How Does Nature Solve Complex Challenges?

And what can it teach us about social innovation? I’m on a grass field standing in a row with five other people, shoulder to shoulder, facing 6 other people mirroring us. Our team of 12 is trying to lower a tent pole stretched over our right index fingers, raised at waist level in the space between the two rows. The instructions are simple: the goal is to lower the pole to the ground while it rests on our right index fingers which should constantly stay in contact with the pole. Reproduction of the Tent Pole Exercise at my co-working spaceI’m in the middle of a really fun and intense five day workshop on Biomimicry Thinking for Social Innovation offered by Biomimicry 3.8. We are almost 30 people with various backgrounds and nationalities, all interested in sustainable innovation inspired by nature — aka biomimicry. We’re gathered in a sweet place surrounded with nature in the southern part of the Netherlands and are learning how biomimicry can apply to social innovation. Back to the tent pole exercise. This is a classic situation you may encounter in many structures: it is hard to balance the general goal of the group with the individuals goal or incentives. How would nature solve this challenge? Let’s have a look at swarm or flock behaviour. You have probably already seen those beautiful flocks of starlings balletting in the skies. The whole flock dances across the sky rapidly without any bird ever crashing into another. The way they manage this is by following some very simple rules: move in the same average direction as your neighbours, remain close to them, and avoid collisions. Consequently, one way to solve the tent pole challenge is to only pay attention to the neighbor on your left and the one facing you, rather than trying to keep track and control of the whole operation. The touch of your index finger on the pole must remain as light as possible as the sum of the forces of the fingers directed upwards must remain inferior to that of gravity pulling the pole downwards. You may also want to simplify the feedback loops. Everybody shouting ‘lower’ is not helping the operation. So managing the amount of information circulating is important too. Just like the birds, keeping track of the few nearest neighbors saves them some energy versus following the larger group’s activity. There are many other components to the tent pole exercise and good hints from nature on how the challenges can be overcome in a good way. These lessons will be the topic of a later article. Biomimicry & social innovation Social innovation is often about dealing with systems, group dynamics and leadership. A large diversity of such models can easily be found in nature. Making the correct analogies may help you find new ways to organize feedback loops, build a strong and resilient infrastructure, find better ways to share information, find new business models. Understanding how nutrients are circulating and exchanged in various systems can help find better ways to distribute money for instance, or understand how to better shape our cities and optimize resources circulation. Many group dynamics and leadership style exist, from wolf packs to ants, reindeer herds to bees. Some principles and patterns are recurrent, often indicating solid strategies. It’s about thinking abundance versus scarcity. Collaboration rather than competition. As Janine Benyus (who coined the word biomimicry) once said, the forest does not try to grow the tallest tree it can, that would make no sense, rather it builds and maintains a whole, resilient ecosystem, and in that ecosystem collaboration is a key element. I have just scratched the surface of some biomimicry principles here. My journey with this field has shown me that the better you understand nature’s principles, the better you can emulate them and create strong and novel solutions. Traditionally, biomimicry has been used to find better technical solutions, for example lightweight material structures like in bird bones, temperature regulation systems like in termite mounds, streamlining and quieting trains by taking inspiration from the kingfisher’s bill and the owl’s feathers... It is only recently that it has expanded towards social innovation. Using the biomimicry framework for social innovation usually leads to use metaphors to abstract nature’s solution principles, but that does in no way undermine the usefulness of the framework, rather it shows how agile it is. Interestingly, the solutions we found during the challenge day in the workshop, were all solutions we could have come up with, without using biomimicry. But stepping out of our conventional reasoning, using another framework rather than hitting the challenge head on, allowed us to step back and be more creative. We gained a different perspective and understanding of the challenge at hand, and, inspired by nature, we found better solutions, faster. Biomimicry is a very good framework to find innovative, sustainable solutions. For it to make sense and yield the best results, it is important to not make lightweight analogies. The context of your challenge needs to be precisely defined and translated to biology to find which natural context it matches best with. In that context you can then find the organisms that can best inspire your solution. Needless to say that it’s a good idea to bring a biologist toyour design table. If you are interested in biomimicry thinking and social innovation, you can have a look at the ‘watering hole’ for social innovators on Biomimicry For Social Innovation’s website or look for inspiring strategies on AskNature. For local advice, we’re more than happy to welcome you in Oslo at BiomimicryNorway. Together, let’s make society sustainable! Michel Wolfstirn is the co-founder of BiomimicryNorway, an organization that aims at spreading knowledge about biomimicry and promoting its practice in Scandinavia. After having spent 8 years as a mechanical engineer in the oil industry, Michel felt the need to balance his karma and together with Nina Havermans started BiomimicryNorway early 2015. Together they are offering talks, workshops and consulting services related to biomimicry and the circular economy.