Deep Roots, Shallow Roots
We all suffer from an inability to see the importance of things that work out of our sight and out of our imagination. We speak of root causes, but we don’t investigate real roots, much less mycorrhizal webs.[1] Which leaves us addressing symptoms and visible indicators without considering where the life of a system flows from.
I am suddenly sensitive to this after a weekend with friends I have known since college days. My mate is a better gardener than me in the sense that he gets better yields, more consistent production, better continuity of crops, etc. You would look at his efforts and mine and give him 9 out of ten and me 6. His garden, not far from a beach, is sitting on sand and he despairs of building any body into the soil: for instance, he doesn’t try to grow brussels sprouts because they need firm roots.
As he talks about what it takes, I am intrigued as ever by the metaphor. He looks at his plants and trees to diagnose their condition. He has learned to detect a shortage of magnesium or of nitrogen. He understands something of the soil chemistry and has tried to measure its pH. And then he sprays his plants with seaweed solution to allow foliar feeding as necessary and desperately tries to provide enough water to keep things going.
Later, we walk along the coast among the dunes. There is quite lush vegetation growing wild, including sweet peas and vetches, roses and sea holly, and a mass of flowers I need to look up. Sycamore trees growing as low bushes in the sea gales. Clearly, natural processes are able to colonise the dunes locally and build themselves a soil.
In a typical organisation, the people, so to speak, are sprayed with seaweed. They are held to be falling short in various ways, in need of fertilisation and pruning and improvement by training. We assume that there is a gardening job to do, to get things to grow that otherwise will not bear good fruit. Of course, we can see with our own eyes that this improvement activity works, but that blinds us to the question of what happens if we don’t intervene. If we don’t send kids to school, do they end up more or less intelligent?
One of my former colleagues bristled whenever management said something like “it’s better than nothing” — he’d challenge our thinking about the crisis, to at least consider whether the situation would stabilise on its own, or whether a lower-effort do-nothing approach would have equivalent or even more desirable results.
Root function
The roots of most plants actively collaborate with soil micro-organisms, principally bacteria and fungi. They supply sugars to the micro-organisms in exchange for water and nutrients. If you fertilise the plant, it doesn’t need to collaborate and will not develop supportive relationships to the same degree. And indeed, many fertilisers will actually kill off many of the micro-organisms.
So here is the metaphor. If plants need to find their own sources of water and minerals, they will help build an environment that supplies them. Their collaboration builds the soil structure so that it can hold a hundred times as much water and dissolved nutrients. This is a fantastically sophisticated system if we let it develop.[2] But typically, and this is absolutely where I have come from, we water too much and fertilise too much and weed too much and dig too much and spray too much and — surprise, surprise — we end up on a treadmill of having to do those things.
A child that grows to educate itself will develop the relationship necessary to learn what they want to learn. A child force-fed a school curriculum and given tests that will determine their future cannot afford to develop those relationships. It is that simple. The application of “education” the way we apply fertiliser will kill the ecosystem that will otherwise educate the child.[3]
Notice that this is a timescale thing. The natural systems take months and years to develop. The artificial systems can get results in hours and days. If you are not learning on a timescale of years about how systems work, you will never see the ways you are shooting yourself in the foot. If your learning horizon is weeks, you cannot ever discover how easy it could be. As we have discussed before, this is a global issue because bad practice in agriculture is helping aridify the whole planet. The timescale necessary to understand how to reverse climate change with these techniques is at least years and decades.
The deschooling of Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich was mostly an intriguing bogeyman, saying things you weren’t supposed to say. He became famous for his book, Deschooling Society, which argued that getting rid of schools as institutions would be a good first step to de-institutionalising society itself.
As summarised in a recent medical article by Cormac Russell, Does more medicine make us sicker?, Illich determined that when a function such as education or medicine starts out it can be moderately effective. As it becomes institutionalised it becomes less effective, achieving some things and making some things worse. Thoroughly institutionalised functions cannot achieve their goals, no matter what. One main reason why they cannot achieve their goals is that they try to apply institutionalised solutions, and in doing so destroy the social and individual mechanisms they actually rely on.[4]
So, to stay with education, the institutionalised mechanisms of curricula and exams are enough to make sure that actual education is a negative factor in achieving its own aims. The solutions it wants to impose, because that is its institutionalised nature, necessarily wreck social and individual learning resources.
As a rider or disclaimer, we should say that Cormac Russell works on precisely the social mechanisms and community assets that institutions destroy. Non-institutional approaches are available that have very different mechanisms and very different outcomes.
The roots of organisations
We can broach this subject by saying that roots are both evident and invisible. It depends how you look. In a pasture, the rule of thumb is that the roots are as deep as the pasture is tall. A sheep pasture grazed right down close to the ground also has shallow damaged roots. As a rather literal analogy we can ask whether the people in an organisation stand tall. Are they able to take pride in what they do as distinct from what they have been asked or commanded to do?
Roots build soil and soil structure. That is, they positively build the environment they exist in. They build in many dimensions because of the vast range of collaborations they engage in. For instance, there are fungi that dissolve solid rock to access nutrients. And fungi that transport nutrients to specific other plants over long distances. So, we can ask whether people in organisations have networks that span many different sorts of association and organisation and institution. Is the organisation in practice building a set of relationships that will give it a robust way of dealing with stressors? Not in any planned way but because that is what organisational roots do?
We can see now how the Illich view of the world plays. We can see that a view of organisation that is too focused and too institutionally anal simply stunts the roots and depletes the environment. And we can recognise many organisations that work in this mode of narrow competitive advantage leading to general decline. We can see for instance, the whole oil and gas sector, or the whole food sector doing itself out of business.
And we can go back to a recent blog about the tyranny of purpose and recognise Gregory Bateson’s insight that too much purpose blinds you to the rest of what is going on, to the larger circles of which you can only see small arcs. In an organisational setting we can infer the roots by the ability of the organisation to engage in conversations about what is, without fretting about the relevance of those conversations. A recognition if you like of the common environment that organisations build and live in.
This raises a subtle but vital question about a cybernetic view of the world. Cybernetics of course is interested in precisely all those connections and relationships that enable viability in an arbitrary and changing world. Roots connect and communicate. Both materials and information travel. The context is everything. My mate can spray his strawberries with seaweed, but their performance is still radically limited by a poor and repeatedly damaged soil. When translated into the language of business, what is the implied value system of cybernetic understandings?
I think this is the question of identity. The soil works best with a huge diversity of plants growing in it. Monocultures are always and everywhere destructive. The identity of a plant is itself a question of context: it grows tall not in isolation but surrounded by other plants that we could see as competitive.
Genes and all that rubbish
It is clear that culturally we wish to believe that many things about us are genetically determined. There has been grotesque investment in genetically oriented bioengineering, which has basically failed. This is the equivalent of saying that an organisation can be what it needs to be irrespective of its context and environment.
The inconvenient truth is that genes are expressed via the odd billion epigenetic switches, which respond to the environment to adapt ourselves as organisms into the world we face. Our diverse plant ecosystems, albeit in a simpler way, change their habit and growth to suit the environment they find themselves in. This was studied 200 years ago in huge and empathetic depth by Goethe in a traverse across the Alps into Italy, noting as he went how the same plants expressed themselves differently at different altitudes and soil types and exposure to wind.
So now we have to say that plants express their environment and in a collective way adjust and control their environment, establishing a cybernetic loop that complicates any notion of identity. Their full standing tall is available via a collaborative improvement of the soil and a moderation of the local microclimate. Why would this be a different equation for organisations?
There are plants that “choose” not to collaborate in various ways. The cabbage family do not have mycorrhizal partners. Black walnut trees sterilise the ground around themselves from colonisation by other plants and trees. These things are also niches in the ecosystem and are viable for a time. We can have organisations that don’t play fair. But to think that this niche is an advantage over collaborative niches is just ecological nonsense. Why would it not be an enduring advantage to improve the soil you are rooted in?
All modern analysis tools start with purpose and try to generate ways of an organisation expressing its purpose, of succeeding in those terms. This is the subtlety of the cybernetic question: how can we see what is possible in the enclosing system when everything depends on everything else and identity and purpose depend on the choices that are made as much as the choices depend on identity and purpose. What can be said about the value system within which all this happens?
With 20/20 hindsight this has been my career issue. Clients for systems consultancy want to be in control of their destiny and want you to specify (in advance!) how you can help them in their quest. I can now see how this precludes all the interesting questions and all the really interesting possibilities. They want genetics without epigenetics. I have been dimly aware of this, and in fact have pitched occasionally on the basis that the what and the how of consultancy would not be available at the start. Many clients do not want to go on a journey with that sort of guide.
We have said that in an organisation with roots the people will be able to stand tall. Maybe we just need a collection of heuristics that tell us when an organisation is thriving, and steer by that.
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[1] That’s the technical term for the symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a plant. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that all the value is in the interactions, not in the parts that we commonly identify.
[2] And oh, how we struggle. I was at a Gurteen knowledge café this week where one person (rightly) talked about how a network of relationships increases the resilience of individuals and groups, and several others immediately (and wrongly) jumped straight to an end goal (own goal?) of efficiency and purpose, and another talked about absolute truth… 🤦♂
[3] As Patrick Hoverstadt put it beautifully at this week’s SCiO meeting: “Education means that little Johnny will go to school and at least have the opportunity to learn all the things that he needs to learn in order to pass his GCSEs.”
[4] Conway’s law is fashionable again and applies here: “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
