🌿 For bns of years, nature has been running the ultimate R&D lab, testing and refining solutions that work in the real world. Traditional top-down management structures may feel familiar, but nature suggests more flexible approaches. Ant colonies, for example, are more nuanced than the rigid hierarchy they are mistaken for having.

While the approach doesn’t promise easy answers, it offers time-tested strategies that have enabled life to thrive and adapt over countless millennia. In an era of rapid change and increasing uncertainty, perhaps it’s time to learn from nature’s most successful innovators.

Biomimicry is “the process of looking to our living systems to inspire more sustainable solutions to our designed world,” local environmental education outfit Dayma explains. But rather than viewing nature simply as a resource to extract from, it’s also looking at nature as “a mentor, an elder that has wisdom about what is tried and true,” and a measure against which we can evaluate our business practices, shore up crisis resilience, and more.

Work like an ant colony

Ants use simple communication systems — similar to blockchain technology — where each individual adds updated information that strengthens the collective signal. This allows autonomous decision-making based on real-time information rather than waiting for orders from above. “There’s no centralized, big staff meeting,” Dayma tells us. While reproductive roles and basic functions remain specialized, there’s no focus-group decision-making for day-to-day operations like foraging. The feedback loops are tight and immediate, unlike traditional business structures that rely on periodic reviews and lengthy approval processes.

Companies can apply this by creating clearer information-sharing systems and empowering employees to make decisions based on predetermined collective goals rather than requiring constant — and often hindering — managerial oversight.

Be a crow, not a koala

When Covid-19 disrupted global markets, businesses that relied on single revenue streams faced catastrophic challenges. Hyperspecialized businesses and manufacturers whose offerings were affected by the pandemic saw their “world fall apart,” Dayma tells us. Nature’s approach to surviving disruption offers valuable insights: diversification and adaptability are key to resilience.

“Generalists do better when the going gets tough,” they suggest, comparing crows to pandas and koalas. Crows are omnivorous opportunists that adapt to whatever resources are available — “it will cooperate, it will forage, it will hunt. It will eat whatever it can and however it can.” Meanwhile, a panda’s diet depends entirely on bamboo, and koalas eucalyptus. The result? Crows thrive globally while pandas and koalas are vulnerable to extinction.

This principle extends beyond revenue streams to supply chains, leadership succession plans, and workforce composition. Having diverse teams with varied experiences creates more methods to tackle future challenges, much like genetic diversity strengthens a species’ ability to survive environmental changes.

Waste not, want not

Nature doesn’t actually eliminate waste — it transforms it into resources for other organisms. “It’s not that the animal doesn’t produce waste, it’s that the waste becomes an essential resource for other organisms in the ecosystem.” A whale carcass undergoes multiple phases of decomposition through which different animals benefit. Each stage is beneficial to another species, from large predators to microscopic fungi and bacteria.

This collective approach can inspire businesses to create circular economy systems, where waste products become inputs for other processes or partners. The key lies in developing relationships with diverse stakeholders and designing products that can be broken down into useful components rather than ending up in landfills.

Learning from cacti

Desert plants like cacti offer masterclasses in resource management during scarce times. Rather than growing large leaves that are vulnerable to water loss from evaporation or animal grazing, they minimize surface area and store water in protected, waxy structures. They’ve identified their most precious resource — water — and built their entire survival strategy around protecting and efficiently using it.

The key insight for businesses is identifying their most precious resource. “It’s easy to see money as the end-all-be-all of business… Is it in fact your scarcest resource? Where does most of that money go? What is the scariest thing you can lose if you lose that liquidity?” Businesses facing challenging economic climates can apply similar principles by designing lean systems based around their scarce resources — which may or may not be money — with efficient monitoring and careful resource allocation.

The hive mind

Evolution never stops, and neither should organizational learning. Some industries and companies, like Uber, according to Dayma, are already applying biomimicry directly through swarm intelligence algorithms — a computational approach inspired by swarming animals and social insects. These systems rely on operative decision-making being based on decentralized and collective intelligence from many different “dumb” interactions rather than centralized information from a single source. This makes certain levels of operation more efficient, effective, and adaptive, says Dayma.