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?"

"The trouble is, and it's what I was really being asked, companies don't usually grow that way. The bigger they get, the more they drift toward dilution. Uniformity starts to look like fairness. A drive for efficiency starts to feel like understanding. And every merger, no matter how strategic, risks erasing the small, specific things that made people trust you in the first place."

Growth often appears as a design or customer-service problem: adding markets, systems, and customers while keeping what was working and anticipating future needs. Beneath operational concerns lies a test of honesty: whether expansion will stretch empathy and deepen awareness or produce dilution. As companies scale, uniformity can masquerade as fairness and efficiency as understanding, risking loss of the small, specific elements that earned trust. Gregory Bateson studied how living systems hold together amid change and coined 'ecology of mind.' He concluded that systems endure by staying in conversation with themselves, implying organizational growth should preserve internal dialogue and relational awareness.

Read at Medium