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Bonus Episode: What Nature Can Teach Us About Organizations, Featuring Ines Garcia · Humanity Working

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hi everyone, welcome to Humanity Working.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Now, as we get started today, I want to start with a a quick story.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of you'll know that my background is as an IT engineer and an architect, and for about 10 years of that, I was an enterprise architect.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if you don't know what one of those is, you can think of them as kind of like a city planner for a large organization.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: We create models as to what organizations should look like in the future, um, what they look like today, and what is needed to bridge that gap.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I did this, as I say, for about a decade, but in my last few years of doing this at Microsoft, I started to get really worried about how little we were taking into consideration these complicated biological systems at the center of every organization, the human beings.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I I thought that we weren't just letting the humans down, but it was leading to worse results for the types of change that I was looking to make happen inside those organizations.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: And as some of you will know, that's what led to this podcast and to our humanity working newsletter.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, about a month ago, that thinking got challenged again.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: I got an email out of the blue about something called biomimicry, which for me was a new concept.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: And shortly after that I heard about the work of Ines Garcia.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if you think about the work we do here as being around human centricity, hers is about what, this is my term, what I would call nature centricity.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I'm delighted that we've got Inès on the podcast today to talk about this.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: So welcome to Humanity Working Ines.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very glad to be here.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so Inest has a book that goes into these concepts in some detail.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm holding it up here on the video version of our podcast.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um it is called Nature's Blueprint for a Business, Harnessing the Hidden Power of Edges.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um we won't get into all the details today, but we hopefully will get a sense of what this is and and why it's important.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: And my hope is that you'll get the same kind of awakening that that I got that this is this is something that is really important.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: And at least leave it with some some interesting questions and thoughts about uh what potentially to do differently.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: But before we get into the specifics of this, I'd love for you and S to explain in the easiest possible terms the term that I mentioned, biomimicry.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: So what is biomimicry?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is a lot more than making a building look like a bird's wing, right?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: Certainly, yeah.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: And um there are many examples of organizations today and products, um, such as tapping into form or structure, um, that the maybe we'll have time to look at.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: But biomimicry, in essence, is innovation inspired by nature.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: It it comes to the the notion that life has been in this planet going for 3.8 billion years of existence, and that is fine-tuned strategies that we could tap into to solve our problems.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, what's interesting about your uh proposed application of it that you go into this uh into this book is that you're not just looking at it in terms of, oh, nature built this interesting product, so let's create the product that looks like this or pulls from this.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: But you're also looking at it in terms of how we design and run and modify and adapt our entire organizations, right?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, in a sense, um, because I think sometimes rather than uh like if you think the invention of um velcro perhaps, right?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um we also need to think about the function.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: So, what is the function that we are trying to accomplish?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: And we should be asking how does nature solve that, like the distribution of information, for example, or the flow of energy.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: Those are the things, those are functions that we want to achieve within our businesses.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: So let's ask how does nature solve that and then tap into that archive of almost four billion years to solve it.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: The moment that I that I picked up this book and I started thinking about this, it it kind of blew my mind in a way, because when you think about organizations today, um which I guess the sort of version of an organization that people would be roughly familiar with, you can date back to around about the indust uh the Industrial Revolution.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um as you point as you point out in the book, the way in which we've designed almost every organization, almost every structure within organizations has almost been like anti nature.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: We standardize, we isolate, we get rid of redundancies in the means of, you know, in the aim of optimization.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think nature has to teach us about the sustainability of that type of approach?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think when we think maybe um a common way of organizing our ourself in organizations, it may just be just the last couple hundred years, uh, industrial revolution and so.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: So there is um further knowledge and experience and history that we could also tap into.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but if we think of edges really is like an outside limit of an object, an area of a surface, and in organizations, we don't have real boundaries, we have artificial ones, right?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's just a cognitive creation for us to help us to make sense of uh diverse reality that we live in.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yet one of the repercussions of those sort of really defined cognitive boundaries, such as where the team starts and an ends or a department, is like the intrinsic notion of the separation between those elements.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so generally, when we look at a department structure on the elements and the components, that forms the whole, that's where the focus, right?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: So um what if we focus instead on the edges, the connections, what comprises those spaces?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and how can those be not just sustainable and resilient, but also regenerative?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how could how could we leave the entities within in a better state?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm reminded of a phrase that I heard a long time ago when I was looking into models back in the days when I was an enterprise architect.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And for some reason I went down like this long rabbit hole as to not just what models are, because I lived in the world of models, but but but why do we model and and what are the limitations of models and how do models benefit us?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Models in organizations have typically been used a lot to allow us to get an understanding of the increasingly complex entity that is our organization.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: But the phrase that I heard when I was doing the research was the best model of a cat is a cat.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and what it was what it was trying to get at was that other phrase you hear about um models, which is all models are wrong and some models are useful.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um so what to me is in intriguing here is that in the book you point out that we have things like organograms, you know, the the the the idea of like let's let's let's show what an organization is and like structure an organization kind of in uh two dimensions.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: But the reality is that the organization itself is not in two dimensions, it's in three or four dimensions, if you want to include the uh the time dimension in there as well.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um we'll get into the the specifics of the edges in a moment here, but can you talk a little bit about how like an like an org chart is itself um a restricting entity?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and and that sentence that you mentioned remind me this idea of frameworks don't have your interest at heart because they don't have your context, they don't know you.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: Those are frameworks or models, ways to to help us, um, but they don't, you know, they don't have that context.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: So let's think about this.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: The function of hierarchies in nature is to control and avoid change, um restrict change.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so so that's the function of the tool.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: So I would imagine nowadays uh we would favor innovation instead.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um so therefore, artifacts from the 1800s that we haven't evolved may not be the best tool that we have at hand.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: So um I think it's important to understand that when we omit the natural order in our sort of imagined constructions, um it can generate detrimental disruption.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: And we're missing out sometimes with all these boxes and departments, um, sort of layer of abstraction and these uh artificial structures that we often look at is essentially splitting and competing for resources, um, even at political level, is gaining terrain or gaining influence in the office politics.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so when we have these very linear, very compartmentalized structures, they don't encourage much exchange and flow, to which I would argue that's not at the C level what we're trying to do.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: I think uh there are tipping points where the the bigger the organization, the more mature or immature that organization may be, the the imagined separation of those different elements is wider, the definition of those modules is is tighter, and the belief of each one being a truly centered separate entity uh sort of is is higher.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um so yeah, I think there is more more options um that we should be looking at than just legacy tools that we haven't really evolved.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: In the middle of that answer, you said something that I thought was just like truly fascinating.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: You covered and just starting this process of trying to understand the the depth of this.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: For me, one of the most interesting uh things about this is that makes it really practical is if you look at nature and you look at a thing that is happening inside a company, when you go look at nature, you might find lessons from nature as to how it actually works in practice that you can then bring back to your company.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: So that point that you just made about hierarchy, let's dwell on that just for a second, right?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: The purpose of a hierarchy in nature is to basically maintain stability and a and a and a status quo.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: Give us an example of that in Nature to show definitively why that is.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: From from memory in the book, I think you use big big cats as an example.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we can type also maybe um some closer relative to us.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: Certain uh certain, like for example, chimpanzees, um, will have uh hierarchy of structures for command and for survival.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: You don't want to get um too out of um the common pattern because you will put your group in danger.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: Although, uh now that I'm saying that also makes me uh think about other very uh close relatives like bonobos, which they very easily suppress dominance.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um so it's also good to be reminded certain narratives that we have been reinforced and told ourselves again and again, and that may be more to the story.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but yeah, in terms of hierarchies, um, I think there are other structures that would be very helpful.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like, for example, if you think about how uh information may flow, how water flows, um, and this idea of fractal uh form, right?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: Form has its own function.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: So, how can we have fractal uh structures that will help us to handle information better and also handle the over and underflow, right?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: What happened when there is stress in the system?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: So, where is our overflow and our underflow?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, common um ways for us to perceive hierarchies doesn't really handle that very well, just it used to be waste.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: So it's almost like we've taken one thing that appears to work for our organization, and and as we obviously understand, right, the the interesting thing about a hierarchy is that for at least a period of time it sustains a level of uh of stability and it keeps the entities in power at the top of that hierarchy.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: They continue to remain to remain in power for a for a period of time, but it creates something that is that potentially is quite rigid compared to other approaches that nature uses that we don't often replicate inside organizations, right?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and also hierarchies sort of either amplify or suppress information, um, and it definitely sort of silos and filters out, and uh and if we think about tapping into each other's ideas, um we sort of like defeating the object that some of the strategies that we're trying to put in place uh is asking us for.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's just we're not using the right tools for the job.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because the world of work is shifting and changing so much.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think this is why some organizations are experimenting increasingly with things like fractal or fractal organizations or holocracies or things like that?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, even Peter Drucker was talking about organizations as biological networks.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this has been around for a long time.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: My uh theory is that um is the false self sense of control.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there is a part of us of uh trying to avoid resistance for change because change is unknown and unknown could be fear, and there is all these um psychological theories of we uh act upon feelings and mainly feelings of fear, um, and therefore this sense of false self-control sort of catches our monkey brain more than our innovative brain because we, as humans, want to create and contribute to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and that's why we do most of the things that we do.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: So, um, yeah, I think it's good to be reminded that um there is a lot of change in the way that we work today.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I also think that we are at the tipping point of making uh informed decisions by our history.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: How are we gonna use that tipping point?
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: Are we are we gonna leave ourselves in a better state, in a regenerative space, uh, where we could be sort of going by inertia of interest of the members involved, um, rather than control or um dismissal or loss of uh potentially workforce.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: So um yeah, I I hope that we have learned enough uh to take informed decisions that will leave us better.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, and actually interestingly, you pointed a potential uh I think contradiction here, which is that um if we're looking to model our organizations around nature the most, uh the the part of nature that is likely to have the largest impact on organizations while people are in them are the people, right?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: The humans.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and potentially, given the way that structures have formed and countries have formed and societies have formed throughout throughout our human nature, it does look as though when when given choices, we tend to form largely sort of more hierarchical uh societies as we try to make sense of the world in which in which we live.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think we pot run the risk of potentially running into just human nature barriers that are gonna cause us to always default to systems that protect us as humans?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um interesting, especially because you you talk about the notion of human nature, and in the book, that's something also I'm trying to break free from some repeated narrative of what is human nature and how can we nurture that human nature?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um if if we think, for example, of biomimicry, um, biomimicry has these life principles, to which, for example, one is about the ability to adapt to changing conditions.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: That is one of sort of those principles of our natural governing laws.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: So, how can we maintain integrity through self-renewal?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, it's it's not how we can maintain sort of status quo by keeping rigid structures.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: How can we, well, and nature also does that um adaptability, which I think is really important skill and it's becoming more and more important, is um incorporating diversity, um, embodying resilience, and resilience also would include redundancy.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think you mentioned that earlier.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: We tend to think of redundancy as a bad thing.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: Redundancy is a strategy for resilience.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so so sometimes it's perception.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I do think that we need to allow ourselves to break free from certain narratives and preconditions that we have heard a lot, but they're not necessarily true.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, one of the things that we often see in organizations is what we call re-organizations, and that's lengthy, painful, and extensive process, and does not leave the the members within in a better state.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: Also, we lose a lot of our institutional knowledge in the process.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's time that we learn uh from from our mistakes, really.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean that is to talk about the nature of of what it is to be human, the ability to learn and adjust, uh adapt and adjust in uh faster because of the fact that we can communicate in sophisticated ways through language and we can pass information through writing, and we can change perceptions through hopefully as your book will.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: That should give us at least the opportunity to start uh start behaving differently than we might do otherwise.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a concept in the book, something along the lines of quietening our in quietening our intelligence or quietening our smartness or something like that.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: What's the term again?
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: Well, cleverness or our perception of cleverness.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, quietening our cleverness.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: I I uh I'm obviously not clever enough to remember it, but it was the but it was the but I love it.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_03: Memory, memory and intelligence are two different things.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: Thank goodness for that, because I've got a terrible memory.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but um quieting our cleverness, I love the concept.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: So um explain a little bit more about that, because I think it's related to something that that humans could use a lot more of, which is humility.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: If if we think of what makes us different than other beings, um, each being have their own function as a as a group.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but what one of the things that makes us different is our ability, or at least the understanding on science where we are now, is our ability to imagine that idea of invention and imagination, and that is essentially clever.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: So when we are confronted with a challenge, we often tend to think around the options of solution from a blank canvas or what we've done in the past.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: That is based on our conceptual perception and cognition, not necessarily grounded in the real world.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, what I'm trying to bring across with quieting our cleverness and this idea of humility is the understanding that the solution to our problems are already here.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: They have been refined for billions of years.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: So we should really allow ourselves to look outside.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: We are governed by natural laws, regardless if we are aware of it or not, regardless if we like it or not.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: There are patterns and solutions in the living beings around us, right?
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: They'd be in fine-tune.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's RD, an archive of RB and RD to tap into.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of what I'm coming with that idea of quieting, cleverness, and ask how does nature solve X function?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: And this for me was sort of, I think, probably one of the single biggest uh aha moments.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'll be honest, when I pick when I picked this thing up and I started thinking about this, I fully expected to enjoy it, which I did.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I've also fully expected that it was gonna be almost solely about the idea of uh environmental sustainable sustainability and organizations having um uh being built in such a way that they leave the planet in a better way than than when they started as an entity.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: And there's elements of that in this environmental steward uh stewardship and things like that along those lines.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: But what was uh new for me was this uh this idea that an organization the most successful organizations on earth, um, if you think of the success of an organization being how long it lasts, the most successful um sort of entities that you can think of as companies, organizations you think of as companies are maybe a couple hundred years old.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well the life on Earth is 3.8 billion years old.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: And there are there are individual species on Earth that have been around for for a minimum hundreds of millions of years.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: And if you go down to single cell organisms or simple multicell organisms uh organisms even longer than that.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh here we are in our little very human-centric world, thinking that every solution to every problem is the result of us and our intelligence.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe with our little podcast here and our newsletter, maybe we even add to that perception as we talk about human centricity and uh uh you know and all of this idea.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: What what you show, I think, kind of beautifully, is that that human centricity or the idea of like what the our role as humans it obviously has some some merit when we're looking at uh at our the rise of the machines and how we make sure that we as humans have some uh some relevance within it.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: But it's also happening in the uh space of a much larger world where nature's certainly addressed these problems.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: Nature's addressed how to do resilience, nature's addressed how to do uh adaptability, nature has uh addressed how to have different parts of an ecosystem communicate and collaborate with each other, all of these all of these things that are necessary in order for us to be able to thrive, nature has a point of view.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and if we can shut ourselves up for a second and tap into that point of view, then we can learn stuff.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that it goes beyond how a bird flaps its wings and and and mimic that in in the next generation of our aircraft, although that's an important uh that that's obviously an important use case.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: But it goes beyond that towards uh how we approach every aspect of our life.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so that I I mentioned humility because that was sort of like the first thing that kind of popped in my in my head.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking, uh we've been like by ignoring what's going on in the in the world around us, we're we're we're missing all of these clues that are all around us as to how potentially we could approach things differently.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: My question for you is actually a personal one.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: My guess is that you've not you know, it wasn't since you walked the earth that you were set that that you were suddenly like, oh, I'm this little thing and this larger thing that is nature, and there's a whole bunch I can learn from nature.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: So so how did how did you personally get to this idea of like deeply learning from this bigger world around you?
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, okay.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: So one pre-thought and then to your answer.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think is from the Biomimicry Institute, there is a visual that for me really helped me to see that perception um of how the humility piece that you were talking about.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: And is basically condensing, if we condense the 3.8 billion years of existence into a calendar year, we humans we are about six seconds to midnight or something like that.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, which I I found that incredibly powerful.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um my journey, in fact, um is relatively recent, I would say, um, because uh I come from communication background, I have a double degree in in comms, marketing, advertisement, PR, da.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: I've done some work as PR for Segway to Wells One platform supposed to revolutionize the commuting.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: And part of my job was convincing politicians to jump into this thing to have media coverage I'm talking about 20 years ago.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um that led me to follow working comms but internal comms in in organizations, communication within.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: And there we tend to think of throwing tech, and tech can be a great enabler, but tech by itself doesn't do very much.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and that led me to this um idea of delivering in a more agile way, right?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, where can we reduce noise and frustration and become more agile into what we're trying to achieve, to which that led me into understanding that there is more than just churning value or perceived value.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then I took myself through um a circular economy um executive program with Cambridge University, and that broadened the horizon of okay, yeah, reduced waste of time, but reduced waste of effort and finances and materials and energy.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then I went into my quest from my previous book, Couple Years Research of how how could I make my own company, one personal TD, sustainable by design, like a fabric layer of the business.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: To which that if um if we think of circular economy, it has we don't talk enough, I don't think, about the principles and especially the principle three, which is regenerate the natural systems.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, yes, keep products and materials in use for as long as possible, yes, reduce waste and pollution, but regenerate the natural systems, like ecosystem services for free.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that led me then into this concept of biomimicry, and I went through a six-month program into how the work that I do with organizations, how how can those be more resilient?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that took me to discovering the edge effect, if you like.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe we couldn't I imagine.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's do that.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go now deep into this concept of of edges.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: So edges I I think is is where a lot of this become it becomes sort of theoretical, but at the same time it can become deeply practical very uh very quickly.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: Let's start with what an edge even is in by in biology terms, um and and why, from an ecology perspective or an ecosystem perspective, why edges are particularly important.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: I loved your examples of edges of rivers as a uh as a good example.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, rivers are edges, ecotons are edges.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, your garden, uh if you have a garden and you stop mowing in a corner, you will be creating an edge very, very quickly.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: Or if uh you stop hovering a corner in your house, you will very quickly create an edge, and you will be able to observe how that edge very quickly increases resources and therefore more resources, more exchange.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so if we take these ideas a little bit, how how we work in companies and and we could be asking ourselves, okay, so how could we increase edge or a perimeter if we think maybe of a pond, right, rather than having a square, if we increase that perimeter of the pond, even that the surface area is the same, even that the volume is the same, when we have a greater perimeter, we have more opportunities of well, of collecting resources.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: And if we think our company uh with our company has done resources as documents, devices, finance.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah I'm purposely not saying humans.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um increases also the opportunity, that sort of extra perimeter of spaces for the members' interactions, right?
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: Diversity of micro environments, um, the the increase of edge, it will increase the exchange of ideas, of knowledge, of energy, and that sort of redundancy, resilience by design, and also sort of increases the density of activities in a small area.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: I think all those things are good things that we want to encourage in our organization.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_02: So structure informs culture, um, and and therefore I think there are better structures that that will help us to achieve what we want.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that the to go to go back to the biology piece of it, just a tiny bit when we translate this concept into organizations by creating a greater, as you as you point out, right, a greater perimeter by creating these these broader edges, we are by definition creating an opportunity for an organization to, for example, innovate more, right?
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's it.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I if you remember one of the um earlier on sort of visuals of the book is a side-to-side comparison of some of the ways that we structure, we talk about organizational charts, but also departmental communication, or even across your value stream, how does that look like versus um maybe how atoms sort of bend and uh above or how um coral fossils look like, or or even an example of a boundary between two countries where we perceive as a straight line.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, they're not.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so so I think this um this notion of understanding form for the function that could help us to allow our own regulation of focus of the energy of the materials within that space to be locally attuned to the conditions and external factors.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: We were talking about adaptability as scale.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think the answers are here, but are we allowing ourselves uh to quiet and listen?
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think that's the question.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: So now let's talk about resilience, which is something we talk about a huge amount on the podcast, but in a very human-centric way.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um for those of you that have been listening to recent episodes, we actually just did one on resilience, and we think of resilience in our human-centric way as being the ability to be able to cope intellectually and emotionally with change.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: But you think of it in a in a broader sense.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: Talk about uh how you uh think of uh of resilience and specifically how nature builds resilience in in a way that is quite different to the way that organ uh to the way that organizations tend to or not.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, nature uh creates resilience by a few strategies.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: One is redundancy, we spoke a little bit about that, but also think about the ability to sort of come back from a stress of or an injury.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, how can you reorganize ourselves and the connections within from learning from that stress?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: And we are particularly bad in our organization.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we get a pandemic and then everything back to define normal, common, right?
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_02: Often what we think of normal is not natural.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if we have an injury playing sport, or we sit in that at the desk, then you'll see you have a problem in your hip, and then you start saying that your knee is giving you troubles.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: Because your body will always shuffle to what is is is um is responsive to the learning injury.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so what can we do in our organizations to help that?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: I was talking about sort of like the inflow and outflow when there is stresses in your system.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: How imagine the ability for movement to of the elements within, right?
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: It could look in multiple different ways, like maybe an irregular branched structure or fractal organizations, channels, connections, right?
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: Creating more relationships at the edges, so you are more tactile, like an octopus, you know what's happening from lived experience.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: So let me divert too much, but there there is uh there is a lot to learn.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: So for anyone who is finding this inspiring, because I think a lot of people will be, but also potentially a little bit abstract, um, which is understandable because these are these are relatively new ideas and with and uh and sort of really concrete examples of practice are um uh uh are sometimes more difficult to establish.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: But can you think of something that you could recommend to an organizational leader, for example, that would be a practical step where they can they can start thinking about or doing something differently tomorrow that is inspired by the nature around us?
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, you make me choose one thing of the many, many things.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_03: I know.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um all right, so let's let's think about this, and I think I I have it quite recent, um, and that's why it's coming at the forefront here.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, in the book we talk about the research on brain capillary networks uh across species as well, and sort of it reveals that a very simple organizational requirements are sufficient to be able to reproduce both structure and function.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and if we think about networks uh where each node sort of connects, often around three others, uh and that creates a very interesting flow that is repeated in other spaces in nature, and it creates that sort of inherent redundancy.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: Why is that important?
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because if one pathway fails, then alternatives exist without excessive sort of complexity or resource waste or anything like that.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: So this is important and it's a very simple thing that one can start thinking about to introduce, so that when something happens or that person doesn't uh it's not at work for whatever reason, or da-da-da, you you have that resiliency in your system.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: Even ants, they go exploring in threes.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I sort of develop this idea of I call it triadic connections.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_02: So it's how can you design and incorporate this idea to ensure that even in meetings, participants form those relationships rather than a body system, it's just a trio um of um in increasing and creating those cyclical processes that is going to allow for um increase of institutional knowledge and passion experience and uh information transfer rather than silo or sort of half-baked um um information person, right?
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_02: Every layer of uh transition and translation is also a layer of ways.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: So, how can you create that shared repository of relatively simple thing to put in place?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm working with an organization at the moment that they just start including this sort of triadic connection in the way that they operate.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: So that's relatively uh low entry, easy point, I would argue, from some of these big ideas.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: Fascinating, fascinating stuff.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think for any organization um that is a little bit worried about the world in which we live right now.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: You've people folks will have heard me talk quite a bit and discuss with folks like Bob Johansson this concept of uh banny, brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: This strange world in which we uh we live right now that that potentially introduces um fragility into our organization.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: If you're uh worried about the idea is is my company going to be relevant or going to exist in 20 years' time, 30 years' time, 50 years time, nature is probably a very good place to look.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: And Iness is a book will help you understand some of the some of the things to think about.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: I want to thank you, Iness, for for helping me think very differently.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um I know that this is the start of a journey for me in terms of trying to understand this more deeply, and I hope um that our audience has got an understanding and a little bit of an introduction to some of the uh to some of this this very enlightening world.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you so much for joining us today.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much, Paul and Matt, for the work that you did.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think the future of work is here, and so these conversations really, really matter.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced by Matt Neal.
• 42:16
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• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: It makes a huge difference in helping others find us.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: And don't forget, you can find all episodes and get our weekly newsletter at humanityworking.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time.