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Environment
Instead of Humanizing Business, Let’s Naturalize It
Workplaces, too, must move beyond the Anthropocene.
Posted October 23, 2020
In the world of technology, design, and innovation, the convention of “human-centered” is usually treated as the no-brainer common ground of what characterizes a good, conscious business. But human-centered business feels oddly out of place now.
What if the opposite of a mechanistic world view is not humanization but naturalization? What if not humanizing business ought to be the goal, rather making business more in tune with nature or even like nature?
If we apply a biological view to business, it marks a radical shift in how we conceive of business. Here are some of the new design principles:
Resilience Over Efficiency
Most organizations are built on the principle of efficiency and equate redundancy with waste. In fact, as Tim O’Reilly points out, efficiency is our societal algorithm, but one that is severely flawed. COVID-19 has made us realize that the myopic focus on efficiency and optimization has in fact weakened our systems.
As Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute observes, governments that lacked reserves of critical health-care equipment, or companies with distressed balance sheets, had much more difficulty responding to the pandemic. Drawing lessons from natural ecosystems, he considers redundancy one of six characteristics that increase the resilience of organizations, along with heterogeneity (a diversity of perspectives and approaches), modularity (creating “fire breaks” to prevent whole system collapse), adaptability (the ability to flex designs in changing circumstances using a process of variation, selection, and amplification), prudence (stress-testing for plausible tail risks), and embeddedness (coherence with higher-level systems like society and nature).
Fluidity Over Control
Before the pandemic, management was seen as a bulwark against chaos and unpredictability, a rational device suited for solving complicated problems. We are now increasingly aware that complex times require different approaches.
Speculative designer Anab Jain thinks “Modernism’s methodologies of mapping, designing, planning, for controlling and changing deeply complex systems may not be the answer to the challenges we face. Maybe we need to go underground — working in networked, symbiotic companionships, like mycelial arrangements, to generate infinite micro-revolutions.”
It is not just redundancy that is becoming critical in the (micro)biocene, it is fluidity: the possibility to shift shape in keeping with ever-changing circumstances. A mix of multiple identities, parallel realities, super-flexibility, and emotional agility makes organizations softer and therefore more resilient—like nature.
Ecosystems Over Ego Systems
Darwin had it wrong. Nature is not characterized by relentless competition, but a highly collaborative and highly complex ecosystem in which the fittest is the most collaborative, not the most aggressive and ruthless. This is a lesson still to be heeded by business. The pandemic has shown us that effective prevention and containment measures have only been possible through collective intelligence, solidarity, and empathy—in short, through radical collaboration.
If we view organizations as embedded in larger ecosystems, structuring businesses with an eye toward a symbiotic relationship with their environment, both natural and manmade, makes a great deal of sense.
In this line of thinking, Exit to Community (E2C), a collaborative working project led by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media Enterprise Design Lab and Zebras Unite, might mark one possible way of not just “giving back” to the community, but giving everything back to the community. Nathan Schneider, co-initiator of E2C, points to tech startup Buffer, which bought out its investors, or organic produce distributor Organically Grown Company in Oregon, which transitioned from an employee- and grocer-owned operation into a community-owned one.
"Exit to Community" could even become an “exit to eco,” with businesses releasing their assets to the ecosystem to nature. This means that nature is not a stakeholder, in the form of abstract triple-bottom-line reporting, but a shareholder.
Animism Over Mechanism
In New Zealand, the government has granted the Whanganui River, as well as a nearby forest and a mountain, legal personhood. Likewise, in Ohio, Lake Erie was given legal standing by voters, and attempts are underway to do the same for the river Ganges in India. Even though National Geographic wonders whether such legislative action will have any real consequences (“will nature be able to sue humans for the damage they inflict?”), these initiatives have symbolic power and a shift in our collective consciousness.
In Japan’s animist Shinto culture, it is assumed that both living and inanimate things have a spirit within them: every flower, every animal, every dust particle, every machine. Indigenous communities often hold such animist beliefs as well, assuming a kinship with all beings and rejecting the notion that humankind is the summit or the center of creation. They demand that we finally understand quality of life as the well-being of all animate and inanimate things, including nature and also, by the way, AI.
Animist innovation and design is a new brand of design that occurs in partnership with nature, and there are already animist investment firms such as Ground Effect. Finally, taking this a step further, the Nature 2.0 movement aims to restore nature’s autonomy and agency by, for example, transforming forests into ownerless, self-managing organizations with the use of digital technologies like Blockchain or AI.
Regenerative Over Extractive
Circular economy models such as Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics,” most recently adapted by the city of Amsterdam, are gaining in popularity. Replacing the traditional linear take-make-waste extractive industrial model, they seek the continual use of materials and a regenerative relationship to natural systems.
Connecting the dots between circular economics and circular mindsets, between sustainability and leadership, Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm developed a framework for leaders that weaves together biomimicry, adult developmental psychology, biophilia, and complexity theory for the sake of what they coined “Regenerative Leadership”: leadership that not only regenerates the leader’s organization and team, but also the leader themselves.
Cyclical Over Linear
Many businesses experience cyclical effects in their customer demand. But none of them incorporates seasonality as a design principle into their own culture.
In the end, biological business is more human business. As the Manifesto of Beautiful Business claims, “As organic creatures, we need freedom to behave naturally, understanding that there are mysterious processes that bring us to health and success which cannot be made more efficient or micromanaged. We should recognize that business itself follows a cycle, so we do not make short-term decisions. We weather the storms, knowing that what goes down will come up.”
Applying this philosophy to a specific business challenge, John Vincent, the founder and CEO of the British “healthy fast-food chain” Leon, hit hard by a 50 percent decline in demand due to the pandemic, said in an interview recorded for this year’s House of Beautiful Business gathering, that his company will not fight but instead seek to get through these trying times through flow.
Whether you view it as a shift from the Anthropocene to the Microbiocene, a new animism, or the beginning of a tech-enhanced biological age, at the heart of this next great transformation of business is the realization that the systems we are embedded in are not machines, they are streams.
These streams can overwhelm and absorb us, propel us forward and carry us away. To thrive in them we need fluidity—of identities, ideologies, intelligences, senses, and emotions—and a symbiosis of technology and biology that helps us to be more attuned with life in its broadest, wildest sense.
