Risk & Business Magazine General Insurance Services Magazine | Page 22

NATURES WAY
BY: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER
Scaling Up
Nature’s Way
Y
ou want your company to
grow, but innovation, agility,
and engagement inevitably
decline as you do. The
problem is organizational
drag–all the time-wasting and spirit-
crushing hoops we have to jump through
at work. Does scaling up have to be this
way?
We just assume that maximizing
efficiency and productivity requires
standardizing everything and everyone.
It worked for the assembly lines at
Ford, right? The problem is that we’re
still designing our companies like
machines–a collection of rigid and
replaceable parts, engineered and
managed from the top. But machines
don’t adapt to change, they don’t grow,
they don’t heal, and they require a lot of
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energy to maintain. We’ve designed all
the adaptivity out of them. No wonder we
reserve most of our passion and creativity
for the weekend—companies don’t seem
to want it at work!
Off the clock, we don’t work this way. We
just go about our business, interacting
with family and friends, doing what
needs to be done, however we see
fit. Cumulatively, our actions result
in the cities and communities we live
in. And we know that as cities grow in
size and diversity, their innovation and
productivity explodes. Meanwhile, the
average company is losing over 25 percent
of its productive power to bureaucratic
routines, costing the economy more than
$3 trillion a year in lost output.
I’ve studied living things for 30
years–everything from plants and
fungi to baboons and social insects.
I’m an evolutionary biologist and
anthropologist as well as an innovation
and organizational design consultant.
For the past decade, I’ve worked with
Fortune 500 clientele to help them evolve
better products and better companies.
Mimicking nature’s proven successes is
called Biomimicry–a design approach
that’s yielded such game-changers as
Velcro (inspired by sticky seed burrs),
Geckskin tape (a nod to reusable and
chemical-free gecko feet), and Michael
Phelps’ speedy, sharkskin-like swimsuits.
There’s even a chip in your smartphone
that mimics the way your ears and brain
work to filter out distracting noise. No
wonder Fortune magazine calls Biomimicry
the #1 trend in business! And Biomimicry
isn’t just about product innovation. My