I love ecosystems. They are so fascinating and powerful. While I was traveling mid-September I was up in Acadia National Park, surrounded by some of the most beautiful ecosystems you’ve ever seen. Glorious.
Stunning Scenery in Acadia
But it doesn’t always feel like that. Not in the morass of the corporate ecosystem so many of us find ourselves struggling through. Translated into the typical business environment, suddenly the hidden connections and the complexity becomes overwhelming in the worst ways. This is compounded for anyone also navigating those spaces with any identity outside the straight, white, male default.. It’s so easy to get lost in it, to burn out.
Me, I’m a big believer that one of the most effective ways to solve a problem is to visualize it. Seeing and understanding the thing gives you just a little more power over it.
So it is with the ecosystem. Mapping it can be a really helpful tool to uncover where the leverage points are inside all that messiness. It doesn’t even have to be that complicated to do, because more than anything, this is a mental exercise to understand your brain and your relationships. It’s about mapping your experience of the ecosystem to find how you can influence it.
As with any ecosystem, it comes down to objects and connections.
The essential components of any ecosystem
Start simple - it’s about:
The People: The real human beings you interact with and who influence your life at work.
The Rituals: The meetings, events, ceremonies, get-togethers that fill up the day, week, month, quarter
The Artifacts: The tools, documents, dashboards, deliverables, the AI agents even that you make, reference, or use
From there, you just need to start building it out. Put yourself in the center and work it through bit by bit. Start in the inner circle, and work your way out to the distant wave makers. Use the distance from you, at the center as the guide of how tight or loose the connection is, and place related objects near each other as you go.
Follow your gut. While mapping the ecosystem of a lakebed is science, this is a bit more of an art and an instinct - it’s about your lived experience.
By the end, you’ll have a map.
You might end up with something kinda like this
Then, it’s about the leverage. What I guide people through in workshops at this point is identifying the stressors. There’s two types:
Things you can’t control
Things you can influence
It’s important to pinpoint both. The former, so you can name it and let it go. The latter, that’s what you can focus on. Those are the potential leverage points that can give you more power to tweak the ecosystem in your favor.
If you want to experience this whole thing in action, I’m doing a mapping workshop at Out & Equal in Seattle on October 15th. If you happen to be there, come check that out. For my design friends in the DC area, I’ll be running a similar session the following week on Oct 22 at Steampunk as part of the Service Design Network’s DC Chapter.
You can also check out more details about Ecosystem Mapping and a handy worksheet to do this for yourself at the website.
I know the world feels unsettling and complicated these days. I hope this technique gives you a way to not understand it exactly, but to understand your place in it and how to focus your energy when it’s being pulled in one thousand different directions.
All the best,
Ray Knickmeyer, Founder & Principal
This week’s palate cleanser
A lovely little Common Yellowthroat, also from Acadia.