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. 



Bio


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’.