# Stories in the Soil

*Tom Geraghty · Ecological Thinking, Voice & Silence, Power*

Tom's follow-up to The Organisational Substrate: that piece was what the substrate is, this one is what it remembers. It opens at Julia Isídrez's exhibition Mud is Everything at Nottingham Contemporary, where the Paraguayan sculptor describes her clay as malleable but holding memory, and sets out three rough tests for what counts as substrate: does it change what can thrive in the organisation, is it a condition rather than an event, and does it survive the turnover of people. An event is not substrate but can affect it, as a forest fire does. Peat and coral reefs are ground built from past life, and soil keeps layers of past conditions; the piece cites the Rothamsted Park Grass experiment for a trace of 1960s nuclear weapons testing. Organisations lay down layers too, many of them made of stories. Jacobs and Campbell's classic 1961 laboratory study shows a tradition outliving the people who started it: an inflated estimate seeded by a planted confederate persisted after every founding member of the group had been replaced, though, as the references note, it did fade over enough generations. In Pferner's far more recent study at a German automotive site, Karl, a quality foreman, asked at a management meeting why one production area was assessed on a quantitative unit rather than on quality, and a few days later received what he called a disciplinary measure involving personal coaching. Thirteen other interviewees referred to his case, and the story travelled among colleagues, absorbed as simply what happens here to people who do that.

The piece cautions that most of us hear a story like Karl's and cast ourselves as Karl rather than as the superiors who disciplined him, so the honest question for anyone with power is whether they have ever responded like that, and whether anyone would tell them. The substrate is turned over constantly by the small, unglamorous work of people talking to each other, like the work of Darwin's earthworms. Trimontium, a Roman fort whose ditches and walls show as crop marks in hot, dry summers, carries the claim that old loyalties, rivalries and fractures in an organisation may often be invisible and can reappear under stress, which reveals them rather than creating them. From Haudricourt's 1962 contrast between cultivating tubers and herding sheep, as different dispositions towards other people, tending the conditions against commanding, Tom argues that tending is subtler but no less powerful, and that substrate work is the most powerful kind of organisational work there is, with the risk that cultivating conditions for some makes them less hospitable for others, so the practice must stay attentive, humble, experimental and inclusive: we are only as safe as the least safe person, and part of the substrate ourselves. It closes on who gets a say in how the substrate is shaped: if we all live in it and pass it on, we should steward it collectively, which sounds rather like a commons, the subject of the next piece.

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## Neighbours (11)

- [A Sand County Almanac](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/leopold-1949.md) (paper)
- [How We Respond](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/how-we-respond-matters.md)
- [Looking At Things Properly](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/a-practical-guide-to-looking-at-things-properly.md)
- [The Organisational Substrate](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/the-organisational-substrate.md)
- [Least Safe Person](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/a-team-is-only-as-safe-as-the-least-safe-person.md)
- [Rewetting Organisations](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/rewetting-organisations.md)
- [The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/darwin-1881.md) (paper)
- [The PS Observer Effect](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/how-you-respond-matters.md)
- [Five Ecological Concepts](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/five-ecological-concepts-for-working-in-organisational-change.md)
- ["Have you heard!?" The narrative roots of organizational silence](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/pferner-2026.md) (paper)
- [Narratives of Organizational Identity and Identification: A Case Study of Hegemony and Resistance](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/humphreys-brown-2002.md) (paper)