The ecology of a merger

"At first, it sounds like a design problem. Or maybe a customer service one. Add new markets, new systems, new customers, and suddenly the challenge is keeping what was working while trying to understand what the future needs to become. But underneath, it's a question about honesty. What if the kind of growth that stretches empathy and deepens awareness (the kind we expect from people) could guide how organizations grow too?"

"Photo by Gregory Bateson - Manuscript Division/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The pattern that connects Gregory Bateson didn't fit cleanly into any discipline. Trained as an anthropologist, he moved through biology, psychiatry, cybernetics and communication theory as if they were chapters in a single unfinished book. He studied tribes in New Guinea, mapped communication patterns in families with schizophrenia, and helped define the early vocabulary of systems theory."

A central business challenge is expanding without degrading the experience trusted customers already have. Growth often pressures companies toward uniformity and efficiency, which can dilute empathy and erase specific practices that earned trust. Honest organizational growth would stretch empathy and deepen awareness, resembling human development rather than standardization. Gregory Bateson studied how living systems persist amid change and collision, calling the phenomenon the ecology of mind. Bateson concluded that systems survive by staying in conversation with themselves. His interdisciplinary work spanned anthropology, biology, psychiatry, cybernetics, and communication theory, studying tribes, family communication, and foundational systems vocabulary.

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