Looking At Things Properly
The fullest statement so far of what reading an organisation ecologically actually involves, built on the ecologist's use of indicator species. Ecologists cannot measure the health of a stream directly, so they read it indirectly through what is present or absent, thriving or struggling: nettles marking disturbed nutrient-rich ground, lichens marking clean air, mayfly and stonefly and caddisfly larvae marking oxygenated water. Three disciplines follow from that, and the piece argues each is transferable. First, context precedes reading: Tubifex tubifex in a fast stream is a warning about oxygen, the same worm in lake sediment is unremarkable, so there is no universal indicator and the habitat must be read before the signal. Second, succession governs interpretation, since a structure that is healthy in a young organisation may be pathology in an old one; the piece illustrates this with a scaling startup where a thickening management layer was first a sign of order emerging and later a sign of institutional anxiety. It also cautions that organisations have no climax community and no predictable end-state, so restoration never means returning to an idealised past. Third, presence is not establishment: introduced practices, the imported operating model, the 360 review, the poster announcing a just culture, may persist on continued intervention without ever becoming self-sustaining, which is planting sundews in drained peat. The positive counterpart is the signal that cannot be faked, the organisational otter: a junior challenging seniors and being thanked for it, dissent surfacing in meetings rather than corridors, lateral sharing between teams competing for resources. The critique of the measurement industry is sharp and specific: an elaborate apparatus can leave us understanding less, because watching the dashboard substitutes for attending to the organisation, and once the indicator becomes the target it stops being an indicator. The distinction it rests on is Aristotle's, between episteme, the packaged and certifiable knowledge the industry trades in, and phronesis, situated practical wisdom that cannot be downloaded. Hence the claim that this is a practice rather than a method: a trained capacity for attention developed across many habitats, not a checklist, and the piece refuses to end in one. It is careful to distinguish itself from organisational ecology in the sociological sense of Hannan and Freeman, which studies populations of firms under environmental selection; this is the opposite in spirit, reading and tending the living dynamics inside one organisation.
Neighbours (27)
- Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems
- Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems
- Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems
- Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
- Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems
- Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–Ecological Systems Analyses
- Social-Ecological Systems as Complex Adaptive Systems: Organizing Principles for Advancing Research Methods and Approaches
- Thinking About Process Safety Indicators
- Complexity
- Efficiency vs Resilience
- Just Culture
- Organisational Fabric
- Principles of Ethical Measurement
- Qualitative Measurement of PS
- Studying Complexity in Health Services Research: Desperately Seeking an Overdue Paradigm Shift
- The Strange Confidence of 360° Feedback
- Thinking Like an Ecologist
- When are randomised trials unnecessary? Picking signal from noise
- Adaptive Cycle
- Beyond Metrics
- Five Ecological Concepts
- Goodhart's / Cobra Effect
- Streetlight Effect
- Déformation Prof.
- Measuring PS: Questions First
- Retrospectives
- Understanding Variation