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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