What can we learn from superorganisms?
Designing Bio-Driven Business Model (BBM)
By Mattia Vettorello and Boris Eisenbart
How to design sound and adaptable businesses that promote a resilient and sustainable vision?
A fascinating complexity
The natural environment is a complex system that can be defined as multiple layers of interlinked open sub-systems. These sub-systems operate at the intersection of human beings and natural actors (for this article, “natural actors” will refer to all animate beings other than humans). Such systems and their relationships are extremely hard to comprehend as they are in constant change to better fit (i.e. advancement of the fittest) the ever-evolving states of the natural environment. Oftentimes, the complexity is impenetrable by human minds due to its chaotic nature.
Chaos theory states:
“The slight flutter of the wings of a butterfly can be felt on the other side of the world”.
This refers to the butterfly effect; a small change in a locally constrained system can result in a large and nonlinear change at a global scale if the conditions are right. In addition, neither the initial change nor the associated effects leading to its escalation are visible until the repercussions are evident. Although the interrelationships are not clear and the consequences of actions are not foreseeable, we often argue that the system is not entirely chaotic either; it is indeed very logical how when more energy enters the system, the system becomes more energetic. While natural systems constantly change and adapt, favouring some while being unfavourable to others, we as human beings may perceive changes to our environment as it becoming more hostile towards us. This is mainly because we are adjusted to a different original state of the environment and are not used to having to change ourselves anymore, in a way that our ancestors might still have had to. COVID-19 or Climate Change and its repercussions on a global scale are very good examples of changes to our environment — COVID much faster and radical, Climate Change more gradual, but likely even more severe in the long-run.
A Well-being economy
Given these challenges at large scale and increasing evidence of economic and humanitarian hardship in the world, there are deeper implications on our lives, and an underlying need to change towards a more fluent and adaptive structure to our way of living and our infrastructure systems. As Johnson outlined in his book Leaders make the future, ‘the next era will be driven by biology and what we are starting to refer to as the global well-being economy, which includes sick-care, wellness, and all the various aspects of well-being such as financial, social, physical, vocational, and spiritual’.
This concept of global well-being can be further extended to include also natural actors. For this, organisations are spurred to questioning and reorient the way innovation has been deployed. The original state of the natural environment indeed has been profoundly distorted by human decisions. More sustainable ways of ‘doing’ — the How we do things — is indeed needed to drive the change towards a resilient network of natural and human actors. Current scenarios are highlighting the vulnerability of the entanglement of complex systems substantiating the realisation that current practices are adversely influencing the relationship with the natural actors.
‘Planned’ economies are often languid as is they seek for certainty and do not account for unplanned shifts, and subdue diversity, radical innovation, forward-thinking and the adaptive capacity required for enduring in an unpredictable environment. For many years now, design thinking has been integrated in diverse industries to respond to an urgency to broaden strategies in order to find solutions to complex and open-ended problems also known as wicked problems. In wicked problems, neither the suitable solution nor the initial problems are sufficiently well understood at the beginning. In short, what could be considered an adequate solution keeps evolving as we learn more about the actual problem. Therefore, a more holistic mindset and anticipatory approach are needed to design sustainable business models that deal with complexity, not finite problems that are in constant flux, and it is futile to think to design a one-size-fits-all solution.
Organisations have been exploring sustainable practices, but most often this is conducted as a patchwork of disjointed activities to gather an environmental overlay for the brand.
As a result, we are driving towards a slow implosion of society, much like the boiling frog story. In short, a frog exposed to high-temperature water quickly will seek to escape immediately but if the temperature of the water increased constantly but slowly enough, the frog would adapt to each gradual increment without realising that this will eventually boil it alive. For this, inspiration for a more sustainable business model can come from observing superorganisms’ underlying natural processes and structures, and the fundamental effectual interrelation that is created among natural actors. Thus, an exploration of natural systems and their sufficient approaches, their complexity and their dynamics can provide viable insights.
Exploring superorganisms: A brief intro
Superorganisms like ants, bees and mycelium are a peculiar analogy to society as they evolved in a way that enhance self-sustainment and efficiency, and productivity and collaboration. For example, natural actors operate locally and collaborate with other natural actors to define mutually beneficial partnerships. They are also optimised for efficiency and effectiveness, which can be referred to the concept of zero-sum game. But if an unforeseen change happens and more resources are needed, they will have to re-oriented to a new balance, otherwise the species will deteriorate. In addition, by-products are engineered to be reused or repurposed from the same natural actor or another one. What it is an output in one system is the input for another system.
This overall complex structure and behaviour cascade to eventually shape the global system nurturing an effective balance. In a bee colony, the queen defines an overall ‘what’ and a ‘why’ in regard to what is needed for the colony’s prosperity. Then bees autonomously decide the ‘how’ to reach that (i.e. finding the flowers with most pollen). They are intrapreneurs and by having a hive of intrapreneurs finding novel ways to contribute to the overall goal, the entire colony prospers. In business, this would liken to a leader/executive outlining a strong vision, while all actors in the organisation can find creative, novel and complementary ways to achieve the common goal. Effective solutions will survive less effective ones and over time, the most fitting solutions prevail. With this, we want to highlight the importance of having a clear systemic, value-driven and actionable vision (e.g. improving sustainable healthcare system or give light to everyone) to drive and inform that said outcome can be brought about and operated in a way that is sustainable. Those Bio-Driven principles can eventually be translated into designing businesses for the 21st century.
The foundation for a Bio-Driven Business Model (BBM)
These three superorganisms show the importance of compelling and valuable integration in the natural systems and the multi-folds of involved natural stakeholders. In fact, what we call Bio-Driven Business Model (BBM) would seek to replicate the interconnections observed in natural organisms. Bio-Driven principles as effectiveness, self-sustainment and if changes happen all systems adjust themselves around it are key to lasting and successful species’ prosperity. With a change, the equilibrium of all interacting systems then shifts to favour some of those organisms from the former state, but thus the systems adjust and work effective in this space again — it might not be exactly the same systems as before. Organisations should start develop innovation cluster and collaborate more closely and across stakeholders/industries. Like bees and flowers for example.
In developing BBM, leaders should also exploit the link between local actions and system-outcome, and incorporating circular cycles of mutual partnership, where by-products are repurposed or serve as input for another system in another form, for instance.
This could spark further initiative of by-product-driven design that enhance the cluster self-sustainment. Hence, leaders should leverage on system thinking to initiate global change to emerge. Society is indeed an open system continuously evolving and therefore business strategies should account for and explicitly incorporate adaptability and collaboration. Everything should to be seen as an ecosystem where each element — this could be a decision to invest on a specific idea — is connected to a variety of other elements at different layers.
Actually, complexity and its intrinsic layers should be observed and understood by an organic action of zooming in and out (viewing things across a nano to macro scale). From nano to macro, and backward to explore in details the interconnections and elements that should be avoided. Referring to the ‘butterfly effects, for instance, at nano level (i.e. household), micro level (i.e. community, city), at meso level (i.e. nation or even continent wide) and at macro level (i.e. worldwide). The purpose of this is to shed light to the interdependency of elements and how one design decision can lead to a better-designed outcome.
For generations to come
In conclusion, complex systems have non-linear interactions, dynamic relationship, boundary blurriness and emergence of changing situation due exogenous factors. Situations are not reducible to their elements and their nature is not even inferable from the behaviour of the single components. Indeed, the intricateness is a characteristic of complexity where the overall emergent consequences and inherent behaviour are unpredictable. The mechanism of “zooming” should not be misunderstood with the mindset of breaking the whole in smaller parts. Complex systems operate differently than the sum of their parts.
Organisations need to proactively address the impact on our biological system. Leaders then should design BBM taking into consideration the complex system and think about causal relationship as an important aspect of decision making.
By driving toward a more sustainable innovation model, it is required then to build teams in an even stronger multidisciplinary manner. Different knowledge is needed to understand the outer layers and the impact on them. This can be supported by adding for example, futurists, policy-makers, economists, system thinkers, data scientists or biologists to the team that works closely with the organisation’s senior leadership to support strategic decision and the design of BBM.
In fact, leaders will not only make decisions on the organisation’s future direction; they will be leading and influencing at the macro scale. For this, as the complexity growth, humanity could highly benefit from an analysis that goes beyond the organisation’s eco-system. The organisation can start scrutinising possible connections with other parts of the wider system as well as envisioning potential consequences.
There is a level of contingency that outlines the exigency of a new adaptive ecological approach to deal with emergence, complexity and fuzziness when uncertainties prevail.
As we have seen from nature, nano- and micro-systems are nested within macro-systems, and the action and behaviours taken in a smaller system is highly likely going to shape the adjacent ones, and so on. Organisations should see complexity as a positive aspect to explore. Exploration should be conducted with both a system thinking — that highlights the interrelationship of decisions — and with an ecological framework — which sheds light on possible direct and indirect consequences affecting the broader ecosystem.
Leaders that try to work in clusters and anticipate the futures can make more consciously decisions in the present. Chances are to drive toward a more sustainable future and one that offer prosperity for generations to come.
