I have studied Music, then Forestry, then did an MBA. Moving between those fields was not a plan. It was a sequence of decisions that each seemed locally obvious and collectively turned out to give me a wide set of tools to understand the world.
What the three share is a kind of structural logic. A Bach chorale works because each voice is constrained: it must move within certain intervals, resolve certain tensions, fit with the others. Those constraints are not limitations on the music, they are what makes the music possible. A watershed works similarly. The shape of the land determines which water goes where, which pools, which runs off, which recharges slowly. Change the shape and you change everything downstream, often in ways that are hard to predict by looking only at the local change. An organisation under pressure behaves in a recognisably similar way. What it can respond to, and how quickly, is not mainly a function of the quality of the people inside it. It is a function of the form it takes: what it measures, what questions it permits, what it treats as fixed, and who is authorised to challenge what.
The pattern that kept appearing across these three fields, and many others, was the same: structure shapes function, and structure is largely invisible from inside.
A watershed looks like a landscape to the person walking through it. An organisation looks like a collection of reasonable decisions to the people who made them. The structure, the thing that determines what is possible, is hard to see when you are embedded in it. Easier to see from a different angle.
I spent time talking to a public body whose expertise in resilience, in ecological terms, was genuine and deep. What was harder for them to see was how the same principle applied to themselves: how their own structure, their performance frameworks and accountability arrangements and definitions of whose job it was to ask which question, shaped what they could think about. Resilience was a domain they were expert in, in pockets. It was also something their own form was quietly working against. Both things were true, and they sat alongside each other without making contact.
That is the kind of problem I find worth working on. Not the knowledge deficit, organisations rarely lack knowledge. The structural one: what an organisation already knows and cannot yet say, where the friction is, which questions keep getting deferred, what the form of the thing prevents from being visible to the people inside it.
In practice this means sitting in on strategy conversations, interviewing people across levels and functions, running small workshops designed to surface what the performance data obscures. The aim is to build a picture of what is actually happening in the organisation, as distinct from what the reporting says. When that picture becomes clear, it tends to feel obvious to the people in the room, because it follows from things they already knew, just never in the same place at the same time.
The work draws on diverse fields such as ecology, anthropology, and other fields when a principle from one of them fits the problem at hand. Music, forestry, and business strategy each have something to contribute to a question about organisational structure, if you are looking for it. Whether a principle travels is always the test. When it does, it can connect disciplines that would otherwise stay separate, and that connection is usually where the useful thing is.
Much of my current work sits at the boundary between ecological and organisational resilience, with local authorities, land managers, and bodies trying to understand how environmental systems and institutional decisions interact. I also work with organisations that need someone to hold complexity across departments rather than reduce it to a single team’s view.
If that sounds relevant to something you are working on, I would be glad to talk.
Related
- how-i-came-to-this — the longer version of the intellectual route
- what-a-frame-is — the underlying concept: what a structure shapes you to see and not see
- resilience-starts-with-you — the argument applied specifically to organisational resilience
- the-indirect-procedure — why changing a system from inside the system is structurally difficult