Decentralization, redundancy, and symbiosis have worked well enough for a few billion years--so they might work in 2013, too.
"All of Earth's successful organisms have thrived without analyzing past crises or trying to predict the next one," writes Rafe Sagarin in HBR, free of "planning exercises," "predictive frameworks," or other buzzy human constructions. "Instead," he says, "they've adapted."
This is because if a species doesn't adapt to the changes in its environment, it's quite dead--not unlike your company (or career). And nature knows this without executive coaching. Meaning that we might have a few things to learn.
Decentralize like a mollusk
Consider the octopus: Fleet of tentacle and prismatic of color, the cephalopod is a paragon of flat, startup-style organizational structure:
An octopus ... doesn't order each arm to change a certain color when it needs to hide quickly. Rather, individual skin cells across its body sense and respond to change and give the octopus a collective camouflage.
If we take managers to be the brains of the octopus--a frightening proposition--employees, especially those with a customer touch point, are the spectacular, tentacular, color-shifting cells--a credo of the connected company. When you move with your feelers (or suckers, as is the case with eight-arms over there), you can move much quicker than your centralized competitors: Wikipedia over Brittanica, Google Flu Trends over the CDC.
Department of redundancy department
Apologies if you've heard it before, but redundancies can be key to survival, in the wild and in manufacturing. Sagarin relates a story:
A CEO I know who uses biological principles to run a manufacturing firm that has never been unprofitable or laid off an employee in 30 years keeps a massive warehouse full of multiple copies of every part he's ever made. This cache of inventory and wasted real estate violates all the norms of just-in-time manufacturing, but when a 20-year-old helicopter is grounded and needs to fly now, he is the only one who has the part.
That evidences the incentive to keep a storehouse of parts, processes, and other resources, though it may not seem characteristically lean. You can see it in the way that Github, the indispensable social coding platform, keeps a wiki-scale amount of code laying around for would-be developers to integrate into their own projects--and why Andreessen Horowitz sent $100 million their way last summer. Sometimes more is more.
Is this your symbiosis?
Keep your clownfish close, your anemones closer
Just as the clownfish and the anemone mutually benefit one another, symbiotic partnerships can create value for the oddest of couples: Consider Ben & Jerry's and Unilever. The socially conscious Vermont creamery needed to grow after years of flat sales, and Unilever needed to bring boutique brands into its many-tentacled portfolio.
"The larger organization adapted more than the smaller one to make the symbiosis work," Sagarin writes, by allowing casual dress for Ben & Jerry's execs, keeping their charitable giving going, and growing more eco-friendly. And thus, he says, the behemoth brought "aspects of Ben & Jerry's DNA" into its corporate life.
To Become More Adaptable, Take a Lesson from Biology
Drake Baer covers leadership for Fast Company. You can follow him on Twitter.
Source : fastcompany[dot]com
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