The ecology of a merger

Gregory Bateson and the art of staying in conversation with yourself.

This week, someone asked me a question that deserves more than a quick answer:

How can a company get bigger without making the experience worse for the people who already trust it?

I’m Nate Sowder, and this is unquoted, installment 10. Today, we’re talking mergers and acquisitions.

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.

Which brings us to Gregory Bateson, the British anthropologist who spent his life asking how living systems hold together when they grow, collide or change. He called it the ecology of mind. His insight was simple… aaand difficult:

Systems survive by staying in conversation with themselves.

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.

What he was really searching for was what he called the ‘pattern that connects’. Every living system, he argued, survives by registering difference — the small shifts that signal when something in the environment has changed. To Bateson, information was a relationship that needed to be maintained. It wasn’t something you could create and store away.

He saw life as a constant negotiation between something you are aware of and something you let drift. The moment a system stops sensing its surroundings, it begins to lose the capacity to learn. And what we often call stability is just the early phase of decline. In other words, if you aren’t working toward something, you’re automatically moving away from it.

That was the core of his thinking. He replaced the language of control with the language of relationship. A forest, an organization, even a mind. Each stays ‘alive’ by keeping the conversation open between its parts.

When the conversation breaks

Bateson’s ideas make mergers look less like transactions and more like ecological events. Two systems collide, each with its own rhythms, feedback loops and internal grammar. At first, both listen politely. Then they start talking over each other.

Signals that once made sense begin to distort. Teams over-interpret silence. Customers catch tonal shifts before any official announcement. That doesn’t mean the system is collapsing. What it means is that it’s losing its sense of self.

Bateson would’ve seen that as a feedback failure, not a leadership flaw. When new information enters a system and the interpretive loops are weak, the signal mutates (it doesn’t go away). Meaning goes looking for somewhere else to live.

That’s the unseen cost of getting bigger. Growth multiplies ways to do things faster than it multiplies ways to understand things. And the louder a system gets, the easier it is to confuse agreement with coherence.

You’re probably thinking what I’m thinking: Every organization faces this… not just in mergers, but technology adoption, strategy, and research.

We build tools to listen faster, but not always to listen better. Bateson would call that ecological deafness: a feedback loop optimized for speed instead of reflection.

Learning from differences

Bateson believed that systems stay healthy by adjusting to the relationships between things. Every change, no matter how small, reshapes the conditions for what comes next. As a system receives information, the key isn’t how much it hears, but whether the hearing leads to reflection.

AI makes that harder. It expands what an organization can sense, but not what it understands. Algorithms pull in more signal, faster… but they don’t know what matters. And often, neither do we.

We’ve trained ourselves to think that hearing more means knowing more. But without a loop that turns signal into learning, it’s just a whole lot of noise.

Bateson’s answer would be:
– Humility.
– Keep the conversation open.
– Build systems that reflect before they respond.

Staying in conversation with yourself

It’s not that organizations fail because they stop collecting feedback. It’s more that they learn how to ignore it.

Even with dashboards, surveys, sentiment trackers… it’s easy to bend the story in whatever direction feels most comfortable.

A forest doesn’t get to do that. It doesn’t negotiate with fire, or spin a drought into a branding opportunity. It just responds.

Bateson’s point was that healthy systems don’t control the narrative.
They stay in conversation with it.

If you want to grow without losing what made you trustworthy, build that kind of system.

Then let it tell you the truth. Even when you’d rather not hear it.

The work is ahead.
And Bateson shows us the way.

The ecology of a merger was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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