Heart of the Art

By John Atkinson

An organisation consists of people, interacting with each other and the environment in which they operate. This is a living system, people are alive and so is much of the world in which they live. It is therefore helpful to view human organisation through the lens of ecosystems. Much is known about ecosystems and how they function. It has become quite fashionable to refer to ecosystems when talking about organisations. Too often people are simply referring to their supply chain or network. Doing this without connecting with this wider knowledge on ecosystems is simply to put new labels on old ways of thinking. If a ‘living systems’ mindset is embraced, it expands the view of a leader on what is happening in their environment and why, offering them a broader and deeper range of options in any situation.

The Norwegian philosopher and ecologist, Arne Naess, spent years living in the mountains by the snowline, right on the boundary of where life becomes possible. He proposed three characteristics of living systems, which if embraced and understood, offer insight into how we might work better with human organisation. These characteristics are complexity, diversity and symbiosis.

Human organisation has many parts. As these interact with each other they create multiple interacting relationships and feedback loops. This results in non-linearity. In a complex environment it is impossible to identify a single root cause for events. There will be uncertainty over the outcomes that arise from actions. This combines to give rise to some interesting phenomena.

• Emergence when the parts of a living system interact with each other, they give rise to a new properties or behaviours that are not to be found in any of the parts. Life itself is an emergent property of physics and chemistry. This means that the more traditional reductionist approach to leadership of breaking things into their constituent parts and managing them separately can be counter-productive in a living system. It is important to consider ‘wholes’. In other words, ‘More is Different’ not just quantitively but qualitatively. You cannot from neuro-science accurately predict social behaviour.

• Self-organisation the interaction between the parts of a disordered system can give rise to a form of order. Random fluctuations, amplified by feedback loops trigger the emergence of this order. Self-organisation gives rise to predictability. Human systems are self-organising. When we impose order upon them, for example through management processes, it takes organisational power to maintain them. Working with this natural self-organising dynamic offers leaders the opportunity to engage in a genuinely transformational way. It is worth noting that in biological systems, a central coordinating brain can make a system vulnerable so being able to self-organise increases resilience.

• Self-referencing living systems are capable of producing and maintaining themselves. They perpetuate their integrity. Leaders attempting organisational change processes who are not mindful of this and seek a new integrity for their work will struggle. If instead they unfold elements that have previously been disregarded, reinterpreting what this now means in a new environment, change becomes a different process.

Healthy ecosystems are characterised by diversity. It is this that also gives them the capacity to adapt creating long-term sustainability. Alexandre Antonelli, Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew describes diversity as a five-pointed star. Leaders who pay attention to these five points and encourage an appropriate balance between them act to further the conditions for sustainable and adaptable organisations.

• Species. For an organisation this means a healthy balance of backgrounds including an appropriate mix of race, gender, ability or age.
• Genes. For an organisation this is the difference within these backgrounds. Not all old white men or young black women think the same.
• Ecosystem. For the organisation this mean being wary of operating solely in one market, sector, geography or community.
• Functions. This is what the organisation does, the balance between its specialisms and the whole. Being excellent at generating uptake for a service is of limited use without being good at delivering it.
• Evolution. In an organisation this is about the different journeys by which the various elements (departments, people) have come together and therefore the varied wisdom that this offers.

Symbiosis refers to a close, interdependent partnership between an organism and its environment, often (but not always) to their mutual benefit. Coral reefs are among the most biologically diverse ecosystems on earth, but they would not exist without symbiosis. The interaction between coral and algae is a crucial aspect of the life of a reef. For the organisational leader, the importance of paying constant attention to what is unfolding in the environment, making sense of what this means for the organisation, and helping the organisation adapt in response cannot be overstated. Just as for the coral reef where relatively minor fluctuations in sea temperature can prove fatal, leaders who fail to identify and respond to variations in demographics, markets, attitudes and economies, will see their organisations fail.

Talking about your organisation as an ecosystem is meaningless if you do not have a way of thinking that embraces how ecosystems function. There are many models of how this happens, the one above is a helpful frame of reference. By considering organisational behaviour in this way, living systems leadership enables people to transcend the normal paradigms of organisational leadership to nurture viable and sustainable operations.