Hack:
Management Innovation According to Nature’s Genius

In 1990, Janine Benyus was a trained biologist working with the US Forest Service in Montana and freelancing as a science writer.  With a love and respect for nature, she followed her calling to make complicated ideas accessible. Through her journalism work, she helped make new discoveries in science accessible to the layman.

Janine’s primary research focus in the early 1990’s was the evolution of organisms and ecosystems.  She began exploring the inherent genius in nature and how organisms and systems have evolved and adapted for optimized, integrated performance.  From the beautiful and functional design of seashells to the elegant strength of spider silk, Janine reveled in nature’s highly evolved, highly perfected constructs:

“After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned what works, what is appropriate, and what lasts here on earth.”

During the course of this research, Janine had an epiphany. She saw the potential for our human systems and products to better follow the genius in nature. She began exploring how products, processes, and whole organizations could better mimic working mechanisms in the natural world.  She chronicled her explorations in a book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, and further evangelized this revolutionary thinking on a speaker circuit. Initially, her audience was comprised of fellow scientists. Over time, she started to see representatives from the US Military, industrial designers, and researchers who were all in search of a different and better way to solve new and increasingly complex problems. For example, what could we learn from how birds flock and fish school in order to create “swarm intelligence” in our increasingly interrelated information systems.

Although it is still early in its own evolution, Biomimicry offers managers in a broad array of business opportunities to catalyze creativity and innovation on the scales needed to support true and resilient evolution in management. We aim to unlock the science and long term lessons from natural history to the development of an ecologically integrated industrial system.

Biomimicry is the conscious emulation of the genius found in 3.8 billion years of evolution. As a management solution, the core component is a framework called Life’s Principles.  Simply stated, Life’s Principles are the fundamental patterns that have enabled life on earth to survive and thrive. Each of the principles is richly and extensively supported by tremendous research from the various branches of the biological sciences.  Translating these fundamental biological principles into industry-specific design principles, corporate culture and values, and management approaches is the art and power of biomimicry.

Here is an overview of the seven Life’s Principles that provide the basis of our innovative approach:

EARTH’S OPERATING CONDITIONS.

These elements are the foundation upon which all forms of life draw energy, sustain themselves, interrelate, and expire:

• Sunlight, water, and gravity
• Dynamic non-equilibrium
• Limits and boundaries
• Cyclic processes

EVOLVE TO SURVIVE.

The parameters that enable species and ecosystems to continue, adapt and survive include

• replicate strategies that work
• integrate the unexpected
• reshuffle information

BE RESOURCE (MATERIAL AND ENERGY) EFFICIENT.

The attributes that better enable natural based systems to live and operate efficiently include:

• use of multi-functional design

• use of low-energy processes

• recycling of all materials

• fit form to function

ADAPT TO CHANGING CONDITIONS.

The factors that enable organisms and ecosystems to adapt to environmental changes include:

• maintain integrity through self-renewal

• embody resilience through variation, redundancy, and decentralization

• incorporate diversity

INTEGRATE DEVELOPMENT WITH GROWTH.

The factors that enable organisms and systems to self integrate, develop and grow over time include:

• combine modular and nested components

• build from the bottom-up

• self-organize

BE LOCALLY ATTUNED AND RESPONSIVE.

The individual and system behaviors that enable local adoption and responsiveness include:

• use readily available materials and energy

• cultivate cooperative relationships

• leverage cyclic processes

• use feedback loops

USE LIFE-FRIENDLY CHEMISTRY.

Lastly, the attributes that provide a long term, healthy, sustainable underpinning include:

• build selectively with a small subset of elements

• break down products into benign constituents

• do chemistry in water

To truly integrate the genius of nature into products, industry and human ecosystems require extensive education, training, and systemic thinking. Traditional management is ignorant of the fundamentals of successful systems-scale organization and operation according to the laws of biology. Management as usual operating with short-term thinking outside the margins of “what works and what endures” is increasingly perilous on multiple fronts.

In our early work, we focused on bridging these Life Principle’s into specific design challenges. We worked with companies like Nike on ideas for designing better shoes. We worked with Kohler to rethink plumbing fixtures. We worked with architecture and engineering companies on giant architectural projects in India, China and Brazil.

Ultimately, we found that our focus on product design alone was too limiting. We needed to address challenges more systemically. What did it really matter if one pair of shoes or a new fixture abided by Life’s Principles if the entire company did not follow suit.

Our approach evolved to comprehend innovation as systems and culture challenge. We encourage people to think about companies as an organism that operates in a much broader ecology. We look at the culture of the company and how well it aligns – or not – with Life’s Principles. Our approach is rooted in teaching, cultivating new centers of leadership, and expanding the knowledge and adoption throughout every corner of the organization.

Although our efforts to introduce our thinking and approach through industry is still in its early stages, we have worked extensively with a handful of pioneering companies and have the validation of early success to build on. 

For example, we are working with the Brazilian cosmetics giant, Natura Cosmeticos. See Natura's entry Innovation in Well-Being—the Creation of Sustainable Value at Natura.  Their cutting-edge innovation culture coupled with increasingly deeper insights into Life's Principles has the opportunity to catalyze new products, processes, and management platforms inspired by the genius of the natural world. In terms of management, our focus to date has been on introducing a systems ecology perspective: helping the company envision why and how it should evolve into a functionally integrated subsystem in a larger ecology of the Amazon Valley. We are beginning to work with them to identify the innovation opportunities that will lead their operations and supply chain toward becoming integrated, nourishing participants in the food web that supports the Amazon Valley.

We are also working with HOK, one of the world's largest architecture firms.  Together we developed an approach to large-scale to architecture and planning called Fully Integrated Thinking (FIT).  Also a systems-based approach, FIT is both a design framework and a potential urban management platform that integrates Life's Principles.  HOK describes it as follows:

"FIT stands for Fully Integrated Thinking. At its essence, FIT is an approach, or attitude, that accepts the idea that the solutions to our design challenges are already around us.  If we think in a fully integrated way, we look deeply and critically into the systems of the place to inform and guide our decision-making.  In this way, FIT is what happens at the intersection of design thinking and a deep understanding of the place (the data)."

In partnership with HOK, we have applied FIT and Life's Principles to design projects in India, Brazil, China, Brunei, and the US.   At a May 2012 lecture for the US Green Building Council, Thomas Knittel, VP and resident Biomimicry expert at HOK, recently described applying Life's Principles to architecture and planning challenges as "a source of inexahustible inspiration." 

 Although still in its infancy as a design and management discipline, Biomimicry is making solid progress towards capturing the minds of key influencers around the world.  Another milestone on this progression is Janine Benyus' receipt of the 2012 Design Mind Award from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.  The Design Mind award recognizes "a visionary, such as an educator, author, critic, curator, or designer, who has had a profound impact on design theory, practice, or public awareness."  Translating this newfound broad awareness into widely adopted management innovation practices represents an exciting new field of work for decades to come.