Thinking Like an Ecologist — Workshop Companion
Ecology isn't just a metaphor for organisational dynamics, but one of the richest lenses we have for them. Organisations are complex adaptive systems, and reading complex adaptive systems is exactly what ecology has spent centuries learning to do. When we borrow from it, we're borrowing practices from a mature discipline built for precisely the kind of thing an organisation is. This trail is a companion to the Thinking Like an Ecologist workshop: the vocabulary, the practice of reading a habitat, the conditions that make things possible, and the edges where the interesting things happen. We don't plant outcomes. We shape substrate.
The route
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Five Ecological Concepts
Introduces five ecological concepts — emergence, substrate, succession, indicator species, and ecotones — and maps them to organisational change.
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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.
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The Organisational Substrate
Sets down a definition for a term used in these articles since 2022 without one ever being written: the organisational substrate is the accumulated physical and non-physical matter an organisation li…
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Rewetting Organisations
Uses peat bog restoration as an ecological metaphor for organisational change: blocking drainage channels (removing the structures that suppress voice) allows the system to self-organise toward healt…
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Efficiency vs Resilience
Uses the Irish Potato Famine and Nokia as cases to examine the tension between efficiency (standardisation, monoculture) and resilience (diversity, redundancy).
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Ecotones & Edge Effect
Applies the ecological edge effect and ecotones — the boundary zones between different habitats — to organisations.
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Safety Organised Criticality
Introduces Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) and applies it to organisational failure.
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Thinking Like an Ecologist
Workshop overview for 'Thinking Like an Ecologist' — introducing six ecological principles as lenses for organisational change: emergence, substrate, diversity, weak signals, edge effects, and succes…