Organisational ecology - new descriptions, distinctions and disruptions for the field by Joan Lurie.

Most of leadership and organisation theory and practices are steeped in the technical and the psychological. However, there appears to be a growing emergent trend turning towards systems thinking, complexity and complex systems theory.

In many of the organisations I’m working with leaders are keen to learn systems thinking so they can manage the growing complex challenges they face. The declared ‘will’ and expressed motivation and readiness seems there, but opening up these new neural pathways to make sense systemically is challenging. The dominant logic, the technical and psychological forms of description are so embedded and tacit they are like gravity. Weighing us down.

It’s difficult to find ways into this new way. It’s not simply learning a new skill at a workshop, nor flicking a switch to new thinking, it’s adapting how one makes sense of the world. My assumption is this can only be done in the context of our challenges - paradoxically we have to practice it, live it, to learn it.

This is made even trickier because the organisational contexts in which this adaption is being called for are themselves wired for the technical, linear, analytical and psychological. Just about all organisational practices, protocols and rituals are drawn from the same buckets. So organisations aren’t yet the containers designed for liberating systemic ways of knowing. In fact, just the opposite - right?

They are designed to get what we keep getting.

To make progress with this adaptive challenge we need new forms of description, action and deliberate disruption

• How do we develop new forms of description, which are not simply behavioural but relational - and what’s the difference?
• How do we develop Organisations to become the containers for growing this new form of description and sense making? What do these contexts look like? And how do they emerge?
• What roles are consultant and coaches playing which are maintaining the paradigms and what do we need to do to disrupt our field? To develop organisational ecologists?