A few years ago, a friend and I sat in a Starbucks in Lafayette, CA talking about quality, Deming, systems thinking and the other usual topics. He recommended I start reading Meg Wheatley. When I got back to Rochester, I picked up Finding Our Way, but couldn't get into it. More recently this book jumped off the shelf while I was looking at other leadership books.

I had a lightbulb moment when I read that organizations are made up of living human beings, and therefore work like living systems rather than machine parts. Organizational Development needs to take into account the complexities and understandings of sciences like biology and ecology. This brought together two great strands of my career: my work life in training, learning and systems development are now connected to my passionate hobby work with sustainable living systems and Permaculture (see blog.greenerminds.com for my work on these topics).

To state that organizations are made up of living components and behave like living systems is almost a no-brainer, except that most of the organizations I've worked in treat people more like replaceable cogs. The language of the workaday world is full of images of machines, cogs, the works, the system, and my favorite from a few years ago, "running out of runway."

On the other hand we speak of organic growth, product lifecycles, niches, ecosystems, network effects and self-organizing systems, terms borrowed loosely from science without thinking too much about what such analogies imply on a deep level.

I've thought of a few carryovers from the principles of Permaculture design that apply here. I'll take future posts to start digging into these in detail.

1. Ecosystems have a lifecycle of change from high-growth, high-productivity youth to later stage, efficient, resilient and diverse maturity. Organizations also follow this S-shaped growth pattern.
2. Living systems cannot be controlled; they can only be disturbed (Varela). Disturbance can be strategic, as in the swidden agriculture practiced in equatorial regions on long rotations. Our approach in most large organizations appears to be broad slash-and-burn or scorched-earth policies of across the board cuts.
3. We are only a small part of the total information system in nature (Mollison). This gets into knowledge transfer and the embeddedness of tacit information in the networked relationships of a specific work system or organization.
4. People have varying roles in this information system: connectors, hoarders, real information harvesters, cross-pollinators ( see Gladwell). Another set of categories from one of the best OD / leadership books ever (The Last Holiday Concert ;-): doers, floaters and goofers.
5. Monocultures require a tremendous input of external energy in order to remain in the early high-yield phase. They maximize one or maybe two variables in the system at the expense of the resilience and diversity of every other system component variable.What is the energy cost of maximizing profit (margin, revenue, cost-cutting, pick your one variable) at the expense of all other variables?
6. What types of network structures are operating? In Small World networks (Moffat, The Agile Organization) highly connected nodes are critical but susceptible to attack, in the way that hyper-accumulating honeybees are in danger of catastrophic collapse.