How do you gesture “co-flourishing”?

on ecosystems of work — inner and outer

I hardly think about it anymore. It’s this single brisk gesture — with my right hand I flip the lid of my laptop open. And this means the work has begun. As long as I can remember my professional life, the ritual of work has somehow always been connected with switching on a device.

Though I do have childhood memories of a different gesturing connected to work. Every summer at my grandparents’ village we used to be sharing the family chores of field work, like seeding or harvesting potatoes. My grandfather would harness the horse and adjust the plow, and we — kids — would take turns climbing on the mare’s back, shrieking from excitement. As a small kid you were allowed to ride the working horse, and if you were older, the adults would let you lead the horse by the reins, while grandpa tried to manage the heavy plow from behind. And then everyone would join in with buckets to pick the ripe tubers of potatoes that have emerged from the freshly plowed land.

These gestures and rituals have now become a distant memory for me, a vapour of another time and place, painted over by the bright synthetic colours of contemporary Western capitalist reality. Freshly out of university, the world of work welcomed me with a very specific lexicon and imaginary: office, manager, colleagues, salary, competition, table tennis, team building, partners, office hours, sick leaves,… And later with more fun stuff: purpose, self-organising teams, servant leadership, agile, slack time, orange Fridays, value generation, lean canvas, customer discovery, teal, freelancing, coworking, zebras,… Once you’re in, full-heartedly, there’s probably no way back into the 9 to 5 world of hierarchies and bonuses.

Yet here I would like to talk about something else. Following a move towards another shift — where enjoying your work and being paid for it is no longer at the centre of the story, but where there is also space for more attentive and caring engagement with an indefinitely broader spectrum of agencies (human and more-than-human), and potential for all flourishing to be mutual, as a writer and biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it in her book Braiding Sweetgrass.

I will attempt to reflect on work as a process of collective unfurling, not necessarily separated from “non-work”, since any activity we may engage in is profoundly influenced by current cultural beliefs permeating all spheres of life, intertwining with and feeding off each other. In words of Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary theorist and biologist, life is a connected phenomena, yet we often don’t notice the patterns of interdependencies. So let us examine work ethics based on a completely different lexicon, offering to look at your team, partners, customers, even competitors, as an ecosystem of abundance, where fostering diversity and commoning may offer strategies for co-flourishing.

On Ecosystems

As Darwin came up with his brilliant theory of evolution, he himself was swimming in the cultural waters of his time, influenced by the popular socio-economic models of early capitalism and the dominant metaphors of that zeitgeist, such as the survival of the fittest or the individualistic success. So Darwin’s theory turned out to be painted on the canvas of that zeitgeist, further promoting some of the ideas that weren’t even his. The same limited worldview was further propagated by neo-darwinists, promoting the so called “selfish gene” and the belief that organisms are genetically egoistic and that success comes only by winning in a competitive struggle, all else being childish or sentimental.

It took bold thinkers and scientists like Lynn Margulis to debunk a good portion of those myths that shaped the thought collective, the social imaginary that has been denying the world of many worlds, promoting one set of truths, and influencing the small and large circles of human life on Earth. The mechanistic view of the Earth continues to separate humans and nature, where a human is a subject acting on the dead matter of the surrounding objects (or resources). This paradigm has justified the exploitation of nature. Such lens of separation also gave humans a false permission to exploit each other. The detached “objectivity” that the prevailing worldview trains essentially cultivates distancing, disembodiment, disembeddedness, and stimulates a very unreal state of being. Lynn Margulis pioneered and promoted a very different view of life on Earth: symbiosis. All living organisms exist in interconnected ways as living systems, in complex patterns and feedback loops, rather than in direct cause-effect lines. With this view we are focusing on emergent properties that are born in relationships, and that make life, evolution and well-being of the entire ecosystem possible.

It’s thus a matter of choice how we look at the living world (and the world of work, for that matter, since social systems form ecosystems too), what we choose to notice, and which metaphors we then apply. Our perception shapes ways we pay attention, understand things and choose to act.

Dwellers and Companions

Work is profoundly relational. So who inhabits our ecosystems of work? Beside being connected to survival and sustenance, work can also be seen as a process of individuation, unfurling into personal and collective potentials. And even for it to be a source of sustenance, your work needs to partake in the flow and exchange of value with someone else. There is hardly any work happening in a solitary cave, an isolated activity just to survive and keep yourself busy for not going insane.

So as we shift from “busy-ness” to “value creation” as a purpose of work, what then is value? Value too doesn’t exist in isolation. It is a relational quality. It’s a flow of give and take. And it’s important that this flow is not interrupted at either side of it. Value can also translate in many different ways, financial and non-monetary.

The flow of value originates with a personal wish and an intention to give something, contributing your talents, ideas, skills, time, effort. It then develops in relation with those whom your work is for — the future dwellers of the house you are building — and their search, needs, struggles and aspirations. Value that comes back to you is unique, and is a genuine gift of appreciation born out of your specific relational space.

Who else takes part in this value flow, who makes your work possible? Let’s look at the companions. Consciously or without being aware of it, there is often a broad range of human and more-than-human agents contributing their attention, energy and effort to the work you are doing, and sharing your intentions. It is easy to think of your immediate team, your partners (suppliers, sponsors…), as your companions. And yet there may also be other actors in your ecosystem, who may not even be aware of their role, impact, or nourishment. This is where it may be worth looking from the perspective of “ethical coalitions”, as articulated by a peer-to-peer theorist and researcher Michel Bauwens, asking: who else may be there, who may be sharing your values and intentions? Sometimes it may take educating other actors, to help them see that you are in fact parts of the same ecosystem.

This thinking also connects to philosophy behind circular economy, as ways of building livelihoods with attention to how the waste from someone’s activities may become the resource for someone else, thus closing the ecological loops as much as possible. Circular thinking opens doors into concepts like sharing and peer-to-peer, maintenance and longevity of products, as well as thinking in terms of services rather than ownership of stuff. Taking a perspective of ownership and responsibility for the community and common good, rather than focusing on individual profit and extractivist behavior, it then becomes possible to perceive the living reality and economies of work as commons.

We can think of commoning as a verb, as gesturing, as a shift in worldview — towards a more conscious intra-relationality between humans as well as between human and other-than-human agents. Gesturing from the place of seeing our interconnectedness inside ecosystems, and moving away from subject-object relationships, we can think of commons not just as something we all share (as we think of air and water) but also as relationships, continuously evolving. Where everyone is a subject with response-abilities, agency and co-ownership. Together enlarging fecundity of the whole.

Work that is rooted in attentive inter-relationships can be understood as an act of commoning and encourage all actors of the ecosystem to assume an attitude of care towards one another, and a shared understanding that all flourishing is mutual.

Personal Ecologies

We are ecosystems within ecosystems. This thought is articulated by the concept of holobiont, defined and explained in the book by Lynn Margulis ‘Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation’. The way we could approach these ideas of the inner ecosystems goes beyond a purely physiological aspect of realizing that there are trillions of bacteria living along our human cells, together making up the thinking and feeling compound of critters we call our selves. It would also imply connecting the different aspects of being and diverse ways of knowing: the imaginative, the rational, the intuitive, critical thinking, sensing, feeling, and thus introducing the ecosystems vocabulary into deeper understanding of the self, the human body, wellbeing, and other aspects, especially in the context where mainstream culture may still be structured around the siloed thinking and independent symptoms treatment when it comes to the health of an individual.

Back to the subject of work, if we think of ourselves as being fractals of larger patterns we are enmeshed into and entangled with, we may experience that in order to redefine whatever it is that we want to influence, we may need to look at it through the lens of personal experiences. For example, if we look closely we might recognize that certain aspects of what Mark Fisher formulated as ‘capitalist realism’ is something that resides also within us, expressed through what we agree to in our daily lives. If you think of culture as the soil we grow in, the constituent minerals of that soil also become part of us. So to influence larger cycles, we can also begin with personal clarity, choices and determination to act upon them. As scientist and philosopher Karen Barad puts it, we are not in-the-world, we are of-the-world, we co-shape its processes through our own perception and agreeing to what we assert as real and possible. For example, if we truly refuse exploitation within our personal ecologies, if this mindset and behaviour that comes with it will cease to be part of our lives (meaning, that we would then probably not accept exploitative work contracts or take advantage of people or other beings we are working with), it might be more likely to disappear from the outer structures as well: if noone plays the game, the game stops. In fact, the larger circles of cultures of work and economic realities may be but concentric ripples of the smaller personal ecologies we inhabit.

Language and metaphors

Once we start thinking in ecosystems, it becomes apparent how crucial is the role of language and the imaginaries it offers in creating and sustaining a certain mindset. For here we need a new lexicon, a new ethics of work, and acknowledgement that most of vocabulary used today, at least in the mainstream Western culture, would picture work in rather creepy (yet all so familiar) ways. Work is a “necessary evil”, a struggle for survival; an organisation is a machine, a series of connected parts arranged in a logical order in order to produce a repeatable output; a company is like a factory, a set of functions to do local tasks under control and command from a central leadership unit. Or all those endless metaphors of military origin that are actively comparing organisations to armies, where we “hit the ground running”, “beat (or kill) competition”, win in the “land grab” game, etc. There are plenty of such suffocating analogies of survival or aggressor’s mode that are in continuous denial of symbiotic possibilities, hanging on to “high performing teams” effectively competing against one another.

The familiar work discourse also talks a lot about economic growth, fast companies, famous individuals, disruptive unicorns, and scaling, but the conversation rarely mentions interconnectedness, wellbeing, community, care, meaningfulness, fulfilment. This language has commodified our thinking, no matter which discipline we come from.

Other metaphors may offer fresh air and space to breathe. What if we think of an organisation as a rainforest? Or a strawberry field of rhizomatic connections? Or a mycelium network communicating and sending nutrients across distances? How about an octopus? The octopus’ brain is located not only in the head but also in the eight arms. Every arm “thinks” as well as “senses” the surrounding world with autonomy yet being part of the same animal.

If we may think of work and organising relationships with dwellers and companions as a process of co-flourishing, not devoid of risks and mutual challenging but also not aiming at eliminating the “enemy” or winning fast, what social imaginary of working otherwise may grow from this thinking?

Gesturing into infinity

I grab the lid of my laptop with a familiar gesture. It’s morning; a cup of my favourite Darjeeling blend is spreading invigorating smell; a new working day is “on”. Yet suddenly I hesitate. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

Ritual gestures serve their purpose — they delineate the outlines of the space. This here is a space for work. That one is for play. What gesture would possibly do justice to the entangled reality where my work is a continuation of my joys, fears, tears and pleasures — all woven into the complexity of a silk-threaded motley ball that is my life? Where I find myself less at trying to arrive to a destination, and more in the process, walking outer and inner forests, as fractals of each other.

I know what landing livelihood on own terms means to me. I know that my work is rooted in the commoning, in collaborative efforts with my ethical coalitions. It is a work of ecosystems, and as such requires collective thinking, sensing and acting within a space of a more attentive inter-being, together developing imagination for landing livelihoods and building organisations that compost infrastructures of separation and honour human and multispecies ecological communities.

I am still holding that laptop lid, hesitating to repeat the familiar patterns, thinking of (or rather sensing and feeling into) a gesture that I wish could express the multiplicities that I want my work to mean.

…and what gesture(s) would you choose for your work?