Shark Week
For many folks, “nature” is something outside, optional, a nice-to-have best reserved for Hawaiian vacations and Shark Week. Others were traumatized by high school biology — forced to dissect frogs or cats and regurgitate alien diagrams labelled with indecipherable fragments of ancient dead language in high-pressure test situations. Biology was making live things dead and taking them apart like messy machines. Not for the spiritual or squeamish, certainly, or probably anyone who loves living things, which presumably includes anyone you’d care to know.
But that’s okay. Struggling through Biology was never a problem for your career. Knowing how life actually works hasn’t been a standard prerequisite for some time now. Organizations are designed like machines, with off-the-rack reporting structures and best practices designed to suppress autonomous experimentation. That’s how we scale up, by ensuring standards of excellence and replicability.
It makes perfect business sense — until you realize that in the living world, the biological world — the only world — organisms and ant colonies are 25% more efficient than you’d predict from their cellular metabolism, while the average company is losing that same amount. That’s not including the management costs, which ants distribute among themselves.
It’s not as efficient as it’s cracked up to be. Mechanistic designs don’t adapt well when conditions change, either, which living systems do with greater frequency, magnitude, and volatility the more they are controlled. Meanwhile, information exchanges are stunted because we lack trust, and our lack of agency to work on things we care about with people we like frustrates and disengages. 70% of people were less than thrilled about their jobs before the pandemic. Do this, for a paycheck. Run workers ragged until they drop or move on, replace. Nothing personal, strictly business. Categorization, competition, standardization. But now, everything is up-ended. The old “best practices” have put many out of business entirely.
We have built our way of life on a fundamental delusion. Life is not a machine we can manage efficiently with an algorithm and some big data, or the push of a button.
I know people can be squeamish or afraid, skeptical of biological determinism, or angered by Social Darwinist justifications for social inequity. They may even wonder if their God is offended. This is not my intention — please know that countless gods have dined at nature’s table before without issue. As a matter of fact, this is where they all came from.
In reality, all our endeavors are biological ones. Nothing makes sense except in light of evolution. Every university department should be in the Life Science Building, and your MBA as well. Nature is us, inside and out, and our systemic Illiteracy and structural blindness towards this reality is killing our future and draining our potential.
Innovation generally means new products and services. But real change, as Donella Meadows noted, is more fundamental. The most profound shifts result from a change in how we see and understand the world.
Life is not a machine, and standardizing living things in the name of efficient production hamstrings future diversity, options, and potential. It’s a great way to go extinct. Even cities that willingly pledged ambitious carbon goals are still struggling to make them reality, because the structures and processes they labor within are not designed to adapt to change. They are designed to prevent it. Efficiency design is failing spectacularly, and it is abundantly clear the realities of complexity require an evolutionary perspective.
I’m an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, and my work builds on what I’ve learned about evolution and human nature. Living things are responsive, agile, resilient, innovative. They adapt, develop, learn and heal. They regenerate, they evolve. They are everything we’d like our global organizations to be — and, it feels natural to work this way, because we are whole beings, alive, not parts in a machine or insects pinned to a board.
People have successfully worked together to grow value and prevent parasitism for millions of years. The simple truth is we are designed to adapt. Our organizational structures simply constrain us from it. I believe this is the key choke point on adaptability and thriving, and we are ready — if not starved — for more integrity, vitality, and humanity in everything we do.
How can we re-design our organizational structures, systems, and processes so people can operate as the adaptive living beings we actually are, with all the potential we possess? How can we design organizations that adapt and stay resilient in the face of change — with innovation in their DNA? How do we work together to grow lasting, transformative value and protect it from the inevitable parasites that stalk it at every level?
And how do we even begin when our very way of life is premised on a fundamental delusion? The first step, I believe, is to open our eyes.
