Organizations as Organisms

Carolyn Fritz

fall 2022

A designer looks to natural systems to explore solutions to human change-based challenges

Institutional changes are typically approached with strict timelines and frameworks, but design strategist Carolyn Fritz thinks that workplaces, and the people who power them, might benefit from a less mechanical and more organic approach to disruption. Instead of treating change management as a rigid and isolated project with a defined start and end date, she’s looking to the natural environment for inspiration. After all, plants and animals are constantly adapting to change, often in gradual and incremental ways and at scales ranging from a single organism to an entire ecosystem.

“Architecture and design projects are inherently change-based,” Carolyn says. “Clients hire us because they want something to change. From aesthetics, geography, systems, physical additions, or programs, we help them navigate change in all aspects of our work. And I’ve always been drawn to nature and curious about the natural world. The intersection of these interests led me to investigate new processes and new ways of working.”

For her Innovation Incubator project, she applied a nature-based lens to the human side of organizational disruption, investigating how the ever-changing natural world can encourage more comprehensive transitions in the human sphere. She explored how organisms adapt to, and even thrive in, changing environments, with the goal of developing new ways to approach and communicate about complex changes.

A conceptual leap

Carolyn acknowledges that connecting these two fields requires a conceptual leap. “Often biomimicry is connected to physical products or engineering efforts, but there isn’t a lot of info connecting it to process or something more intangible,” she says. To bridge the gap, she adopted a two-pronged strategy used by leading biomimicry consulting consultants: Approaching a challenge by abstracting it to nature (which she calls “Challenge to Biology”), and by looking at nature and abstracting it to humans (“Biology to Design”).

In the first stage of her research, she identified barriers to change management and investigated how nature handles analogous disruptions. The second stage involved analyzing natural adaptations and looking for similar situations in organizational transitions. Then she sought to map these natural paradigms onto a more familiar and established industry standard, the Prosci Change Management method for organizations. This method involves preparing an approach, managing change, and sustaining outcomes.

Findings

Regarding the first PROSCI phase, preparing for change, Carolyn found that the natural world does not “prepare” for change; instead, it reacts, responds, and evolves at different scales, from the entire ecosystem down to the individual organism. This understanding can help leaders improve communication efforts by prompting them to ask questions like: What types of engagements might resonate at an organization-wide level? What types of engagements might resonate at a department level or at a team or individual level?

As for the second PROSCI phase, managing change, Carolyn notes that natural systems tend to adapt to change more incrementally as compared to human systems that rely on control and strategy. “Ecosystems are not ‘managing change’ as we understand it,” she says. “They are reacting, responding, and evolving in relation to each other.” This ties in with the third phase, sustaining outcomes, as part of cyclical and interconnected processes of adaptation and response. Organisms adapt as disruptions occur at large scales, like landslides and fires, and at smaller scales, as in a forest where an invasive species is gradually crowding out native plants. Carolyn views this as an encouragement to view change, response, and day-to-day existence as cyclical and interconnected.

Future applications

Instead of a monolithic change management strategy with linear milestones and a distinct start and end, Carolyn’s research urges leaders to take inspiration from ecosystems’ continual feedback and adaptation. Teams can develop and execute more resilient strategies by carefully defining audiences and crafting messaging strategies for different scales and functional groupings.

“In our architectural practice, we often look to the natural world to inform planning, materiality, or site-based solutions, and I think it makes sense to extend this in more abstract ways,” Carolyn says. “Biomimicry is an untapped lens for change management that can support how we design for the greater good.”