Ecosystem Notes #6: Parallel Enquiry
Social Leadership Daily - Day #830
What am I hoping to find on these journeys? Truth, answers or shelter?
This is about parallel enquiry: to walk through this landscape, through the year. To walk it through the seasons, to discover what is fixed, and what is in motion. To connect with the single place, over time
In parallel, to consider the idea of the Organisation as Ecosystem. To test the validity of the metaphor, and see if there is more to it than a convenient fiction.
Here, deep in the winter, my initial footsteps are about boundaries, and language. To start with undefined space, rather than fixed structure. To set out with the words that I know, and to discover new ones, both singularly, and in patterns.
With each walk I am collecting: memories, notes, photography, sketches, and things. The lost and discarded, the shed and the littered. Not to find a truth in these, but to explore patterns, and seek meaning in the granular.
A fractal enquiry? I am unclear of the value, at least for now. My hope is to find a light tracery, a common definition, through this embodied experience. To see if the Forest lets me see the Organisation differently, and whether there is a commonality in the conception of boundary, motion, connection. Essentially to see the walks not simply as canvas upon which to paint, but rather as the pigment itself. To represent the texture of the Organisation in the land, and the land within the boundaries of the organisation.
Maybe at the end I will simply carry memories. Or perhaps the landscape will give me something more.
This new work is exploring the idea of the Organisation as Ecosystem: through these short form pieces, as well as longer writing over on the Blog, i’m developing the language an ideas, considering aspects of Social Leadership relating to motion, boundary, and connection.