Bringing All of the More-Than-Human Into Organisations
Listening to the more-than-human while recognising and celebrating the mystery
For so many of us, being in exuberant wildness (in all the ways that exuberant wildness erupts and displays and beckons) is a time of communing with the more-than-human. A communing that words often cannot serve but that our hearts and minds and bodies know how to be in. A communing that’s of flora and fauna and fungi, of cellular and of matter, of place and ancestry, of living systems and of this Earth. A communing of deep time and a heightened present.
It’s impossible for me to describe my experience of being in the exuberant wild, with its mystical, magical resonance, my often gateway to the more-than-human, with anything but the poetic or the lyrical. After all, the poetic and the lyrical are doorways into the sense of things; and communing is all sense.
I therefore find it moving and exciting and necessary that organisations are bringing the more-than-human onto organisational boards, making the more-than-human an organisation’s main stakeholder. That more and more organisations are recognising how troubling it is to imagine ourselves as separate from the more-than-human. And that more and more organisations are including the more-than-human in the sphere of what an organisation pays attention to and how it pays attention. To include the voices and needs of the more-than-human not only elevates our experience of being human but elevates how an organisation is being as well as what an organisation is doing.
When I think of the more-than-human, I often find myself gazing through an animist worldview, a worldview that holds, for me, a rich and satisfying enquiry into what is animation, what is life, what is intelligence beyond the human experience. What I find there is mystery, and I find this mystery not only reassuring but deeply important.
‘When I think of what I believe in, it is closest to a form of animism - the belief that all plants, creatures, and parts of the Earth are animate and alive. But it is an animism of chaotic difference. Of woven contamination. It is an understanding that my being alive does not mean I should assume that the aliveness of the hill or the river or the wild roses is the same flavor as my aliveness. Knowing that a stone is alive keeps me alive. And knowing that a stone is alive differently than me keeps me asking questions, keeps me humble and curious and open to surprise.’
It is with a humble, and curious, and open to surprise gaze that I believe we would do well to hold the more-than-human within as we integrate their voices and needs into organisational fields of attention, noticing what we exclude because we find it ugly, investigating the ways we make fantasy and ideal. Only through as clear a gaze as possible can we learn how to truly listen, and see. The more-than-human that we give place to on organisational boards and lift up as stakeholders are, after all, also the more-than-human of sweeping viruses, parasites, violence, and violent death.
The intention to ‘look with as clear a gaze as possible’ is, I find, the same for all aspects of organisational design and stewardship. We cannot fully explore organisational decolonialisation without first looking with as clear a gaze as possible at the ways that we benefit from neo-colonial systems and stories and from not partaking in internal and external repentance and repair processes. We cannot fully explore the role of money in organisations without first looking with as clear a gaze as possible at the everyday violence and harm of dominating financial systems. We cannot fully explore unhealthy relationships and behaviours within organisations without first looking with as clear a gaze as possible at the ways that we might individually and collectively be benefiting from those relationships and behaviours.
Does looking with as clear a gaze as possible at the more-than-human mean that we collapse our commitment to listening and integrating their voices and needs in organisations? I don’t think so.
Instead, I think this kind of gaze opens up organisational perspectives that deepen our work, within organisations and without; for to include the more-than-human is to include the mysterious, the ‘chaotic difference’ of the exuberant wild. It is to include the mysterious, the chaotic differences of, and in, each of us. And it is to include the mysterious, the chaotic differences of the rich web of complex relationality that is an organisation, and that are the neighbourhoods, ecosystems, social systems, and planetary systems that organisations are so (wonderfully) irreparably weaved into.
If you’re curious about bringing the more-than-human into organisational decision-making, here are some questions that might bridge you into individual and organisation-wide enquiry:
What exactly do we mean when we speak of the more-than-human?
What of the more-than-human are we including and excluding, and what personal and collective worldviews might need adjusting to hold as clear a gaze as possible?
How might we deepen our personal and collective communing with the more-than-human?
Which humans are already in deep relationship with the more-than-human, and how can we listen to the messages they hold that are born of that deep relationship?
What does it mean to be of service to the more-than-human?
We humans are a mass of fungi and bacteria, carried through life by ecosystems within and on us that bring good physical and mental health or deep unwellness. More and more, I find myself thinking of myself as more-than-human. Yet, perhaps it is well that I hold that framing with caution and care. As concludes ‘Mother trees and socialists forests: is the ‘wood wide web’ a fantasy?’, we might do well to let trees be trees even as we hold them through an animist lens, with ‘animist lens’ as gateway into reverance and awe for all the ways the more-than-human are not like us:
If trees have conceptual value, it is not because their similarity to us elicits our sympathy, but because their difference from us enlarges our horizons. They are the most visible markers on the evolutionary road not taken. Trees stand in for all the photosynthesising, carbon-dioxide breathing, fixed-in-place species that share our world yet have fundamentally different ways of living in it.
Contemplating trees should be, above all, an exercise in humility. The mountains and woods, Santayana told his California audience, allow you to “take yourselves simply, humbly, for what you are, and to salute the wild, indifferent, non-censorious infinity of nature”. Perhaps the presence of beings older, larger and more numerous than we are – whether or not they resemble internet users or our mothers – can be a reminder that we are not everything, and that everything is not us. “Let us therefore be frankly human,” Santayana enjoined. And let the trees be trees.
Curious about integrating the voices and needs of the more-than-human into an organisation’s sphere of attention? You might find the Ecological Organisations Framework (released under creative commons) helpful, especially the two questions it holds in the area of integrating the more-than-human. Or, explore working with me directly.