Organizations as Living Organisms

I bet most of you have experienced pain in your toe; that small part of your body that suddenly reminds you just how important it actually is. And if you’ve ever cracked it, you know the feeling; for a while, your entire world becomes your toe, suddenly more important than the vital organs in your body. What about our organizations?

Organizations are not so different. A single department can fail and cause others to collapse. One dissatisfied customer can demotivate a hundred loyal ones.

Some employees feel valued and irreplaceable, while others feel invisible, not because they lack value, but because no one seems to notice it. What if these patterns aren’t random? What if our organizations, much like human bodies, are living systems; complex, sensitive, and deeply interconnected?

With industrialization, people began supporting their families through structured, modern workplaces. Companies became the core of this new social and economic structure, surrounding our lives and playing a role as essential as our own bodies. To understand how these living systems evolved, let’s look back for a moment.

The metaphor of the organization as an organism is not new. As Gareth Morgan explored in his classic 1986 work Images of Organization, we can view organizations through different metaphors: as ecosystems, living networks, platforms, machines, brains, cultures, political systems, or even psychic prisons. Among these, I believe the organism metaphor is the most meaningful, as we all live as organisms within complex environments.

Modern systems models, such as the Open Socio-Technical Economic (OSTO) System Model, integrate cybernetics and feedback theory to conceptualize organizations as dynamic, living systems that constantly renew themselves through information flow and adaptive responses.

Today, many organizations are seen as living ecosystems; adaptive, data-driven, and interconnected. A healthy organization, therefore, is one that can sense, respond, and renew itself continuously. Others, unfortunately, create toxic environments that people wish to escape.

A complex adaptive system recognizes that we can design structured environments that are well connected to the people within them, yet not dependent on any single individual.

Connecting departments that don’t directly work with one another is like flexing your ankle to relieve pain in your neck, a principle well known in physiotherapy. In other words, healing one part often starts by listening to another.

This connection must come from the brain of the organization, from its leadership, which creates the connections that allow every unit to act in harmony without depending entirely on one another.

We’ve recently seen this metaphor come alive at @SunExpress through JetStream, a learning & development program that acts as the connective tissue of our organizational body.

Through JetStream, 14 employees from diverse departments were rigorously selected for a shared learning journey. The program’s content is related to the continuous success of the airline, but even more importantly, it demonstrates how empowering selected employees and connecting departments can drive collective achievement. The relationships built between operational and transactional departments have improved collaboration, making daily business smoother and more human.

Just like a human body, an organization’s vitality depends on the quality of its internal connections. Whether it’s a neural signal or an email, what matters is how alive the communication feels.

After all, the true strength of any living system, whether a body or a modern airline, lies not in its size or structure, but in the life that flows through its connections. That’s what keeps us truly alive.