How Human Beings Create the Environments They Must Survive In
In a valley in the Canadian Rockies, a beaver begins building a dam.
It carries branches.
It packs mud into gaps.
It works day after day, gradually blocking the flow of a stream.
After weeks of work, something new appears.
A pond.
The pond provides the beaver with a safer place to live. But the consequences do not stop with the beaver.
As the water accumulates, a wetland ecosystem begins to form.
Fish and amphibians move into the newly created pond. Trees standing in the water begin to decay, creating habitats for insects. Birds arrive to feed on those insects.
An environment that did not previously exist has emerged from the repeated actions of a single animal.
The beaver has not merely adapted to its environment.
It has changed the environment itself.
This is the idea known as niche construction.
And it serves as the final bridge between the natural and organizational worlds.
1. From Adaptation to Construction
For a long time, evolutionary biology tended to emphasize how organisms adapt to environments.
The environment presents conditions.
Organisms respond.
Those that are better suited to those conditions are more likely to survive and reproduce.
Chapter 3 examined this relationship through Darwin’s observations in the Galápagos.
But there is another direction to the relationship.
Organisms also modify their environments.
A beaver builds a dam.
A coral polyp secretes calcium carbonate and contributes to the formation of a reef.
An earthworm moves through soil, altering its structure and chemistry.
Over long periods, countless small actions can accumulate and produce environmental changes far greater than the individual organisms that created them.
The relationship, therefore, becomes a feedback loop.
The organism changes the environment.
The changed environment then affects the organism.
Adaptation and construction interact continuously.
This idea has become an important part of broader evolutionary thinking, including approaches associated with the extended evolutionary synthesis.
The significance of the idea is profound.
An organism is not simply a passenger inside an environment.
It can become one of the forces that creates the environment in which it must later survive.
2. Humans Take This Process Further
No species has pushed this process as far as humans.
Beavers build dams.
Humans build cities.
Beavers reshape streams.
Humans reshape landscapes.
We cultivate farmland, construct roads, create ports, establish communication networks, and build institutions that connect millions of people.
Among the most sophisticated forms of human niche construction is the organization.
A company.
A school.
A military unit.
A government agency.
A research institution.
An organization is an artificial environment deliberately created by human beings for a particular purpose.
Unlike a natural ecosystem, it can have its basic structure designed in advance.
Someone decides who reports to whom.
Rules are written.
Responsibilities are assigned.
Resources are allocated.
Decision-making procedures are established.
Information channels are created.
The organization may even be represented visually through an organizational chart.
At first glance, this seems fundamentally different from a natural ecosystem.
A forest is not designed by a central planner.
A coral reef does not begin with a management committee.
A river valley does not have a formal reporting structure.
An organization does.
Yet something unexpected happens after the organization begins operating.
The structure created by its designers gradually develops relationships, habits, informal rules, alliances, reputations, and information flows that were never fully designed by anyone.
The organization begins to evolve.
3. An Organization Is Neither Machine nor Nature
This is what makes organizations so interesting.
They are designed systems.
But they do not remain completely designed.
They contain formal structures.
They also contain informal structures.
The formal structure may say that one person reports to another.
The informal structure may tell a very different story about whose opinion actually matters.
The official process may specify how information should move.
The actual information may travel through entirely different channels.
A decision may formally belong to one executive.
Yet everyone may know that another person has the practical influence to determine whether that decision succeeds.
An organization, therefore, exists somewhere between a machine and a natural ecosystem.
It is intentionally constructed, but once built, it develops forms of order that its designers cannot fully control.
This is one reason the open systems perspective became so important in organizational theory.
Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn, in their influential 1966 work, developed a framework for understanding organizations as open systems rather than closed machines.
Organizations receive inputs from their environments, transform them internally, produce outputs, and receive feedback from their environments.
They continuously exchange resources and information with the world around them.
An organization survives through this ongoing interaction.
It is therefore better understood as a living system than as a static machine.
4. Every Organization Has Its Own Ecosystem
Consider a company.
Money and resources flow through it.
Some departments sit closer to the center of those flows than others.
Information about new products, personnel changes, investments, and strategic decisions travels through both formal and informal channels.
A quarterly financial report may appear to be nothing more than a collection of numbers.
Behind those numbers, however, there may be a history of decisions about which departments received resources, which projects were prioritized, and which groups were pushed toward the margins.
Now consider a school.
Grades and reputation become important forms of organizational currency.
Certain teachers may become central because they are associated with highly successful students.
Certain students may occupy influential positions among their peers.
The formal hierarchy may say one thing.
The social network may say otherwise.
Consider a military organization.
The formal chain of command is deliberately designed and often extremely strict.
Yet practical influence does not always follow rank.
A newly commissioned officer may formally outrank an experienced noncommissioned officer.
But years of operational experience can give that senior noncommissioned officer a form of practical influence that cannot be explained by the rank structure alone.
Government agencies provide another example.
Budgets and approval authority flow through particular departments.
The department controlling a critical stage of budget allocation can acquire influence far beyond what its position on an organizational chart might initially suggest.
Research institutions have their own currencies.
Research funding, citations, reputation, expertise, and access to influential networks can determine who occupies the intellectual center of an institution.
The organizations themselves look completely different.
Their purposes are different.
Their rules are different.
Their cultures are different.
Yet a recurring pattern can be found inside all of them.
There are rules.
There are centers and margins.
Information flows.
Resources move.
People influence one another.
And invisible forces shape the movement.
5. The Organization as a Small Universe
At this point, the argument of the first three chapters begins to converge.
Newton showed that invisible forces can shape visible movement.
Einstein showed that observation depends on the relationship between the observer and the system.
Darwin showed that survival depends on the relationship between an organism and its environment.
Niche construction showed that organisms can also modify the environments in which they live.
Now the scale becomes smaller once again.
The organization.
An organization is a small universe created by human beings.
It has its own environment.
Its own flows.
Its own centers.
Its own margins.
Its own forms of attraction and resistance.
Its own history.
And, most importantly, its own invisible forces.
But there is an important boundary that must be established here.
The concepts borrowed from physics and biology cannot simply be equated with organizational phenomena.
Gravity is not organizational power.
Niche construction is not identical to organizational culture.
Information does not literally behave like light passing through spacetime.
An employee is not a planet.
A company is not a galaxy.
Such comparisons may be useful as metaphors, but they are not scientific identities.
Confusing the two would weaken both the science and the organizational theory.
6. Physics Gives Us a Way of Thinking
The purpose of this book is therefore more modest—and, I believe, more useful.
It does not take the laws of physics and apply them directly to organizations.
It borrows a way of thinking.
When a visible phenomenon cannot be adequately explained by what is immediately visible, look for the structure surrounding it.
When an object moves in an unexpected way, examine the forces acting upon it.
When the same event is experienced differently by different observers, examine their positions.
When an organism succeeds in one environment but struggles in another, examine the relationship between the organism and its environment.
And when an organism changes its environment, examine the feedback between the two.
These patterns of reasoning can also be applied to organizations.
If someone repeatedly receives important opportunities, it may not be enough to examine that person’s ability.
Look at the information available to that person.
Look at their relationships.
Look at their position.
Look at their reputation.
Look at who trusts them.
Look at which decisions they can influence.
Conversely, if a highly capable person repeatedly finds themselves excluded from important opportunities, personal ability may not be the entire explanation.
Perhaps information does not reach them.
Perhaps they are disconnected from important networks.
Perhaps their expertise is not recognized as valuable in that particular environment.
The visible result may have an invisible cause.
This book follows those traces.
7. The Four Ideas Come Together
The journey so far has produced four related ideas.
Invisible forces shape movement.
This is the lesson that begins with Newton.
Position changes experience.
This is the insight developed through Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Survival depends on the relationship between an individual and the environment.
This is the lesson of Darwinian evolution.
Individuals can also change the environments in which they live.
This is the insight provided by niche construction.
These four ideas form the conceptual foundation of what this book calls Organizational Relativity.
The concept can now be stated more precisely.
Within the small universe of an organization, an individual’s behavior and survival cannot be explained solely by that individual’s fixed characteristics. They also depend on organizational environment, relational position, and the distribution of information and power.
This is the first formulation of organizational relativity.
8. Four Principles of Organizational Relativity
The idea will eventually develop into four principles.
1. Relativity of Position
People in the same organization can experience the same event differently because they occupy different positions.
The position of the observer matters.
The same organizational reality can therefore appear different depending on where a person stands.
2. Organizational Gravity
Power, information, relationships, and other sources of influence can pull people toward certain centers and push others toward the margins.
These forces create an organizational field.
The formal organizational chart does not necessarily reveal the full structure of that field.
3. Relativity of Survival
Survival is not an absolute measure of individual ability.
A person’s effectiveness depends partly on how well their capabilities fit the organizational environment.
A strength in one environment can become a weakness in another.
4. Changing Trajectories
Organizational environments change.
When they do, the positions that once provided an advantage may no longer do so.
Individuals can also change their environment through their actions, relationships, and influence.
Their trajectory is therefore not fixed.
9. Entering the Smaller Universe
The first part of this book began with the largest possible scale.
The universe.
We looked at gravity.
We followed Einstein into spacetime.
We came to Earth and examined Darwin’s understanding of adaptation.
We then looked at how organisms can reshape their environments.
Now the scale has become much smaller.
The organization.
This is the point at which the journey truly becomes personal.
Everyone who works in an organization occupies a position within a system of relationships.
Everyone receives some information before others.
Everyone is closer to some decisions and farther from others.
Everyone has relationships that increase their influence and relationships that limit it.
Everyone exists within an environment that rewards some characteristics more than others.
And everyone, through their actions, contributes in some way to the environment.
The organization is therefore not merely a collection of people.
It is a space.
And within that space, forces are at work.
10. The Organization Has Gravity
The first part of the book has now reached its destination.
From the universe to Earth.
From Earth to human beings.
From human beings to organizations.
The central question is no longer about gravity in the physical universe.
It is about the forces that shape movement inside the organizational universe.
Who becomes the center?
Who remains on the margins?
Why does information reach some people first?
Why does one person’s opinion carry more weight than another’s?
Why does the same ability create success in one environment and frustration in another?
Why do some people become increasingly difficult to replace while others, despite working just as hard, remain easily replaceable?
These questions mark the beginning of the second part of the book.
The next chapter turns directly toward the force at the center of this theory:
organizational gravity.
What creates it?
What gives a person organizational weight?
And why can someone with an impressive title sometimes have surprisingly little real influence, while someone with modest formal authority can quietly become one of the most powerful people in the organization?
The answers begin with a simple idea.
Organizational gravity is never created by a single source of power.
Organization Relativity Theory
Chapter 4 — The Organization: A Smaller Universe
How Human Beings Create the Environments They Must Survive In
Category: Organization Relativity Theory
Tags: Organization Relativity Theory, Organizational Theory, Organizational Behavior, Niche Construction, Open Systems, Organizational Ecology, Power, Information, Leadership, Organizational Environment, Darwin, Einstein, Newton, Workplace, Organizational Gravity
This chapter is adapted from the forthcoming book Organization Relativity.
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