TEEMing: Animal Style
Recently I decided to submit an abstract for a conference I like, and that I thought might like me.
As I scanned the list of categories, however, I couldn’t find anywhere I’d fit. No, my ideas were not about transportation or energy, or fashion. They were about everything. But you could only choose three. I gave up.
How to check the box on the obvious — that the systems we live in are coming apart? That these problems were hopelessly tangled, and our disconnect is paralyzing? Even those with the will and resources to tackle them are rebuffed. Cities that pledge ambitious carbon goals find themselves frustrated and tried and true “best practices” have put many well-meaning organizations out of business. It is clear that our good intentions and clever technologies cannot create the transformation we require. The weight of necessity and roar of demand are not enough — for one simple reason:
The structures and processes we labor within are not designed to adapt to change. They are designed to prevent it.
The idea that complex living systems can and should be managed for efficient production follows fairly naturally from a scientific perspective. Most of my own work in the lab involved teasing apart living systems, observing and measuring the dynamics and variables of each part — with good controls, of course — pinpointing the most effective procedures for my experiments, correlating and categorizing. As students, we competed to produce the right
answer for a grade, so competing as a worker for a paycheck was an easy transition. That training served me well when I worked in biotech — it wasn’t too much of a jump to enshrine standards of replicability into best practices that suppressed deviation. Tune each part up nice and tight, then press play — with sticks and carrots dangled by leaders chasing their own sticks and carrots. This is how you scale. All things being equal, efficient production makes more. The global economic behemoth was built on this premise, and people get rich on it every day.
Our organizations are designed for such efficient production. It’s a powerful way to engineer precision machines and manufacture and deliver them at scale. We’re very good at it — our sigma six lean machines even go into space!
But rigid pillars and monocrop harvests have a way of failing spectacularly, as King Ozymandias’ sphinx bears witness. In real life, the specimens aren’t tidily pinned to boards or secured beneath glass. There are no controls, and certainly, life isn’t sterile. All things are never being equal, because life is not a lab. It’s a complex and dirty world out there, and the creatures are literally inside us. A golden stockpile of grain is a nice buffer, but there is no glass to protect us from the savage whims of nature. Ultimately, efficiency design leads to extinction.
And so, we have built our entire way of life on a dangerous illusion.
We are biological beings. Everything we do is part of living systems, even our businesses. Nothing makes sense except in light of evolution. Yet, how many of those designing our world are familiar with the process of evolution and the nature of living systems? How many CEOs and policy-makers are biologists? A Google search for STEM logos gives no indication that Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math are concerned with living things. You can STEAM ahead and add Art — but there is still no hint of evolution behind it all. We are fundamentally stone blind and illiterate in this regard, and it is terrifying.
This failure to understand our place within living systems impacts everything we do — the way we organize and work together, the way we design and live. It has deadly side effects. COVID, climate change, social injustice and inequity, you name it. All these problems are complex “externalities” — next to impossible to account for, but requiring expensive and ineffective Band-aids with side-effects of their own — wicked compounding ones that threaten the very scaled-up solutions we were after, to begin with. It may not be anyone’s fault in particular, but with increasing magnitude and frequency, our solutions create bigger problems than the ones we were attempting to solve.
Now COVID has up-ended everything. Workers have hit their limits being parted out, and organizations are desperate for things requiring integration and wholeness: agility, innovation, resilience, and “regeneration” depend on it. Meanwhile, most of the dazzling alternate possibilities we had have been eliminated, marginalized, or silenced. There just aren’t many experiments available to play with anymore. It’s nothing personal, just strictly business.
Mechanistic design is failing spectacularly.
We are at a crossroads. The realities of complex living systems demand a new approach. It is high time for system redesign.
But how should our systems function? It’s surprisingly hard to see the forest for all the beliefs, biases, wishful thinking, self-deceit, and plain old lies we bring to the table. Our judgment is clouded by too much time behind glass.
My own approach has been to back way up — to try to see living systems and processes as objectively as I can, to look at what it is they seem to “want” to be. I’m an evolutionary biologist, bioanthropologist, and consultant, and the author of TEEMING, widely regarded as the primary work on biomimicry in business. Certainly, it’s the most wide-ranging! I’ve never found studying individual neurons or genes very compelling. I am no reductionist. My focus has been on the process by which all these miracles came about: how does this writhing dance of complexity emerge and change? And not in the lab or
under glass, not in the dry summaries I read about in books — but in the field, as a human being, with dirt beneath my feet.
I lived in a tent in a remote part of the Rift Valley in Ethiopia, not too far from where Lucy’s ancient fossil remains were discovered. I was a primatologist, studying two very different kinds of baboons, each with their own social system, behaviors, and appearance. My interest was in the process of speciation itself: how did these populations diverge, and why did they remain
distinct, despite sometimes mating when they met? And why was the desert baboon so distinctive from other baboons, with such tight-knit and cohesive societies? What was it that allowed them to evolve so quickly and collaboratively?
These questions were not just idle interest. The ancestors of these baboons lived alongside our own, and their tracks tell us much about our history. But there was more: we diverged from our nearest living relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, some 5 million years ago. That’s the blink of an eye in evolutionary time, and genetically we are only 2% different. A wildlife
geneticist looking only at our DNA might think we were the same species. But when you see folks standing in line for their Starbucks, sitting shoulder to shoulder in small enclosed airplanes, coming from baggage claim with fingers and ears intact, you know we’re not just well-dressed chimps. The same processes that let desert baboons evolve so rapidly have also
worked on us.
As far as we can tell, all extant life descended from a single replicating spark. We are all related, each of us a deep-time survivor with 3.8 billion unbroken years of successful ancestors. Every organism inherits a proven way of life, designed for and by this chaotic world. All are proven successes — even our house pets and their fleas. What works? Nature offers incomparable open
source R&D if you look.
If you can accept this basic premise — that all life traces its ancestry to a single shared beginning, and that all living things diversified from that, you can start to ask “how did they adapt? How does persistence, thriving, and abundance actually work in the living world?”
Careful observation of “business as usual” on Planet Earth leads to — as Verne Harnish, founder of the well-known global Entrepreneurs Organization, beautifully puts it — “a unified theory of business.”
Many folks believe evolution works through survival of the fittest — nature red in tooth and claw, it’s a dog eat dog world. This justification for the ruthless economic competition is an insult to Mr. Darwin, who did not espouse such views. In fact, Darwin understood that organisms avoid competition. It is energetically expensive, and there is little to be gained in injury or death.
Animals aren’t rushing into battle as a general rule — it’s mainly bluff and display, like on the streets of New York. Individuals show off their genetic wares, and less flashy ones move away to do things in a slightly different place, a slightly different way. As they do, their populations diversify into new niches and become more unique. The protoplasm of life expands and diverges as new opportunities emerge.
Take the water fleas as an example. In San Diego, tiny isolated pools briefly appear on the claypan mesas after winter rains. These ephemeral oases explode with fevered activity but quickly dry up. Inhabitants need to move fast. In dry times, the water fleas’ eggs lie in the dust — sometimes for many long, hot years. When the rains come, they instantly hatch into females and begin to eat — as much and as fast as they can while cloning more little females like themselves. Why fix it if it ain’t broke? Why waste time looking for mates?
Cloning is incredibly efficient when conditions are constant. Whoever eats more makes more. But as the pools dry up and the water warms, the fleas switch to sex. Males appear as if by magic, and mating begins. Now, they scramble up a new combination of genes, producing eggs that will lie dormant until the next rains. Cross-fertilization increases the likelihood of hitting on something that will save them.
That's how evolution works: in a population of diverse individuals, some leave more offspring than others, and the population shifts in that direction. The more diversity in the population, the more experiments available to work on, the greater the potential for adapting to change. Natural selection can only work with what it has at hand. No diversity, no evolution. Adaptability requires learning to see and cultivate diverse possibilities, imagine what they could become, and continually move toward the next best options.
Efficiency competes to solve problems. Adaptation moves towards what’s available and working. Diversity is the limiting factor.
Now the leverage points on our complicated lives become a bit more defined. You see our systemic failures are essentially the result of a mechanistic worldview, driven by illiteracy in living processes, resulting in structural blindness that exacerbates the cycle in a runaway feedback loop. The result is increasing fragility and fragmentation. Workers are stretched to
breaking, and the agility, resilience, innovation, and regeneration organizations are in desperate need of depending on whole system integration.
After studying these dynamics for many decades, in the field and in the boardroom, spreading evolutionary thinking and design in human endeavors has become my life’s work. If we can change the paradigm we operate within — from mechanistic efficiency where everything and everyone is standardized (limiting diversity, options, and future potential), to living systems thinking and design — everything just might flow from there. I believe this is the highest leverage point on change. We are, after all, living things. We know the answers in our bones.
This is the first article in a series leading up to the publication of my upcoming book, The TEEMING Transformation. If you’d like to know how more about my “Evolution Revolution” and how you or your organization can participate, please join me on May 21 for a free 90-minute introduction to my TEEM Ecosystem. Discover how evolutionary thinking and design can help us
radically rethink our systems, processes, and structures, in order to rehumanize, revitalize, and regenerate communities, industries, organizations, and systems worldwide.
See you then!
Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker
