically responsive and responsible ecosystem stewards.
BODILY VISUALISATION
To give ourselves some way of tasting what being ecological means, I’m going to ask you to close your eyes for a while. You don’t have to, but I think you’ll find this talk much richer if you join me by investigating your lived experience.
Bring your attention to your body. What is your experience of being in your body right now? What physical sensations do you notice? Do you notice your heart beating? Can you feel your body breathing in and out? Now bring your attention to what you’re sitting or standing on. Investigate the place where your body meets another surface. Can you tell where that point of contact is? Are you losing heat or feeling a difference in temperature at the place your body meets another material? Now widen your attention to your external environment. What sounds can you hear? What sensations are you experiencing that arise from your environment? Is there dampness, heat, stillness, movement in the air?
Now we’ll do some time travel. Go back to the start of your day and travel through it. Perhaps you woke up in bed next to someone and you were aware of that other body near you. Or perhaps you were alone and you were aware of that sense of you alone in your bed. Recall the contact of the sheets on your skin. Later on, you likely interacted with substances like toothpaste to brush your teeth, water to wash your face. Perhaps you filled a kettle with water and then pressed the on button, then drank a hot drink. Have you eaten today? Remember that process of eating, the food outside your body, then in your mouth, then swallowed. How about other people in your day. Have you been in the same space as someone else today? Did you sit next to them, walk past them on the street, perhaps make direct physical contact with another human being? You’re all here on this Zoom with me so you’re likely at a computer or on a mobile phone, which means you’ve turned on a screen and your fingertips have hit computer keys or interacted with a mobile phone screen.
Through all of this, from the moment you woke up to right now, did you feel like a singularity, a complete and separate entity with clear and discoverable borders?
We’re going to investigate your day’s experiences again. Add in to all of those activities the estimated 39 trillion bacteria in or on the human body. To put this into perspective, we have around 30 trillion human cells in our body. We have bacteria in our gut, on our eyelashes, our skin, up our nose, our belly buttons, our lungs, our genitals, and our bladders. We have multiple microbiomes in and on our body. We are more bacteria than human cells.
Perhaps, after all, you weren’t just a singularity, a complete and separate entity with clear and discoverable borders going about your day, but a creature that is more of a multitude.
Can you locate the border of you? Where is the edge of you and the start of everything else? Is your border your skin and everything your body holds within it? What about your hair? Is each strand of the hair on your head, your arms, your legs, your genitals, your eyelashes a part of you? How much hair do you think you shed today? It’s likely you wouldn’t notice all of it. A hair from our head holds viable DNA if kept stable. Is that hair no longer part of you the moment it’s no longer on your body if that strand of head hair contains your DNA? What about skin cells? Are they a part of you? How many skin cells were you shedding when you were in bed, as you brushed your teeth, as you ate, or right now? When is your skin part of you and when is it not?
Your consciousness, your emotions, your awareness of you: can you pinpoint the edges of these? Are they contained within the edges of your skin or do they travel outside? Where do you really begin and end? Think about the last time you held someone’s hand. Could you tell at all times where the edges of you ended and the edges of the other person began?
Our reliance on our environment is a matter of life and death. 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. We breathe in air and utilise the chemicals within because otherwise we’d suffocate. As we process and expel what we consume, aided by chemical processes in the body, where are the lines between food, water, air being separate from us and when are they a part of us? When we breathe, we move carbon through our blood, into our lungs, and expel it. At what exact moment in the conversion process is the carbon part of you and when is it no longer you? Perhaps, after all, you weren’t just a singularity, a complete and separate entity with clear and discoverable borders going about your day, but a creature that is very much of your environment.
Now bring all of these multitudes, this environmental reliance and interactions, into your awareness of yourself as a being that has multiple relationships, multiple interactions. The relationships and interactions with loved ones, friends, colleagues, people at the supermarket, or on the train, or on the bus, or walking past in the park. Think about how you’re carrying those relationships and interactions with you each day. With family, close friends, partners, we’re carrying years, decades of relationships and interactions with us as we go about our day. Now extend those relationships and interactions to include everything else you meet and interact with and are affected by: objects, animals, trees, rivers, plants, clouds, sunshine, electricity, internet, computer software, and on and on and on.
Where exactly do you begin and end? Where are the edges of you, the human being? Perhaps, after all, you aren’t just a singularity, a complete and separate entity with clear and discoverable borders going about your day, but a creature that is a multitude, of your environment, deeply and irrevocably enmeshed into constellations of relationships, and interactions, constantly being rearranged and rearranged by, impossible to point to where we end and others and other things begin.
Now hold this awareness of the magnitude of this for ourselves, and include every other human being on this Zoom: each of us with trillions of bacteria, shedding hair and skin, breathing, eating, drinking, moving through our day carrying multiple relationships and interactions.
This is what, it seems to me, 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 really explore it, we find that the human body is actually dispersed, a multitude that’s more bacteria than human cells, a constant shedding and regrowth, our cells, our selves being arranged by our environment and rearranging it, constantly. When we close our eyes, we can experience both the borders and the borderless-ness of being a human being and we can ask the question: do we really know where things end and everything else begins?
When you’re ready to step back into your singularity (for a while), feel free to open your eyes.
TASTING ECOLOGICAL
If your experience just then was anything like mine is when I shut my eyes and bring my attention to my body and then extend it outwards, what you’ve just experienced is how I directly experience what it means to be ecological, to be a living organism in relationship with their environment.
More than that, we know that there are ecological relationships being lived within and on us. The relationship between us and our gut microbiome is just one kind of ecological relationship. Here it’s a mutualistic symbiotic relationship, meaning that different species live in close proximity and both of the species benefit. Ecological relationships are intimate and meaningful relationships. In the case of us and our gut bacteria, we host the bacteria for their lifetime, giving them what they need to thrive, and they help us digest our food, access nutrients, develop and maintain our immune system, and protect us against harmful invaders. Healthy and happy gut microbiome equals healthier and happier human bodies. I know this well. One of the challenging health issues I have means that some of my gut bacteria that I rely on for health and wellbeing has migrated from the large intestine into the small, causing all sorts of havoc to my small intestine and causing me daily issues for my immune system, access to nutrients, and food digestion.
I am not a biologist and this is not a biology lesson. But when I was thinking about how best to convey what it is that led me to birth the Ecological Organisations Framework and the story of Ecological Organisations it rests on, I realised that it’s through my awareness of myself as an ecological being hosting and being hosted by ecological relationships, that was the path into seeing and experiencing organisations as ecological, and I realised that without touching the experience of being ecological, then ecological organisations become just a lifeless theory. And nothing ecological is lifeless.
Now that we have that lived experience of being both bordered and borderless, we can investigate Ecological Organisations by looking for where we find an organisation’s borders.
EXPLORING ORGANISATIONAL BORDERS
It seems to me that we have co-created a story of organisations as singularities, complete and separate entities with clear and discoverable borders, and I now believe that believing this co-created story to be a fact, to be Truth, can do immense damage to an organisation, an organisation’s members, and the ecosystems and social systems an organisation is situated within.
Most of us here could probably give a definition of what an organisation is. We might explain it as a group of people, with a shared purpose or goal, with a specific legal status. We might include that it has employees or members. We might add that it often has a head office, multiple offices, at the least an address we can write to it at. It seems pretty obvious. But when searching for the borders, the edges, of an organisation. I’ve found that these descriptions leave me unable to actually pinpoint them.
An organisation is often defined as a group of people with a shared purpose or goal. That makes sense to me. But when I look to find the organisation here, I’m left frustrated. People group around all sorts of shared purposes or goals, that doesn’t bring us to the organisation itself. For starters, we’re grouping here, today, with a shared purpose, but we’re not an organisation. People group up in parks for yoga classes or group walks. They’re not an organisation.
I want to find the borders of the organisation if it’s a group of people with a shared purpose or goal. I want to know where I can find the edges. When the members of this group go home at the end of the working day, if they work in an office or an allocated building that belongs to an organisation, or when they stop working on organisational tasks, if they work from home, does the organisation cease to exist for a while? What about at weekends, when an organisation’s members are with their families, or hiking mountain trails, or flying to a new city, or watching TV? Has the organisation itself become somehow dissolved at these times? We know that’s not true. Or when a member leaves, and another arrives. What if all the original members of a group leave the organisation and it’s formed of entirely new members, does the organisation change? The atmosphere might, the direction might, maybe they’ll even rebrand, but does ‘an organisation’ as a thing change?
Even if they merge with another organisation, if we look to find the borders of the organisation as the borders of a group of people compared to everyone else, we know that people aren’t singularities, complete and separate entities with clear and discoverable borders, so we know that a group of people isn’t ever just a group of people. It’s a group of human beings that is deeply enmeshed in their environment and that carry with them into their working lives a multitude of living relationships and daily interactions.
I then find myself investigating the physical. Can we locate an organisation in an office, a building, a home office? When I look there for an organisation, I find walls, floors, ceilings, lights, desks, electricity, internet, and so on. I can locate those things but I’m not finding the organisation there. Any 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, and I wonder if part of the organisation goes with these visitors. What happens when an organisation expands into two offices? Has it been split in half? Many of us are members of organisations that don’t even have an office. I’ve been a core member of a number of organisations where I’ve never met the other members in person, where we all work from different locations around the world
Then I look to legal status. Most organisations have one. An organisations most often is a non-profit, a limited company, a church, a school, an institution, a purpose-led enterprise. Still I can’t find its borders. The organisation isn’t the computer file or the piece of paper that says an organisation exists and affords it a certain legal status.
When I investigate an organisation like this, I find myself feeling a little embarrassed, seeing these investigations as somewhat childish. We know that an organisation isn’t actually a thing. Try to touch it and we know how much of an idea it is. It’s an idea all of the above elements combined: the members, where the members work, the shared purpose or goal, the legal status they have. But I keep getting stuck when I think of the human body and how easy it is to say yes, there’s a singularity, a complete and separate entity with clear and discoverable borders, until I investigate it and find it to be both bordered and borderless, that to be human is to be ecological and be enmeshed within ecological relationships.
Even if we land at organisations as ‘an idea we all agree to share’, that I could never touch or find its edges in the same way that I could touch you and say, look, there you are, we know that organisations exist. The impact of them on our lives is beyond doubt and beyond argument. 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. We have relationships and interactions with members of the organisation we are members of, and relationships and interactions with members of other organisations. We look to organisations to pay taxes, keep promises, sell us things, provide us with things, take care of services. The impact and output of them is without argument. We have daily, lived experiences of them. Here in the UK, I am daily experiencing the impact of the actions and outputs of large to small organisations, depending on them for my heating, water, food, electricity, and so on. At this time, some of the organisational impacts are so impactful that they radically change my daily life as a UK citizen for the worse.
When I examine an organisation, look to where its edges are, just like with our bodies, I find that instead of singularity, a complete and separate entity with clear and discoverable borders, there exists both borders and borderless-ness. Take Amazon as an example. I know Amazon the organisation exists. I can point to Amazon delivery centres, the delivery trucks they utilise, their customer service team. I can buy products from their organisation. I can divide people into Amazon employees or those working for Amazon, and those that aren’t. I can even track the peripherals - supply chains, who does business with them, who their stockholders are. It gets trickier, though, to divide people into who is impacted by the actions and output of Amazon, and who isn’t. It doesn’t seem a huge leap to guess that we’d find that every single human on this planet is affected by the actions and output of Amazon. It gets even trickier to divide the ‘everything’ that is affected by the actions and output of Amazon, and those that aren’t, like the impact on the Earth’s natural ecosystems and all the lifeforms that dwell within them and are in relationship with them. It doesn’t seem to me to be a huge leap to guess that we’d find that everything on this planet is in some way affected by the actions and outputs of Amazon the organisation.
And it’s not just a huge organisation like Amazon. Investigate an organisation and it becomes challenging to separate out the impact and actions from an organisation. After all, the shared idea is a group of people with a shared purpose or goal.
We still need to define an organisation though, even if we find that there are no true borders. 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. I need to know who’s paying me, what tasks I’m responsible for, what purpose or goal I’m contributing to. We need to know who to hold accountable 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 our commons, so that we can understand who and what is within that commons and who and what is without.
It’s the same with humans. We need to know that you are you and I am I. Besides, each of us humans is unique and that’s wonderful.
When investigated, the nature of an organisation seems as enmeshed in relationships, made up of relationships, as a body is. The edges are hard to determine, what’s taking place within its borders affects and is affected by what’s taking place outside of its borders.
If we didn’t create stories of definable borders, an organisation wouldn’t exist. But, we need to remember that these borders - like most borders - are a story that we co-create and keep co-creating.
ECOLOGICAL ORGANISATIONS
Once we hold organisations as both bordered and borderless, as edges that are tricky to find, we can co-create a reimagined organisational story: Ecological Organisations.
Ecological Organisations are organisations that are curious about themselves and how they are relating with their environment. They are organisations that recognise that, within their so-called-borders, they are a web of ever-changing, fluid, responsive relationships - from the relationships between its members, to the relationships playing out within and between its systems and social norms; and that recognise that, outside of their so-called-borders, they are affecting and being affected by webs of ever-changing, fluid, responsive relationships that are the ecosystems and social systems an organisation is situated in. They are organisations that recognise that they are being constantly rearranged by relationships and all that dwell within those relationships, and are constantly rearranging relationships and all that dwell within those relationships, because to be is to be in and of a multitude of relationships - as it is with us humans.
Thinking back to the multitudes of relationships, interactions, and the intimate, symbiotic relationships that each of us human beings carries and meets and is rearranged by every single day that you experienced when you shut your eyes - bring that complexity, that inter-relating, into your understanding of an organisation, even the smallest. As well as the webs of relationships that each human member of an organisation is woven into and brings with them into an organisation, think about the multitude of relationships that are a part of what it means to work together in different formations within an organisation - from pairs, to triads, to small teams, large teams, departments, boards, and so on. On top of that, bring in investors and all of their relationships. Stakeholders and all of their relationships. Clients or customers, and all of their relationships. Now start to bring in neighbourhoods, natural ecosystems, man made structures such as electricity grids and phone lines and internet.
When we start to hold the myriad of ways that an organisation affects or impacts all the relationships inside its imagined borders and all of the relationships outside its imagined borders, now we are touching the ecological nature of organisations.
Through looking at an organisation through this lens, we can become curious about where and how an organisation is causing harm or being helpful. Curious about where and how all the different relationships within an organisation are hurting an organisation’s members or helping them - or, likely, both. Curious about how the relationships within an organisation are hurting the organisation or helping the organisation - maybe both. Curious about where and how the actions and output of an organisation are hurting or helping small communities, large communities, neighbourhoods, nature, social norms, natural and manmade ecosystems, more-than-human beings, and the Earth. We can utilise this lens to trace and observe and intentionally improve the relationships that an organisation and its members are consistently rearranged by and are constantly rearranging, both within the organisation and within the local, regional, bio-regional, and global ecosystems and social systems an organisation is located within.
AN ANIMIST LENS
There’s one thing that we still have to explore.
Let’s revisit and examine again these two terms: ecology, and ecological relationships. The ecological is the relationship between living organisms and their environments. Ecological relationships are the relationship between living organisms.
How can an organisation be ecological, be enmeshed within ecological relationships, if it’s not a living organism? Here’s where another lens comes in. Even if we understand that an organisation is a web of relationships and interactions, enmeshed in wider webs of relationships and interactions, if the nature of an organisation is a group of people with a shared purpose or goal, a legal status, members and so on, why isn’t every group of people with a shared purpose or goal an organisation?
Whether we view organisations as animate or inanimate is, it seems to me, just another story that we are co-creating together. Over the many years of my being fascinated with organisational design, strategy, and facilitation, as well as group dynamics playing out with organisations, I have found myself relating to organisations through an Animist lens. Where others just see organisations as a grouping of business, offices, computers, decisions, employees, partners, production, output, legal status, and so on, I see these as being the elements that birth organisations as their own beings, breathed into life by humans. Beings that we can choose to have the honour to nurture, steward, and, hopefully one day, support through a good death.
What opens up for me when we view organisations as animate instead of inanimate? Now I, as an organisational member, become an organisational steward, listening deeply, paying careful attention to what the organisation needs and is telling me. Being an organisational steward becomes one more way I can honour life and all the forms it takes, one more way I can choose to move toward right relationship. Now I, as an organisational steward, become activated into radical stewardship: radical responsiveness and responsibility for those relationships within the co-created boundaries of an organisation and radical responsiveness and responsibility of the relationships within the multitudes of relationships an organisation is situated within.
This, then, is what, to me, an Ecological Organisation encompasses. This is the reimagined organisational story that moves and activates and excites me. This is how I step further into activism, right relationship, and stewardship.
Whether you choose to adopt an animist lens or not, or co-create a story of Ecological Organisations or not, I hope that this talk will ignite interesting breadcrumbs you might want to follow and leave you with questions to live into and explore.