Human Organizations and Organisms

During a recent company meeting I was reminded of a quote by one of my favorite authors, Sir Ken Robinson:

People talk about their functions in the organization. Human organizations are not at all like mechanisms. I mean they have hierarchies, responsibilities and different roles – but a human organization is much more like an organism. What I mean is it’s a living thing. If all the people leave the building there is no organization left in it. The organization is the people, their relationships, their motivations, their energies, their values, their aspirations or lack of them. It’s a living breathing thing. A successful organization is one that reciprocates with its environment and one that helps to enrich the environment upon which it depends. When that relationship is broken the organism dies.

There are several people in the office who have been nurturing those mini potted plants you can buy in a packet at the dollar store. They water them everyday (or most days) and put them near light so that they can grow. They can do a lot of things for the plant except make it grow. Whether or not the plant grows is really a function of the conditions. All they can do is make sure they have created the conditions under which the plant can grow and flourish. This analogy was particularly neat for me as a manager because in a dynamic organization everyone plays a part in creating an environment where employees, co-workers and clients can flourish. That takes three things:

• Knowing  that there is no mythical entity called “The Company “ Every person that works in your company is the company. Even the janitor. It might sound cliche particularly coming from a senior manager but you cannot divorce yourself from the environment you depend on and expect it to flourish. It simply doesn’t work that way.  This is true of any relationship.
• You can’t treat yourself like “just another cog in the mechanism” Taking a note from medicine I learned that where there is a cancerous cell, the likelihood that surrounding tissue will also become cancerous is high unless something is done to to change the conditions. The same thing applies to human based organizations/organisms – if you see a problem or you feel like you aren’t flourishing you need to do something about it.
• Knowing that human organizations(organisms) are much trickier than plants or cancer cells. Human organisms have a variable component that plants and cellular tissue don’t have – Free will. While a plant will generally grow under the right conditions  it doesn’t have the ability to decide whether or not it will use the resources around it. It just does. Same with cellular tissue. Organizations are different.  We can (and do) choose how we react to the environment.

Human powered organizations are incredibly powerful. Thoughts like anything introduced to the “organism” have the power to create growth or morbidity.