Nature's Business: Leadership Lessons

You can either see hope in the world, or you can see despair. You can either rise to the challenge and bring about change, or bundle yourself up in fear of the next mindless environmental clearance. You can either allow the leader within you to rise, or sink under the burden of the immense task ahead.

- Anjan Prakash

You can either see hope in the world, or you can see despair. You can either rise to the challenge and bring about change, or bundle yourself up in fear of the next mindless environmental clearance. You can either allow the leader within you to rise, or sink under the burden of the immense task ahead.

Whoever we are, this is not the time to give up. It’s the time to show up. The baton is now in our hands and we must win this race to survive. Luckily, the solutions are staring us in the face. Through biomimicry, nature is already inspiring great designs and practical solutions. But it can also teach us winning leadership skills and how to build better businesses. Here are some examples I have culled from 3.8 billion years of nature’s pure genius.

NATURE’S SENSE OF PURPOSE

Each year more than a million East African blue wildebeest start the largest overland migration in the world, to coincide with the annual pattern of rainfall and grass growth. Roughly 1.5 million individuals undertake an almost 500 km. long journey overcoming all obstacles. We can learn two lessons from the wildebeests:

Swarm intelligence, better understood as self-organisation: Within an hour of spotting a rain cloud, the wildebeest self-organise and kickstart a common direction of motion – a characteristic wave-like form. They adjust the distance between each other so as to function, for all practical purposes, as a single unit. The older, larger animals stay ahead of the group, so the younger ones are protected. They even take turns sleeping, while others stand guard against predators. Self-organisation is fundamental to their survival.