Invasives and the Practice of Institutional Restorative Ecology
When I bought my house in Massachusetts, the edge of my property was overgrown. It took my daughter and myself about 5 years to progressively beat back some plants to find what was there. Invasives like buckthorn, multiflora rose, and Japanese burning bush had totally taken over. Each year we uncovered something new—the lilac bushes one year and a beautiful oak sapling that was on the edge of the property another year. They came alive as they were uncovered and could reach for the sun. I finally realized, however, that it was not enough to just cut the invasives back. I had to start to renovate the edge space and plant native plants, like red twig dogwood, while I continued my effort to eradicate the invasives. The invasives are in the soil and will probably always be there, waiting to come forward when you turn your back.
I have begun to think of institutional management as similar to my efforts to reclaim the border of my property with invasives being those habits, practices, cultural elements, or people that keep an institution from thriving. And invasives are sneaky. They start to take over when your have your guard down, Before you know, they are everywhere. An example might be the simple giving of stipends for a bit of extra work. Before you know it, you have a problem of inequality in pay, job descriptions that don’t match positions responsibilities, and hidden costs in what have become normal activities. A colleague and I used to joke about the “stipend” culture.
Budgets are ripe with invasives. They include endowed chairs that are not fully endowed yet treated as if they are in terms of responsibilities of the chair-holder, pushing the true cost of the position on to other parts of the budget. They include the shell game of moving costs around rather than aligning them with a particular activity in order to use the information to make a judgement of the value of the activity.
Leaders either allow invasive personalities or practices to take over or they bound them. For example, it is so easy to play the game of: You pretend that you are following the guidelines and I will pretend I am holding you accountable. Once you stop really paying attention and holding back the invasive practices, there is no bounding it at all within the organization. I call this the “wink, wink, nod, nod” approach to accountability. Another way that invasives take hold is through the practice of pointing out an invasive problem, and allowing someone to point to another invasive species that is even worse, leading to everyone just throwing up their hands. Or the game of hot potato where the blame for the invasive problem is constantly shifted to a different place—who is responsible for the removal, anyway?
The real challenge of invasives is that they can really appear to be beautiful on the outside. They are interesting, exotic, and flowery. But underneath, if allowed to spread, they crowd out healthy, native species and the organization experiences the toxic nature of rumors and gossip that come from a lack of consistency and transparency. Soon what is said publicly does not align with internal or private messaging or metrics.
How do you take on the problem of invasives? Here are a few suggestions:
First, identify the invasive species and be ready for the long haul challenge of pushing them back. Remember that you cannot eradicate invasives. You must always be thinking about building sustainable practice that manages them like:
o Build clear policies that are known and followed
o Follow the governance structures rather than go around them
o Build clear accountability into all decisions built on clear metrics
Make sure you plant healthy species and encourage them to grow while putting boundaries around invasives. Be consistent in following policy while eliminating practices that are hidden from the whole. And be honest, transparent, and consistent every day.
Getting rid of invasives takes effort, creativity, and consistency. How do you get rid of them? Fire, poison, cutting them back, pulling them out, introducing insect predators, planting native competitors. What will not work is ignoring them and hoping they go away. You cannot leave any space open for their invasion. I like the terms that are now being used in conservation for the re-establishment of health in an ecosystem--restoration ecology or reconciliation ecology. The management of invasives in an organization involves the discipline of giving constant attention to the work of restoration and reconciliation which in terms builds institutional resilience and strength.
Knotweed
My daughter has training in ecology. Her training has made her extremely aware of the invasive plants that are in her surroundings. She is obsessed with helping her community overcome Japanese knotweed. It will take patience, learning, community understanding and effort, taking the long view, and persistence.