Most people consider the world like a physical artifact. It’s made of stuff, it has pieces. New things are brought into the world. This is a very limited view though that makes it very hard to see emergent behaviors.
An organic view of the world instead looks at things growing out of the world rather than being brought into it. When we view things organically, we think about how they grow & change as opposed to what they’re made of. This mental frame allows us to think about hard problems differently, and un-stick situations that seem unsolvable.
Organisms by definition are any living structure that can grow, reproduce, and show the hallmarks of life. Those hallmarks are things like the ability to regulate their internal environments, adapt, and change the world around them.
Every Group of People is An Organism: the organism idea works as a useful myth or frame for companies, charities, and even groups of friends as described in the article Orgs. Companies of all sizes really do fit the definition of an organism: they can grow & reproduce. They definitely change and adapt, they have internal structure, and they change the world around them taking all manner of inputs (people, money, supplies) and producing outputs (jobs, products, services, more money).
If we were looking at a single person, we would talk about homeostasis, or the ability to regulate the internal body temperature automatically. Organizations of people have this ability too. They have stable behavioral loops that keep them on the straight and narrow and functioning in a predictable way.
When you actually draw these out, they look…pretty obvious actually. Consider a charity like the American Red Cross:
These loops are a kind of homeostasis. You regulate your body temperature, since if you get too hot or too cold, you will die. So too the American Red Cross regulates itself with a loop.
These loops are so fundamental to the way orgs work, they also govern how we think about adaptation and change over time. How to change is itself described as the “Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act” loop.
Because life & existence is an open-ended game with fundamental uncertainty about what happens next. Organisms can’t be sitting, waiting with baited breath about what should be done next. So they orient behavior around loops to provide predictable forward paths, even when the circumstances are unclear.
If you have ever seen a gyroscope spinning you may be familiar with gyroscopic stability. As the gyroscope spins fast, it resists certain kinds of change. The faster it spins, the greater the stability it has. Running through loops is a form of “spinning behavior” that makes organisms resilient to the bumps that they will take in their environment. You can see that clearly in the human homeostasis loop, containing positive & negative feedback, and it works for the American Red Cross too as they go through budgeting cycles that help them plan what to spend and how to raise.
External Push & Internal Motivation
Organisms also all share pressures from the external world. These are the hits and bumps they’ll take. This too works for every group of human beings, whether the hit is the death of a friend in a close-knit group, competition for a business, or donor apathy for the American Red Cross.
Additionally, all organisms “want” things. Above all, they want to perpetuate themselves and continue surviving. Individuals may want tasty food, sex, or a better job. And just as it is naive to reduce a person to saying, “All they want is food, shelter, and health” — so too it is equally naive to boil down a company to “all they want is profit” or a charity to “all they want is good in the world”. Motivations are numerous, and usually conflicting — and an organic view takes into account a matrix of overlapping motivations, rather than over-simplistic one-dimensional thinking (“companies want profit”).
How can we apply this?
In the Will Power Isn’t the Way article, we applied an organic view to looking at a person, and talked about disrupting certain behavioral loops to create new ones. That article gave concrete advice on how to use an organic view to improve how an organism functions, in that case, an individual person. The same principles can be applied to large orgs, which, re-summarizing are:
- Identify the behavioral loops that provide for stability / homeostasis
- Add friction to undesirable steps
- Remove friction from desirable steps
- Identify context & cues that trigger undesirable loops, and disrupt them
If “Will Power Isn’t the Way” were re-written for large companies, it would probably be called “Leadership Isn’t Enough”. Many large organizations think that either a written plan, or a strong executive is enough to bump them on to a new path, when those things are tactics to be seen in a broader context.