The question I hear over and over might be familiar to you-- How do I get my clients or my organization to do this kind of work? More sustainable, regenerative, transformative, impactful? More nature-inspired, place-based? The obvious way is to push harder. Find the money. Get the leaders on board. But life doesn't do it that way. Life selects from what’s present and trying to grow, develops capacity, and cultivates the conditions where possibility flowers. Where are you pushing the boulder? How might you cultivate conditions for possibility to flower?

This is a 25 minute mini-masterclass edited from a recent talk. It’s a good intro to the work we’ll do in the 8 week Living Design Lab. The first cohort is nearly full but I have some spots available for the next one. Bring your big vision to life through Teeming and Living Design! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRLrnMmmeF8

What can baboons, ants and bonobos teach us about building organizations that actually work? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Years ago, studying baboons in Ethiopia, I became fascinated by something strange. Hamadryas baboons organize themselves very differently from other primates—with specialized roles, ritualized signals, and social mechanisms that help hold a complex society together. Sitting on a termite mound being bitten by ants, I suddenly found myself wondering: How did a primate end up organizing in ways that looked so much like a social insect? That question eventually led me deep into the biology of superorganisms, cooperation and collective intelligence. Diverse groups have an enormous adaptive advantage—but only if they can preserve that diversity while keeping runaway dominance from taking over. Baboons have mechanisms for it. Bonobos have mechanisms for it. Ants and bees have mechanisms for it. And so do we. In this excerpt from my Learn Biomimicry talk, I explore the evolutionary roots of cooperation, dominance, social immunity and the structures that allow diverse individuals to become something larger together. Not Who's in charge? But What allows the intelligence of the whole system to emerge? This video is part of Living Design: Learning from 4 Billion Years of Evolution, a series exploring what living systems can teach us about adaptation, organizations, collective intelligence and creating the conditions for life to thrive. https://youtu.be/PbdT8xlEf30

We spend a lot of time trying to predict the future. But Life doesn’t. Conditions change. Resources disappear. Constraints emerge. Unexpected realities get in the way. So Life adapts. Grows new capacities. Finds better partners. Renews the resources future generations will depend on. And preserves possibility as it does so–– because diversity is the raw material for whatever comes next. That’s a different way to think about our designs. Instead of asking how we can predict and control, we could ask How might we build the capacity to meet whatever happens next? That’s the idea in this next clip from my recent Learn Biomimicry talk. Life finds a way! How might we? https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDkcfWyXFTMs&si=Sist2JiMdBy33DVF

My obsession started when I was very small: trying to figure out the leverage points that could flip humanity into living more like other animals do. Why did we put them in circuses and scrape their homes bare for freeways and parking lots? I didn't see the coyotes or rabbits ruining other animals' futures. And yet they were clearly our relatives, as Jane Goodall showed. We were animals like any other. I spent many sleepless nights over it. Where did we go off track? How could we find our way again? What could I do? For that matter, what could anyone do? Nothing I thought of would work. Everything was connected to everything else. It would just make matters worse. But my father was an architect. He pointed out the geodesic domes sprouting along the 1970s California coastline. A set of simple rules of connection adding up to a strong, flexible structure. Like Tinkertoy. He also told me how the same kinds of simple rules, if properly aligned with human nature, could guide people to do what the architect intended. That idea stayed with me, and I set out to find the simple rules by which other organisms live—how they “create conditions conducive to life” without thinking so hard. In retrospect, possibly an overly ambitious career goal! But someone had to do something. Well I've broadened my passions over time, but my interest in life's deep patterns stuck around. They've been honed by four billion years of challenge, after all. From Hawaiian island plant biogeography to whale distributions in the Bering Sea to baboon hybridization and speciation in Ethiopia. How does life grow itself? How does it organize intelligence? How does it create conditions conducive to life for its descendants? At every scale, the same patterns: the simple rules of growing possibility despite uncertainty, change, and challenge. The same patterns organize our own lives—the many ways we live and think, design, and lead– as I've noticed in groups from Indigenous communities, to teams in companies,, nonprofits, and other institutions.