The Organisational Substrate

“It has often been said that, as far back as we can trace man, we find him a tiller of the ground; but long before he existed, the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth-worms.”

— Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881)

I’ve used the term “organisational substrate” for years, and introduced it in previous Psych Safety pieces, I think the earliest of which is my ecotones one in 2022. But I have not, so far, actually defined or explored it in writing. This is the article that does so. But first, beavers.

I recently went swimming in St Mary’s Loch in Scotland, where, according to nearby signs, beavers have made their home. Beavers are engineers: not ones with dirty overalls, oily hands and big spanners, but ecosystem engineers, organisms that physically alter their habitat, affecting it for everything else that lives there. A beaver fells trees and drags them into a stream to build a dam, which slows the water and creates a pond behind it deep enough that the beaver’s lodge entrance sits safely underwater. The beaver doesn’t have a Gantt chart, Change Advisory Board or project managers, and yet their dam will outlast most organisational transformation programmes.

The beaver’s work outlasts the beaver. Over time, especially if a dam is abandoned, the pond gradually silts up, the dam breaks down, and the pond behind it drains away downstream, turning into wet, rich grassland. These are called “beaver meadows“, and they last long after the last beaver has left. The sediment the dam trapped becomes the soil that the grasses and wildflowers of the meadow grow in, and what the engineer built is no longer a structure and is instead the foundation of a habitat.

Ecologists call this base layer of a habitat the substrate: the soil, peat, sediment, water, rock or any combination of these things and more. It’s what everything else grows in, and its composition and stability determine what can thrive and what cannot. If you’ve read the indicator species piece or any of my ecological pieces, you’ll have come across the term a few times.

So what is an organisational substrate?

I define organisational substrate as the accumulated physical and non-physical matter that an organisation lives in and on: the power structures, tooling, incentives and punishments, memory and story that determine what can thrive and what cannot. We build the organisational substrate continuously by living and working in it, the way a willow tree’s roots hold a river bank together and sphagnum moss acidifies the bog. 

Some of our organisational substrate is as solid, though as brittle, as reef. The clunky old legacy software system that everyone works around, the office layout that determines who bumps into whom, and the capital reserves that influence the organisation’s appetite for risk. These things were all built (intentionally or not) by someone, for reasons that made sense at the time; the builders may have long gone and the thing might no longer be serving its original purpose. Beaver meadows.

The substrate is constructed

It’s tempting to think of substrate as the passive bit: the inert stage on which the interesting living things perform. Soil is just there, right? But soil is a lot of stuff, both living and not: minerals ranging from microscopic particles to boulders; water; and millennia of accumulated organic matter — every leaf that fell, every plant that died, every organism that died and decomposed (or got eaten, which is essentially the same thing). And soil has a very real structure: roots, fungi, water and burrowing creatures continually create and remake networks of pores and channels. The result is a complex, layered, sometimes fractal-like structure across multiple scales, worked over endlessly by animals, fungi, bacteria, and earthworms. As the ecologist Frank Egler put it: “Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, they are more complex than we can think.”

The same is true of our organisational substrate – it’s far from an inert, neutral background, but is something that was built over time, by people and things, and continues to be built every day, as we will see.

The soil outlasts the worm

Darwin’s final book, published six months before he died, was about earthworms: The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits (1881). He’d first raised the subject of worms at the Geological Society in 1837, a year after the Beagle came home, and it fascinated him for the rest of his life. He anticipated others might be less enthralled by the topic, conceding in his introduction that “the subject may appear an insignificant one”, but he carried on anyway. 

He kept worms in pots in his study, breathed on them, shouted at them and got his son Francis to play the bassoon at them and wife Emma to play the piano at them. On establishing they were deaf (the worms, not his family), he then put the pots on the piano and found they responded to vibration through their bodies. He tested their intelligence by offering them paper triangles and recording which corner they seized to drag leaves into their burrows: they mostly chose the efficient (sharp) end, which he took cautiously as evidence of something like judgement in an animal with almost no brain. 

His main field site for worm studies though was his lawn at Down House, where he spread a layer of cinders over the grass and then waited 29 years before digging a trench to see how far the worms had buried it. You can trust a man who spends twenty-nine years watching a lawn, partly because he isn’t going anywhere. By his calculation, the collective worms of an average English pasture pass about ten tons of earth per acre through their bodies every year, endlessly turning the country’s surface over. Worms are some of the most important ecosystem engineers on the planet.

“”All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”” — Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower.

We are all ecosystem engineers

Like the worm, a willow tree doesn’t intend to be an ecosystem engineer, but it is: it creates substrate stability. Bits of willow twig break off, float along the river, get stuck in the riverbank, and start growing. Its roots begin to bind the riverbank together against the incessant flow of water, the bank is held together more strongly, and a whole community of species gets a stable margin to live on and expand just because the willow is there. Ecologists call this niche construction: organisms don’t merely adapt to their conditions, they make them, constantly, as a side effect of being alive.

Sphagnum moss goes further still. It doesn’t just tolerate the acid bog; it manufactures it: pumping out acid in exchange for nutrients, holding water in its dead cells to keep the ground wet, creating the anaerobic conditions in which very little else can grow, decompose, or compete. Sphagnum makes the world more like sphagnum. There’s a wonderful paper about this called: “How Sphagnum bogs down other plants“.

We all do this at work too. Simply by being there, we’re altering the organisational substrate; in fact we’re very much part of it, inside it, altering it continuously, through our presence and actions. When we find ourselves in a substrate that suits us, we will often unconsciously reinforce that same substrate, potentially to the detriment of other people that it doesn’t suit very well. This is particularly true for people in power; people seldom dismantle the power structures that got them into power, for much the same reason that trees seldom destroy the ground they’re rooted in. 

The substrate would still remain if every one of us were replaced steadily one by one. Not because it can survive without us, but because it is passed to each of us in turn.

“A real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil.”
– Karel Čapek 

Whatever it is that we call “culture“, it sits on and within the substrate. If the substrate is the accumulated ground (the tooling, the incentives, the capital, the time pressure, the memory, the stories, etc), then culture (what we say and do, how we say and do it) is what’s currently growing in it: the living, human, present-tense expression of those conditions. Which is why culture-change programmes that address only culture, not the conditions that give rise to the culture, have the approximate effectiveness of shouting at a lawn.

There’s one more consequence of being in the system rather than above it, and it’s methodological. We have to be in the substrate in order to read it. There’s no remote observatory; the reading is done from ground level, by people who are themselves, inevitably, altering the ground just by walking it. This is the same discipline as reading the habitat before the indicator species, the context before the signal. It just reminds us of a need for a little humility: the reader is part of what’s being read.

Ground that never stays still

There’s a corollary to the idea that a substrate’s composition and stability determine what can thrive: if ground is disturbed frequently (if the substrate changes too often), it’ll be inhabited only by those suited to change: pioneer species like fast-growing, quick-to-seed nettles or willowherb. More mature communities (a word as contentious in ecology as in organisational dynamics, but still useful) need ground that stays still long enough for slow things like oak trees to establish, their acorns maybe present all along in the soil, just waiting for the right conditions to emerge and thrive.

In organisations that change very frequently (such as restructures every year or two), nothing sticks, and the constant new initiatives are colonised by the pioneer species of the politically nimble. Stability is the precondition for anything that takes longer than a planning cycle to grow: life rarely thrives on persistently unstable substrates. A counter example makes the point well: given enough stability, life can endure incredibly harsh conditions. A crustose lichen, Rhizocarpon geographicum, the map lichen, for example, can live for millennia, growing a millimetre a decade on mercilessly exposed, high altitude mountain rock, enduring weather that would kill most gardens in a day. Change can be good; but a stable substrate is precisely what makes successful change possible for those living on it.

Drained peat doesn’t come back

If we can build organisational ground simply by being in it, it’s tempting to assume we can rebuild it just as readily once it’s damaged. We can’t, or at least not in the way we imagine. Peat is an important example of this. Peat is almost nothing but past life: dead sphagnum accumulating at about a millimetre a year, so a ten-metre bog is ten thousand years of moss. Draining a peat bog happens quickly. Someone cuts drainage channels, water flows, the water table drops and the moss dries out and dies, as does the peat underneath. What follows is a loss rather than a pause, because exposed to air, the peat oxidises and releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide, and the entire substrate shrinks at rates that can reach centimetres a year.

You can go and measure this for yourself, in the Fens where I grew up. In 1851, before the great mere at Holme Fen in Cambridgeshire was drained, a post was driven down through the peat and anchored in the clay beneath, its top set level with the ground. Immediately after drainage a subsidence of nine inches a year in the soil level was recorded, and today it stands roughly four metres proud of the surface. Four metres of substrate, thousands of years in the making, gone in under two centuries; the land around it is now the lowest in Britain.

“Every layer they strip seems camped on before.” — Seamus Heaney, “Bogland”.

When restoration finally comes, rewetting doesn’t bring the old peat back. What rewetting does is restart the accumulation, at a millimetre a year, and the bog that eventually grows is a new bog: similar, perhaps eventually even better in whatever way we mean by better, but not the old one.

Organisational substrate obeys the same devastating asymmetry. It’s so much easier to destroy something than it is to create. Degradation is fast; a round of redundancies, a public shaming of a mistake, a broken promise by leadership, and trust that took years to accumulate can oxidise in days. Restoration is slow, and it is not resurrection. The organisation that does the patient work of rewetting does so in ground that now includes the memory of the draining, and the new growth carries the scar. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing; a bone grows back stronger from a fracture. 

Disturbed ground has another trick, too: real soil holds a seed bank, dormant seeds from earlier communities that can germinate the moment the ground is disturbed and conditions are right for them. If we tear things up in an organisation, we shouldn’t be surprised when what springs up first is not the new behaviour the redesign intended but the old stuff that we thought was long gone, whose seeds were just dormant in the substrate.

This is why “getting back to how things were” is the wrong ambition, and not only because the good old days were rarely as good as the folklore says. It’s the wrong ambition because it’s not available. What restoration offers, in bogs and in organisations, is the conditions for new and healthy things to thrive. They may resemble the old ones, or new ones, or they may be the otters that we thought were extinct. The honest version of hope is forward-facing rather than a longing for the past.

If there’s a single discipline to take away, it’s the beaver’s-eye view of every intervention we’re tempted to make. Before introducing the new practice, redrawing the org chart, or announcing rebranded company values, ask what ground they’re expected to thrive in. The answers to why our organisational change programme worked, or didn’t, are often underneath us.

A different way of seeing isn’t something one can be handed; it’s something we develop, over time, in the field. That’s what our Thinking Like An Ecologist workshop is for: not a new set of tools, but an exploration of a different kind of seeing.

References

Berger, J. (2018) Divine Polity: Religion and Re-Imagining the Role of NGOs in Global Governance. PhD thesis, University of Kent. The earliest use of “organisational substrate” I can find, there meaning an organisation’s underlying rationale, developed by analogy with DNA. My use is ecological rather than genetic: the shared ground built by past life that everything present grows in.

Darwin, C. (1881) The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits. London: John Murray. To the Victorian public’s credit, it sold 3,500 copies in its first month, rivalling the sales of On the Origin of Species.

Egler, F.E. (1977) The Nature of Vegetation: Its Management and Mismanagement. Norfolk, CT: Aton Forest.

Jones, C.G., Lawton, J.H. & Shachak, M. (1994) “Organisms as ecosystem engineers”, Oikos 69, 373–386.

Mars, M.M. & Bronstein, J.L. (2023) “Ecological Metaphors in Organizational Science: An Interdisciplinary Critique”, Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies 41(2), 15–46. Ecological concepts borrowed into organisational writing tend to drift from their source meaning unless they’re traced back to the ecology and held to it.

Odling-Smee, F.J., Laland, K.N. & Feldman, M.W. (2003) Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ramsay, A. (2024) My Dad Brought Beavers Back, illustrated by Abigail Little. Edinburgh: Scotland Street Press. The story of how the ecosystem engineers returned to Britain, by the family who brought them. Aimed at children, and better than many books aimed at adults.

van Breemen, N. (1995) “How Sphagnum bogs down other plants”, Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10(7), 270–275.

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A Practical Guide To Looking At Things Properly 

“A scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.” — Wonko the Sane (Douglas Adams)

Organisations spend a great deal of time and effort trying to understand themselves, through engagement surveys, benchmarks, maturity models and more. And yet many leaders will admit that they don’t feel like they know enough: the dashboards and the metrics aren’t quite the full picture. Many of the things that matter most in an organisation are the things that are hardest to measure directly: things like alignment, buffer capacity, expertise, safety, and ambition. 

The more elaborate and expensive our system for understanding something, the less we may actually understand it, because we end up paying attention to the numbers instead of the actual organisation. This is worse than simply not knowing, because it doesn’t feel like not knowing. It feels good, it feels like control.

Ecologists have spent a very long time on the same sort of problem: we usually can’t measure and quantify the health of an ecosystem directly either; there’s no eco-mometer that we can put in a stream to give us a measure of its health. So ecologists instead read these things indirectly, through what’s present or absent, what is thriving or struggling, what’s changed and what persists. In “Five Ecological Concepts for Working in Organisational Change” I described one of the ecologist’s most useful tools, the indicator species: organisms whose presence or absence reveals the health of a habitat in ways that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to measure directly.

And this is why I think 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.

And it is a discipline, which is important. Reading organisations ecologically is not a method or a tool. It’s a practice. The difference is that a method can be written in a manual or explained in a training session, whereas a practice has to be developed. What I’m describing here is closer to what an experienced field ecologist does when they walk a habitat — a kind of trained, attentive seeing that draws on their experience and everything they know without consulting a checklist. That takes time, and exposure to many different habitats. And it takes someone occasionally pointing at the thing you walked past and saying: oh, did you see that? This piece describes that way of seeing, not a checklist of things to look for.

First Sight and Second Thoughts, that’s what a witch had to rely on: First Sight to see what’s really there, and Second Thoughts to watch the First Thoughts to check that they were thinking right.
Terry Pratchett – The Wee Free Men

What do we mean by indicator species?

Bear with me through a few plants and freshwater invertebrates; because every one of them is teaching a habit of attention we’ll take back to the workplace. All species can tell us something about the habitat they occupy. Even very common species carry information. Nettles (Urtica dioica) typically indicate nutrient-rich, recently disturbed soil and often signal human activity — a place where things were moved or the ground was disturbed. Rye grass, hardy and tolerant of compaction, can suggest grazing or trampling pressure. Rosebay willowherb is sometimes called fireweed, because it will rapidly colonise burnt ground, telling us something about the history of the land – during WW2 it was also known as bombweed, because it thrived in bomb sites. Fruticose lichens, and some fungal diseases such as sycamore tar spot, are particularly susceptible to air pollutants (classically, sulphur dioxide), so we tend to only find them where the air is clean, away from heavy industry and traffic. All these tell us something about the habitat they’re in, and by identifying multiple species in one place, we can triangulate a fairly precise picture of the local conditions without actually measuring anything. 

(Note, I’m using primarily British examples throughout — the specific species will be very different in other parts of the world, and that is, in fact, kind of the point.)

Some species are more discriminating than others. The organisms that ecologists find most useful as indicators tend to be those with narrow tolerances — sensitive to specific conditions in ways that make their presence or absence genuinely informative. Among the most useful are the “EPT” taxa: Ephemeroptera (mayflies), Plecoptera (stoneflies), and Trichoptera (caddisflies). These freshwater invertebrates are highly sensitive indicators of water quality: they require high oxygen levels and low levels of pollutants. A single kick-sample from a healthy stream, containing stonefly nymphs and caddis fly larvae, tells an ecologist more about water quality than laboratory tests (and far more quickly too), because these organisms are living indicators of conditions, not just a metric analysis of nutrient and pollutant levels.

Now, consider Tubifex tubifex, a small and ostensibly very boring aquatic worm. Also known as the sludge-worm, or sometimes, if it’s feeling fancy, the sewage worm. In a fast-flowing stream that we would expect (and hope) to be oxygen rich, the presence of tubifex could be a warning: it tolerates low oxygen and organic pollution that most other invertebrates cannot, and its presence signals that the conditions might be too degraded for more sensitive species. The same organism in the sediment of a large lake is entirely unremarkable and somewhat reassuring — those conditions suit it fine, and its presence there tells us relatively little. The same species in different contexts tells us different things. 

This is the first thing to understand about indicator species, biological or organisational: context precedes reading. There is no universal indicator; no signal that means the same thing in every habitat. In organisations we often forget this: we read a behaviour, a metric, a structure, and assume it means what it meant somewhere else. It doesn’t, necessarily. The same signal, in a different organisation or a different stage of the same one, can mean a different or even opposite thing. So the first move is never to interpret the signal. It’s to read the habitat.

Reading organisational indicator species

Let’s explore what that might look like inside an actual organisation. I was once part of the senior leadership team of a fast scaling tech startup and in the very early stages, we had very few managers (we also didn’t have heating, and our primary server was one we pulled out of a skip). Everyone just did stuff, made decisions quickly, rarely asked for permission, and we moved fast. But as we scaled, we hit the usual issues that rapidly scaling organisations do: work got more complex and interdependent, and as a result, tasks and deliverables would more often collide and conflict with each other, which meant that we needed increasing alignment and oversight to make sure we weren’t getting in each other’s way. We needed team and product managers to provide oversight, coordination and prioritisation. This growing concentration of managers as an indicator species was a healthy organisational signal: structure was emerging where there had been early productive chaos, processes were forming around the places where coordination at scale was breaking down, and the indicator species of governance roles were doing what they do — stabilising the substrate so that more long term and mature species could take root. However, two years later the project management layer had thickened beyond what the work required; handovers had become excessively elaborate and approval boards had become blockers rather than enablers. What had been a healthy response to early-stage complexity had begun to signal high institutional anxiety: a defensive response to an environment that felt fearful of failure and far more brittle than it once had.

The same species at different stages of an organisation result in a different reading.

This is where ecological succession matters as a companion concept. We can’t read an indicator without understanding where the system is in its developmental trajectory. An ecologist doesn’t look at pioneer species on recently cleared land and conclude that something is wrong — those are exactly the species we’d expect to see at that stage. The same species on an established woodland floor might be cause for concern: it would suggest a recent disturbance, a localised regression to an earlier successional stage.

A caution, though, about pushing this metaphor too far. Succession in a woodland tends towards something we can broadly predict, because the conditions are somewhat stable and we have repeatedly watched many woodlands do it. Organisations are not like that: there is no fixed end-state they’re heading for, arguably no climax community, and the trajectory can stall, reverse, or branch. The organisation now is as different to the past organisation as it is to another organisation, so restoration never means turning the clock back to some idealised point; it means asking how to move towards a better future.

Whilst succession doesn’t tell us the end state, it still tells us something important about order. A disused pasture does not become woodland in a single step; it has to pass through stages like scrub first, because some states are preconditions for others. We can’t skip them, however much we desire the end result, because the later stage is not merely later; it’s dependent on what the earlier stage builds.

Organisations work the same way. The mature thing cannot be installed before the conditions that make it possible actually exist. We will not (for very long) get people openly challenging senior decisions in a place that hasn’t first built the more basic conditions that make challenge safe and survivable; we cannot introduce otters into a river that cannot yet support them. So succession is useful here not as a ladder with a known top rung, but as a reminder of two things: that the same signal means different things depending on where a system has come from, and that some things simply cannot happen before others.

Presence isn’t establishment

One of the subtler lessons from ecological restoration work is the difference between presence and establishment. A conservation project might introduce specialist species (for example, round-leaved sundew [Drosera rotundifolia] to a recovering peat bog) as part of a restoration programme. To a passing observer, their presence looks like success: the specialist indicator species are there, therefore the habitat must be recovering and healthy. But an ecologist must look more carefully: are these plants thriving and reproducing? Is the substrate actually supporting them, or are they merely persisting on the back of the intervention, dependent on continued artificial implementation and support to survive?

Organisations do this constantly. Fixating on “what worked there” instead of considering “what will work here?”. Adopting the “Spotify model”, implementing 360 degree reviews, putting a poster up telling employees we have a “Just Culture”. These are introduced species. Their presence may tell us relatively little, because the question we need to ask is whether they are self-sustaining: whether the conditions in the substrate actually support them, whether they are spreading and reproducing without continued top-down mandates, whether they’re actually the right species for this habitat at all. If the answer is no, what we have is a display, not a thriving habitat. The trap is flipping causality, in thinking that because many healthy organisations run regular team retrospectives (for example), that running regular retrospectives means we’re a healthy organisation. 

“The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect (an intricacy that has its astonishing moments, as when sundew and butterwort eat the insects), the more the mystery deepens. Knowledge does not dispel mystery.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

This is where “rewetting organisations” comes in. In environmental restoration of a peat bog (incidentally, from the Gaelic bogach, meaning soft), we don’t begin by introducing specialist species. We begin by restoring the substrate: slowing down change, raising the water table, allowing sphagnum moss to re-establish, so that the conditions exist in which native species can return and thrive of their own accord. The specialist species come last, not first, and their arrival is evidence of recovery rather than its cause. Organisations that naively introduce practices they’ve seen others do, carry out restructures that mirror a different organisation, or apply goals and targets without attending to the substrate that supports them (including capabilities, power structures, incentive systems, institutional memory, and more), are at risk of planting sundews in dry, drained peat. They may, if we’re lucky, persist for a while, but they will not thrive. 

What are we actually looking for?

An ecologist asked to assess a habitat doesn’t arrive with a fixed checklist to tick items off. They arrive with a trained capacity for attention, developed over years of looking at many different habitats in many different conditions, and they read what is in front of them against everything they know about what could and should be there, what has been there, and what the current conditions suggest about where things are heading.

Some signals are generalist: ubiquitous enough that their presence tells you relatively little. Others are discriminating: their presence or absence in this habitat, at this stage, under these conditions, is genuinely interesting. The skill is knowing which is which; and that knowledge is inseparable from knowing the habitat. Organisational “seeing” means looking at, and doing our best to understand, the context first – before interpreting what the signals may be telling us. If we read the signal without reading the organisation first, we risk confidently misreading it.

With that caveat stated, some organisational signals tend to warrant attention:

A proliferation of committees and change advisory boards often (but not always) indicates an institutional fear of failure: we’d rather not do anything than try something that incurs risk, and the accountability sink of decision-making is distributed so widely that responsibility becomes impossible to locate. Heavy, bureaucratic handover processes between teams frequently signal low inter-team trust: paperwork and process act as a surrogate for trusting relationships. An abundance of individual metric targets for performance, particularly where they are tracked publicly and tied to reward, often suggests that leadership doesn’t trust the workers to be intrinsically motivated, and tends to suppress exactly the lateral knowledge-sharing that collective performance requires.

But (and this is the tubifex point) none of these signals means the same thing in every habitat. Individual targets are appropriate in some cases where there is little interdependence between people. Heavy duty approval boards and signoff may be appropriate in safety-critical, highly complex contexts such as nuclear power. Read the context first. Always read the context first.

The positive organisational indicators

What’s the organisational equivalent of otters?

Otters returned to many British rivers as water quality improved — because the conditions finally supported them. They sit near the top of the freshwater food chain, and their sustained presence signals that the entire system beneath them is functioning: clean water, healthy invertebrate populations, plenty of fish, stable bankside vegetation. We cannot fake otters. We cannot introduce them into a degraded system and expect them to hang around for long. Their sustained presence is evidence of genuine, systemic recovery.

The organisational equivalent is the signal that could only exist if everything beneath it was working. Not the signal that has been managed into existence and kept on life support, but the one that emerged because the conditions were finally right. A junior team member openly disagreeing with a room full of senior leaders and being thanked for it, not “performance managed” afterwards. Genuine productive dissent surfacing in formal meetings rather than only in corridors and car parks. Lateral knowledge-sharing and ideation across teams that are nominally in competition with each other for resources or recognition.

These things cannot be “performed” sustainably. They can’t be introduced by policy – we cannot simply tell people to “speak up”. These signals are the otters: evidence that the substrate has genuinely changed, that the water is clean, that something has actually been restored rather than imposed or mandated. If we are regularly seeing these things, they are typically very good signs of organisational health.

The measurement-industrial complex

We’re all familiar with organisational surveys — the engagement survey, the pulse survey, the psychological safety survey. Ecologists do surveys too, but the two things share little more than a name. When an ecologist surveys a habitat, we’re exploring, looking, seeing, sensing: reading what is present and what is absent, what is thriving and what is struggling. A staff survey, by contrast, is a snapshot, abstracted from the habitat, often in language that doesn’t quite fit the context.

There is by now a substantial industry built around the measurement of organisational health — engagement platforms, culture diagnostics, psychological safety scales, maturity frameworks, and benchmarking services of all kinds. Much of this is well-intentioned. Some of it is useful, particularly when applied carefully, longitudinally, and in combination with richer and more qualitative reading. But the industry as a whole rests on an assumption that the ecological approach exposes as problematic: that the same indicators mean the same things across contexts, and that the path to understanding an organisation runs through the consistent application of validated instruments.

This isn’t true. At least not primarily. The more elaborate and expensive our system for understanding something, the less we may actually understand it: because the apparatus of measurement tends to substitute for the discipline of attention rather than supporting it. When we have a dashboard, we watch the dashboard. When the dashboard tells us that engagement is 7.2, we manage towards 7.8. And in doing so, we invoke Goodhart’s Law in its most destructive form: the indicator becomes the target, and in becoming the target, it stops being an indicator. We end up improving nothing, or, in many cases, actually making it worse (you may already be thinking of cobras as indicator species!). The sludge worm at the bottom of the dashboard keeps trying to tell us the actual conditions, but nobody is paying any attention to it because it’s boring and small.

The measurement-industrial complex trades in what Aristotle would have called episteme: systematic, generalisable, transferable knowledge. The kind that (at least claims that it) can be packaged, certified, and applied by someone who wasn’t there and doesn’t know the habitat. What the organisational ecologist¹ develops over time is closer to phronesis: practical wisdom that is irreducibly situated, inseparable from experience and context and judgement, and not available as a downloadable checklist. We can learn the names of the EPT taxa in an afternoon. Knowing what their presence or absence means, in this particular stream, at this particular time of year, given what happened upstream last year, takes much longer, and it takes practice.

What the organisational ecologist actually does

An ecologist doesn’t “fix” ecosystems: we work to restore the conditions in which the system itself can recover, and then we pay attention to what emerges. Organisations are complex adaptive systems, not machines to be upgraded by swapping a component in the right place.

The capacity of being an organisational ecologist, of “seeing things properly”, develops over time, through practice and attention and the accumulation of many habitats read carefully. It is not a generic framework to be applied or a checklist to be ticked off. A real woodland restoration plan is a strange document to an organisational eye. It works across decades, sometimes with no end point at all, and contains almost no deadlines. Its phases overlap rather than run in sequence. Its operations are conditional: we fell trees only if they’re diseased, we intervene only where needed, and we support regeneration where it appears. A phase is complete not in Q3 but when the assessment suggests it is — when the system itself says so. The plan describes conditions and directions, not dated milestones, because habitats don’t consult plans. Neither do organisations.

None of this resolves into a simple organisational checklist, and it would betray the whole argument if it did. But there are dispositions, habits of attention, that the organisational ecologist develops.

• We read the habitat before the signal, because the same signal means different things in different places.
• We consider where the organisation is in its own development, because a structure that is healthy in a young system may be pathology in an old one.
• We implicitly distrust the introduced species: the practice imported because it worked elsewhere, and ask whether it is actually thriving or being propped up.
• We triangulate across many weak signals rather than trusting a single strong number, because a number is the feeling of knowledge and rarely the thing itself.
• We look for the signals that can’t be faked: the ones that could only exist if the conditions beneath them were sound.
• And we attend to the substrate, because we’re working with a living system that will not consult our plan, and the most useful thing we can do is often to make the ground more hospitable and pay attention to what grows.

Most of all, we keep looking. The habitat changes, the stage moves on, the indicator that meant one thing last year means another now. We’ll never stop trying to look at things properly, because the work is never finished.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first.

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Thinking Like an Ecologist: A Field Guide for Organisational Change

A different way of seeing isn’t something one can be handed; it’s something we develop, over time, in the field. But it helps to start somewhere. That’s what our Thinking Like An Ecologist workshop is for: not a new set of tools, but the beginning of a different kind of seeing.

1* Note: Through all of this I should be clear that I mean something quite different from the sociological field of “organisational ecology” (Hannan and Freeman), which studies why whole populations of businesses are founded and die under impersonal environmental selection. In this piece I mean something smaller and almost opposite in spirit: reading and tending the living dynamics inside a single organisation, on the premise that its conditions can be shaped.

The post Organisational Indicator Species: being an Organisational Ecologist appeared first on Psych Safety.

Emergence, substrate, succession, indicator species & ecotones.

I started my career in ecology, as an experimentalist working in a research station’s wonderfully named “Weed Science” department – a title that sounds more like a kooky 80s film than a scientific field. Ecology introduced me to a set of ideas that shape how I now think about organisations and change. Here, I’ll share five of my favourites that we often use in our work: emergence, substrate, succession, indicator species, and ecotones.

Emergence: non-linearity & non-determinism

Emergence is one of the defining properties of complexity, and therefore of ecosystems. It refers to the way non-linear, non-deterministic patterns arise from interactions between components of the system, whether that’s people, teams, tools and technology, or plants, fungi, soil, animals, and weather. 

In a complex system, we’re dealing not with deterministic plans, milestones and predictable results, but with probabilities, experiments, and nudges. It’s dispositional, rather than deterministic: we can’t control the outcome of our work, but we can shape the organisational substrate (more on this shortly) to encourage the kinds of outcomes that we would like. Complexity doesn’t mean random, chaotic or out of control. And it certainly doesn’t provide an excuse for inaction. It just means that many interacting elements produce collective behaviour that can’t be reduced to simple, linear, cause and effect.

If this all sounds very esoteric, allow me to ground it in an example. Himalayan balsam is an invasive species in the UK that spreads rapidly in wet, cyclically disturbed areas such as river banks. It grows fast and tall, with shallow roots and seed pods that are fired out into the air, scattering hundreds of seeds that carry easily on the wind or water. As a result, it rapidly colonises new areas and outcompetes slower-growing native plants such as willow trees, whose roots help hold river banks together and provide habitats for invertebrates and waterside wildlife. 

Where Himalayan balsam takes hold, we see a number of successive (we’ll come back to that word too) negative effects:

1. Lower plant biodiversity: other plants are outcompeted and replaced by stands of balsam monoculture.
2. Riverbank erosion: when balsam dies back in autumn, it leaves bare ground, and water washes away the soil.
3. Fewer invertebrates: species that rely on stable riverbank habitats such as mayfly nymphs lose their niches.
4. Decline in water quality: eroded soil sediment clouds the water, blocking the light, killing water plants and reducing oxygen levels. 
5. Reduced vertebrate populations: less oxygen and fewer invertebrates means less food for fish, and in turn fewer birds like herons.
6. Changing river form: as willow trees disappear and aren’t replaced, and the riverbanks are eroded, the whole shape of the river changes.

Within just a few years, an entire ecosystem can shift dramatically for the worse, all triggered by the arrival of a single, innocuous looking flower. It’s almost impossible in most cases to predict what the effect of a single species into an ecosystem might be in advance, but in retrospect the cause and effect becomes clear, if we understand enough about the system. 

This is emergence in action: one small change – for example the addition of a new species in an ecosystem, or creation of a new team in an organisation – can result in potentially huge systemic change.

The practical implication of emergence is that we need to let go of the comforting fiction that we can accurately roadmap our way through complex change work. Instead of trying to plan every step, we must pay attention to relationships and interactions. We employ safe-to-fail experiments, detect and interpret emerging patterns, and amplify or dampen as appropriate. 

We don’t “roll out” and impose change. Phenomena like psychological safety, performance, trust, safety and innovation emerge from the daily micro-interactions between people, processes, and environments. We can’t command “Be innovative!” and expect it to happen, but we can aim to create the conditions in which innovation is more likely to emerge – which leads to…

The Substrate: the underlying conditions

Out of all these ecological/organisational crossover terms, “substrate” is probably the term that I’ve been using for longest. Similar in theme, but building on Ed Schein’s “Three Layers” idea with a complexity/ecology lens, the substrate is the base or medium on which organisms, and systems, live: the soil, rock or ocean. It’s not inert; it’s a living, changing foundation that determines what can thrive and what cannot. The wet, acidic, low-nutrient characteristics of peat bogs, for example, shape the species that colonise them. The substrate for lichens may be something as inert and stable as rock or brick, or another living thing, such as tree bark, or the shell of a barnacle.

In organisations, the substrate is the underlying set of beliefs, structures, rituals, incentives, norms and more: the organisational fabric. It’s what new capabilities and teams take root in. We can scatter seeds of Agile, Lean, HOP or psychological safety, but if the substrate is unhealthy, depleted or toxic, nothing will germinate (or at least, not for long before it withers away).

This is where our idea of rewetting organisations comes in. In environmental restoration, “rewetting” a drained bog or wetland doesn’t mean planting new species first; it means changing the conditions: slowing water flow and restoring the substrate so that native plants and animals can re-establish themselves. In the same way, rewetting an organisation might mean addressing power imbalances, reforming policies, and changing rewards and incentives before rolling out new programmes. Only once the substrate is receptive and stable can new shoots of change stand a chance of thriving. And as Prospect Theory reminds us, we feel potential losses more strongly than equivalent gains, so even positive shifts in the substrate may feel threatening until things stabilise.

The organisational substrate is a living, changing, evolving part of the system, not just an inert foundation. The living parts of the system itself (people), along with physical (infrastructure or even office design and furniture), technological, procedural, or other intangible components (including things like values and beliefs) make up the substrate and collectively determine its health. 

Organisational substrates are also fundamentally modulated by power – formal, informal, expert, and demographic – and you can think of the influence of dominant ideas, rituals, goals, or stories that influence the substrate. Substrates affect not just how we behave and what we’re capable of achieving at work, but also influence how we think about the workplace. This tells us that there are things we can do: small, iterative changes and nudges that can alter the substrate and make it a more fertile ground for the things we would prefer to grow. 

Succession: patterns over time

Emergence helps us see how patterns form through countless local interactions, and succession describes how those patterns evolve over time. When an ecological system is disturbed by something: fire, flood, grazing, or human activity, it goes through a process called ecological succession. Pioneer species such as mosses, grasses, and plants like willowherb colonise bare ground, which stabilises it. Later, shrubs and then trees may follow; alongside corresponding animals and invertebrates, and a mature, more diverse and stable habitat gradually establishes. The sequence can take a long time – even hundreds or thousands of years, and it’s in constant flux.

Organisations undergo their own forms of successions after disruption – whether through a merger, leadership change, crisis or the creation of something entirely new, like a department, or a start-up. In the early stages we often see “pioneer species” of behaviours, roles, ideas and practices emerge –  these are short-lived and opportunistic, and vital in making the environment hospitable enough for other species to thrive. But these early phases are rarely stable. Over time, the organisation either stabilises into a more mature structure, or stays in this apparently chaotic perpetual early succession with high staff turnover and low institutional memory. 

Our aim, both ecologically and organisationally, is moving towards stability, because a healthy and stable substrate enables resilience, adaptation, and agility. This is why, for example, internal platforms are so popular in large tech firms: it’s much easier to innovate rapidly upon a secure foundation.

Recognising which stage of succession we’re in helps set realistic expectations and interventions. Ecologists don’t simply skip to the end – we don’t plant marsh saxifrage and expect a thriving peatland habitat to appear. There’s groundwork and stabilisation to do first. Similarly, we wouldn’t impose a mature governance model on an early-stage tech start-up.

Ecosystems recover from disturbance through succession: pioneer species colonise, and establish the conditions for more complex communities to follow. It’s not a staged project plan, but a dispositional trajectory that takes different routes depending on conditions that emerge. The point about succession is that it’s the direction that matters, not an end goal, maturity framework, or Target Operating Model.

In both ecosystems and organisations, succession reminds us that change cannot be imposed; it is gradual, contextual and iterative. We can’t skip to the end.

Indicator species: weak signals of organisational health

Ecologists often use indicator species to assess ecosystem health – something that might be otherwise difficult or impossible to measure directly. Species such as lichens, bryophytes, bilberry, diseases like sycamore Tar Spot, and many water invertebrates can all act as effective indicators. Because they’re highly sensitive to conditions such as air pollutants, soil acidity, or low oxygen levels in water, their presence can inform us about the surrounding substrate – the air, land, or water respectively.

Organisations have indicator species too. A high concentration of project and programme managers might signal a desire for more control and predictability. Heavy duty, bureaucratic handovers and signoffs can indicate low inter-team trust. High numbers of committees and Change Advisory Boards can indicate a deep-seated organisational fear of failure. And an abundance of metric goals and targets can suggest a leadership focus on individual results over collective performance. 

And there are many more. These indicators aren’t necessarily problems on their own, but they can signal deeper issues long before any annual staff engagement survey highlights them. The more indicators we notice, the better we can triangulate an accurate picture of the organisational culture. 

A good ecologist instinctively spots a lot of indicator species, often literally up close, looking for bryophytes, invertebrates and lichens. They can likely tell you a great deal about an environment just by paying attention. The same should apply to good organisational change practitioners: we should be able to see and interpret many weak signals that others might overlook. We should attend to these subtle cues – indicator species are far more useful for organisational sense-making than lagging metrics, dashboards and KPIs. By the time the KPIs change, the system has already shifted. Indicator species inform us much earlier.

Ecotones: where the interesting stuff happens

An ecotone is the interface or transition zone between two ecosystems: something like a forest edge, a hedgerow, an estuary or coastline. These valuable and often vulnerable places are generally much greater in biodiversity and density of organisms, but they’re also in greater flux. It’s often called the “edge effect”.

Organisations have ecotones at interfaces too. Those interfaces might be the boundaries of the organisation, interfaces between departments or teams, or temporal (short lived) boundaries when events such as conferences or Communities of Practice occur. The edges are where new ideas, behaviours and practices, even new business models emerge (just as speciation happens in ecotones). The edges are where new challenges and opportunities surface, as well as hybridisation of complementary ideas.

Organisational ecotones are valuable. We shouldn’t put up walls or create team silos where people no longer interface with others, and we shouldn’t try to blur boundaries, erase differences and homogenise the organisational culture either. It’s that very friction and diversity in the ecotones that lead to interesting and valuable things happening. We can, instead, create conditions for healthy exchange: things like shared ways of working, secondments for team members into other places, boundary-spanning roles, and communities and events that span teams and departments. We should create the conditions to maximise the potential benefit of our ecotones – and the first step is to recognise where they exist.

Why thinking ecologically matters

These five concepts of emergence, substrate, succession, indicator species, and ecotones inform our mental model of organisational change; they’re heuristics for making sense of complex systems, and remind us that:

• Outcomes are emergent and non-linear. Nudge and experiment, don’t try to control.
• We can’t just “plant” change; we must attend to the substrate. Create the conditions in which people can thrive.
• The real organisation lives in interactions between people and components, not in the org chart.
• Change unfolds through succession. Work on trajectories, not project plans.
• Pay attention to indicator species: the weak signals of deeper organisational health.
• Work consciously at the organisational ecotones, where diversity and innovation emerge.

Ecologists don’t “fix” ecosystems; we try to restore the necessary conditions and let nature do the work. Likewise, effective organisational change is rarely about a single heroic leader or a large “transformation programme”, but about understanding and shaping the dynamics already at work. Less command-control, more stewardship: tending to the substrate so that organisation, and the people within it, can thrive.

Adopting an ecological lens doesn’t make organisational change easy, any more than ecology is easy (it isn’t – and it often doesn’t work in the way we want it to) but it gives us a much richer, and importantly more realistic, map that informs our practice. 

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