31: Organisational Ecology with Joan Lurie

This episode explores what it means to shift our mindsets towards ecological thinking and practice in organisations. This shift is away from the dominance of mechanistic and psychological thinking, not to replace these but in addition to them. Joan shares her long experience of working to disrupt organisations and help them to 'liberate' themselves from patterns that entrap them.  To achieve this, individuals, teams and organisations have to let go of their attachments to the psychological and technical ways of knowing and thinking and move towards ecological thinking – understanding behaviour in terms of connectivity, interdependencies, patterns, and circularity.   Simon and Joan discuss the challenges and aims of co-creating this emergent field of Organisational Ecology and Eco-Leadership that is so urgently needed to address the challenges of technological and environmental disruption. 

Joan is the CEO of Orgonomix. A company she founded in 2009 with the purpose of enabling systemic change and reshaping leadership and organisations to thrive in complexity. She has spent the past 30 years working both within organisations and as a consultant assisting executive teams to lead complex adaptive change and disentangle and repattern the organisational systems they are part of. Her work and unique methodology (OrgonomicsTM) helps her client systems find flow and coherence It provides the scaffold to enable them to change their cultures, business and operating models with transformational and commercial results. Using these transformations as containers for development she helps leaders grow leaders’ systemic lens, extend their relational intelligence and build their adaptive muscle to be System Leaders. She sees this as an imperative for leaders to help them thrive, for optimising organisational functioning but also as a necessity for the survival of our whole ecology which is under threat. Joan is a Fulbright Scholar and has a Masters Degree in Adult Education and Development from Wits University, South Africa and a Masters Degree in Developmental Psychology from Columbia University, NYC. She currently lives in Melbourne collaborating and learning with clients and colleagues to discover new ways for all of us to be at our ‘growing edge’.