Mycelium in organizations

Lessons from Animistic Science and Help Desk Circles

Biomimicry has always fascinated humans. This article is based on the idea that we can learn how to organize (in the sense of having organizations”) by learning from nature.

That would be particularly useful as the interconnectedness and unpredictable emergence of everything is starting to open up a complexity gap that can easily paralyze entire sectors. In my work, I’m starting to feel the complexity gap more and more, as I see people grappling with complex realities and becoming unable to form organizations that can handle that complexity.

This article seeks to inspire out-of-the-box thinking about many-to-many governance, which aims to replace hierarchical, siloed structures with more fluid, contextual, and reciprocal patterns of interaction and decision-making. In non-linear ways, it was inspired by reading Andreas Weber’s Matter and Desire.

However, many-to-many governance represents not only a technical or structural shift but also a profound cultural and philosophical one. It challenges deep-seated assumptions about the nature of organizations, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. Embracing this approach calls for cultivating new ways of knowing, being, and acting that are more aligned with the living patterns of the world around us.In this article, we will explore how insights from animistic science and the practice of “Help Desk Circles” in sociocratic organizations can inform and enrich our understanding of many-to-many governance. We will see how these seemingly disparate approaches share a common commitment to context-sensitivity, developmental unfolding, and the primacy of relationships in organizational life. And we will consider how they might point us towards a more fully “living” model of the organization – one that is not just alive, but in service to the aliveness of all.

Animistic Science and the Living World

Animistic ways of knowing, as practiced by indigenous cultures around the world, rest on a fundamentally different understanding of the nature of reality than mainstream western thinking. In an animistic view, the world is not a collection of inert objects, but a community of subjects – a complex web of sentient beings with agency that are in constant communication and interaction with one another, and therefore very much like the organizations we’d like to build.

In an animistic world view, the primary mode of relating is not one of detachment and control, but of reciprocity, respect, and intimate attunement. The boundaries between self and other, culture and nature, are fluid and permeable.

Some key principles of animistic science that are relevant for organizational design and governance include:

Attentiveness to context and place: In the animistic view, every being and every phenomena is fundamentally shaped by the unique web of relationships and histories it emerges from. To understand or engage with any part of the system requires a deep, situated attunement to the whole – a knowing that is impossible to get just from propositional knowing.
Participatory knowing: Animism recognizes that we can never stand outside the systems we seek to know, but are always active co-creators of the realities we participate in. Knowing is not a matter of detached observation, but of intimate, embodied engagement – a dance of sense and response in which knower and known are mutually transformed.
Distributed agency: In the animistic worldview, intelligence and creativity are not the sole province of individual human minds, but are distributed throughout the entire fabric of the living world. Every being has its own unique way of apprehending and responding to its environment. The health of the whole depends on the diversity, vitality of all its part, and mutualism.
Reciprocal responsibility: Animism sees all beings as fundamentally interdependent and mutually sustaining. The flourishing of any one depends on the flourishing of all, and vice versa. This creates a profound sense of ethical obligation and care, rooted not in abstract moral principles but in the felt experience of kinship and connection.

Organizational animism?

When applied to the realm of organizations and management, these principles suggest a radically different way of understanding and engaging with the living systems that we are part of. They invite us to see the organization not as a machine to be controlled, but as a complex, adaptive ecology with its own inherent wisdom and agency. And they call us to cultivate practices of deep listening, contextual attunement, and reciprocal care in all our interactions and decision-making.

Help Desk Circles and Context-Responsive Organizing

One concrete example of what this might look like in organizational contexts is the new practice of “Help Desk Circles” in the context of sociocratic governance unique to Sociocracy For All.

Sociocracy is a system of decentralized, consent-based decision-making. It organizes work around self-governing “circles” that are responsible for specific domains, i.e. topics, things, areas of knowledge, etc., and that are linked together through a system of double-linking and feedback loops.

In traditional sociocratic models, each circle has a clearly defined aim (purpose) and domain, and is responsible for all policy decisions and operations within that domain. This creates a high degree of autonomy and efficiency. Each domain is held in a circle – or passed to its subcircle(s) – like in a fractal root system.

Yet, when our own sociocratic organization grew, an expanded pattern became necessary. It grew out of practice, in response to a need. It’s not necessarily “new” or “not sociocratic”; I consider it a practice compatible with sociocracy that we wanted to name as a shorthand to explain faster how this recurring practice works.

Help Desk Circles are often those focused on core infrastructure or support functions. They create more fluid, context-responsive relationships between circles. In this model, certain circles take on a dual role – they not only steward their own domain, but also serve as “help desks” or “service providers” for other circles in the organization to do the same thing they are doing.

In communities (inside and outside of what we consider organizations), this kind of behavior is a natural response. Let’s say I’m in the person who is really good at baking bread. I bake bread for people in my community. Then a neighbor comes and asks me to show her how to make bread. Now I’m a bread baker and a supporter of other bakers. I will teach the neighbor how to make bread so they don’t rely on me. Chances are, if they have a specific problem, they might come back to me again. The group version of that is what a Help Desk Circle is.

It is either founded in mutualism and the desire to contribute, or it is regulated with direct contracts.

An example is a Website Circle that runs the organization’s website but also supports parts of the organization in making their pages on the organization’s website. Maybe even in making their own websites.
Another example is a Budgeting Circle that supports budgeting in all circles, as an internal service to all circles for their own budgets.

In most organizations, HR is already running as such a service – in its best manifestation as an organization-wide care-taking role.

Building on that, imagine an organization where conflict resolution is at once

distributed – all circle members engage in conflict resolution directly on their own initiative – and

centralized – circles can go to the Conflict Resolution Circle if they can’t figure it out alone.

That’s what a Help Desk circle does, just for all and any domains.

This support can take many forms – from offering templates, trainings and documentation, to directly collaborating on specific projects or initiatives.

Note that this practice is more specific than “networking everyone.” It’s more like a small world network where there’s particular density of relationships within a domain and then individual connections where there is an operational need.

An organization then becomes a set of overlaid small world networks for different needs, just like our bodies have interconnected networks for neural, circulatory, and lymphatic connections. The pattern of Help Desk circles can help build organizations like that.

Adding Context

Another key is that these support relationships are not fixed or mandated from above. Instead, they can be negotiated and renegotiated on a case-by-case basis through “domain activity agreements” between circles anywhere in the organization’s network of circles. These are dynamic, context-specific contracts that clarify what activities and decisions each circle will take on in a particular scenario, without completely redistributing domains.

If the circles are the roots – in a fractal manner – then those direct connections make the mycelium that connect the roots and might even connect across what we consider “organizations.” These inter-team connections become part of an organizational interstitium or mycelium, and perhaps even to inter-organizational connections beyond the boundaries of an organization, i.e. providing help desk circle services to other organizations.

As circles mature and take on more autonomy in a particular area, the Help Desk Circle can gradually step back and focus its support elsewhere. Conversely, if a circle becomes overextended or loses capacity, it can renegotiate its agreements and draw on more active support.

Participatory knowing

Participatory knowing is key in shifting to an attuned way of organizing. The fact that a Help Desk Circle is not just a service for others but also an agent itself is therefore a key feature.

Without that, the Help Desk Circle would act without in-depth, perspectival and participatory knowing, leading to an othering between those serving and those served, and making the system prone to fall into narrow-focused transactional relationships again.

Many-to-many relationships outside of “the organization”

It is often overlooked that every organization not only has relationships on the inside but also to the outside. Two obvious relationships are those with customers and members. But there are many more relationships – suppliers, competitors, researchers, followers, lawyers, consultants, certifiers, professional associations, policy makers, employee resource groups, caterers and many more – that questions the boundaries of what an organization is and where it ends.

Seeing an organization as one isolated entity is just as reductionist as seeing a human as one isolated entity. The truth is that we are multitudes and we are in constant exchange with the world around us. In this view, an individual does not exist for just one purpose but in service of aliveness and life in general, as any single purpose will be too narrow to sustain life.

Could the same be true for an organization? I suspect that our typical view on organizations is distorted by the fact that the outside (e.g., the suppliers) can’t be commanded and controlled. A command-and-control organization will enforce an inside and ignore its “outside” (as its external impact as externalities) because the interdependence is an inconvenient truth, better to ignore as to not let the internal coercive power be questioned.

In a choice-based paradigm, that strict separation becomes unnecessary. Whether an entity is inside or outside becomes an absurd question – both parties choose to be there, and choose to be in mutually beneficial relationships. Who is to say what’s inside and what’s outside?

That said, it can be useful and adaptive to have an inside and an identity, just like the construction of a self for individuals (in the sense of Metzinger’s ego tunnel) has proven useful. So we need to pretend that we’re one entity with a membrane – so we can act as one and take care of that collective layer – while never forgetting that we’re actually not separate or even cohesive without our ecosystem.

Being better connectors

I’m tuned into the gaps connected to this way of thinking. Neither are our people ready (too often attached to egos and scarcity), nor our wider system (e,g., an economic system that legally binds us to making profit) nor our internal workings of organizations.

My intention is not to solve all these things but only to offer a puzzle piece from the world I know best – decentralized governance in organizations. My sense is that we need to put our efforts towards being better connectors, and by that I mean making it easier for ourselves to be connected, for example by using tools and protocols for interoperability, information curation and sharing as well as more transparent and decentralized forms of resource allocation and governance.

Every time someone figures out how to do “stakeholder engagement” well in their particular context, they are creating a path towards this paradigm.

We don’t have to live in a new world to do that – we can do it now, and we are already doing it. In most optimistic moments, I see all the projects and realize that this paradigm shift is underway.

What’s possible?

The challenge of this time to me has to parts

The first is to reimagine what organizing could look like if we shed assumptions in our hierarchical conditioning. Maybe we simply have to give ourselves permission to act on our altruistic impulses.
At the same time, we need to build appropriate tools and practices to increase the literacy and fluency necessary to build intentional and adaptive organizing spheres with these features.