Ecological Thinking

This theme applies ecological thinking — systems, resilience, adaptation, disturbance, emergence — to organisational life and psychological safety. Drawing on ecology, it treats complexity as a feature of the terrain, not a problem to be engineered away.

Articles (17)

• Core Principles
• Looking At Things Properly
• The Organisational Substrate
• Complexity
• Efficiency vs Resilience
• Rewetting Organisations
• Thinking Like an Ecologist
• Adaptive Cycle
• Can You See The Cat?
• Ecotones & Edge Effect
• Five Ecological Concepts
• Resilience Engineering
• Selection Pressure & PS
• Stories in the Soil
• Safety Organised Criticality
• Sociotechnical Theory
• The PS Knowledge Map

Papers (26)

• Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems (Holling, 1973)
• Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems (Holling, 2001)
• A Sand County Almanac (Leopold, 1949)
• Early-warning signals for critical transitions (Scheffer et al., 2009)
• Ecosystems and the Biosphere as Complex Adaptive Systems (Levin, 1998)
• Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Gunderson & Holling, 2002)
• Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems (Walker et al., 2004)
• Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–Ecological Systems Analyses (Folke, 2006)
• Silent Spring (Carson, 1962)
• Social-Ecological Systems as Complex Adaptive Systems: Organizing Principles for Advancing Research Methods and Approaches (Preiser et al, 2018)
• Speaking Up to Prevent Harm: A Systematic Review of the Safety Voice Literature (Noort, Reader & Gillespie, 2019)
• The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms (Tansley, 1935)
• Food Web Complexity and Species Diversity (Paine, 1966)
• How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality (Bak, 1996)
• Images of Organization (Morgan, 2006)
• Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers (Jones, Lawton & Shachak, 1994)
• The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms (Darwin, 1881)
• The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association (Gleason, 1926)
• The Theory of Island Biogeography (MacArthur & Wilson, 1967)
• An Introduction to Niche Construction Theory (Laland, Matthews & Feldman, 2016)
• Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries (Pauly, 1995)
• The Population Ecology of Organizations (Hannan & Freeman, 1977)
• Will a Large Complex System be Stable? (May, 1972)
• Ecological Approaches to Organizations (Baum & Shipilov, 2006)
• Ecological Metaphors in Organizational Science: An Interdisciplinary Critique (Mars & Bronstein, 2023)
• How Sphagnum bogs down other plants (van Breemen, 1995)