What Business Leaders can Learn from a Bio-Inspired Mindset: Everything is Connected
Bio-inspiration is all around us. From your hand to the trees in your yard, from tiny bacteria to the world’s largest organisms, Nature’s connections hold important lessons—for business, everyday life, and building the future. Let’s see how the leadership mindset can benefit from taking a closer look at Nature.
Bio-inspiration is all around us.
Vertical connections
Do you know the saying that a person “can’t see the forest for the trees?” It means that he’s so focused on details that he can’t see the big picture. By thinking about “vertical” connections, we think down in levels of organization from a tree to its cells to its molecules and even down to its atoms. And “thinking bigger”—beyond the level of the forest—brings us to biomes, ecosystems, and ultimately the entire biosphere.
Innovative thinkers and leaders face the daunting challenge of seeing the forest AND the trees (and beyond). People don’t work equally well at every scale—but we should practice flexing our brains at various levels of organization, to “flare and focus,” as futurist Amy Webb calls it. Doing this collaboratively empowers our teams to recognize connections that can support our goals.
Horizontal connections
Image credits: Design_Cells via Shutterstock.
The microbiome is a wonderful source of bio-inspiration about “horizontal” connections, which can be physical, chemical, or genetic. That’s why I tend to think of the microbiome as an API between the body and the world around us. Plus, there’s lots of bacterial sex within and between species in the microbiome; DNA that gets passed this way can be used immediately, for example to survive antibiotics. Some of the most exciting research in the microbiome field is not just revealing these connections among bacteria, but exploiting them for medicine and wellness.
Temporal connections
Image credits: Thavis 3D via Unsplash.
What about connections across time? In a very real way, DNA is a connection between the present and the past. Your DNA contains a record of every generation that came before you, backward in time through humans, primates, mammals, vertebrates, chordates, deuterostomes, animals, and eukaryotes, all the way back to the very first living thing. Understanding this connection helps us think of DNA as not just a molecule, but as an operating system that underpins all life and is now open source, thanks to biotechnology.
We tend to think on short time scales: days, months, years. Maybe decades, if your leadership team is exceptionally open-minded. Can you imagine the response if you stood up in a meeting and demanded to know the plan for the century? But whether it’s you or someone else, it’s crucial that someone in your network broadens your organization’s perspective to a variety of time horizons.
What can we solve with a bio-inspired mindset?
My fervent hope is that the climate crisis will heighten our awareness of connections between people, between parts of the globe, and between humans and the uncounted millions of species on our planet. Overall, our Bio-inspired ability to spot connections vertically, horizontally, and temporally empowers us to find solutions in unexpected ways—just as Nature has done here on Earth, for billions of years.
About Tiffany
Dr. Tiffany Vora speaks, writes, and advises on how to harness technology to build the best possible future(s). She is an expert in biotech, health, & innovation.
For a full list of topics and ways to collaborate, visit Tiffany’s Work Together webpage.
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After a 19-day voyage to Antarctica aboard The Island Sky in November 2023, Tiffany has many remarkable stories to share & a wealth of insights to catalyze a sustainable future.
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