The Prism of Nature

Since the dawn of humankind our ancestors have feared nature, worshipped her and survived her. Our deep history as nomadic hunter-gatherers adapting to the harshness of the natural world is deeply imprinted in the recesses of the unconscious mind. The power of nature’s omnipotent force was intensely present for the early hominid mind to see, hear and feel. But nature wielded not just fear and awe; it was also a source of inspiration for those that were willing to receive its wisdom.

Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest polymath geniuses of the renaissance in the late 1400s, was deeply inspired by a visceral understanding of nature. Leonardo observed that nature’s genius was far superior compared to any creation of the human mind. Leonardo’s flying machines imitated the flight of birds; his drawings of palaces and cities mirrored the metabolic processes of organisms with the flow of food, water, people, goods and waste all built into the architectural design. Leonardo’s creative perspective was enhanced by visualising the world through the prism of nature.[1]

In the late 1600s, the economist William Petty and the philosopher John Locke were inspired by nature, but by the contemporary work of the legendary physicist Isaac Newton. Just as Newton did for physics, Petty and Locke attempted to establish a mathematical foundation for the study of economics.[1] In order to further ground economics in the scientific precision of physics, early neoclassical economists in the mid-1800s, like mathematician Léon Walras, transposed the mathematics of energy physics, derivative ideas from Newton’s laws of motion and his early work on gas thermodynamics, directly onto the world of economics. Walras proceeded to literally lift, equation by equation, these mathematical principles and translated them metaphorically into economic concepts. Newton’s shoulders that Walras so heavily stood on, predominantly described a mechanistic, cause-and-effect, linear view of the world, insufficient to characterise the dynamic complexity of constantly evolving business ecosystems in disequilibrium.[2] Soon thereafter, in the early 1900s, the engineer Frederick Taylor set out the principles of scientific management which in turn were based on the principles of economics. Quite unlike Leonardo da Vinci’s inspired perspective from the natural world, traditional management theory was predicated on the underlying principles of economics and physics, that assumed a static, linear world content to safely live under the illusion of equilibrium.

Organisations are now confronted with the need to rapidly and iteratively adapt to radical disturbances in their business ecosystems. Every management challenge that we encounter emerges not from a static, ordered, linear world; rather, it arises from a dynamic, chaotic, non-linear landscape. The blistering pace of change in the global business ecosystem, however, pales in comparison to the epochal and spatial scale of the turbulent forces at work in nature. Billions of years of the powerful forces of geological change and biological evolution, acting in symphony over millions of species, sets the stage for the grand theatre of life where adaptative strategies are forced to play out over time. Nature’s enormous richness and complexity across infinitely long time periods provides the bedrock from which surprising inferences can be drawn and transposed onto the world of business. The fundamental principles underlying the intricate operations of natural ecosystems, can therefore provide a powerful metaphor to help explain the evolutionary path of business ecosystems.

The dynamic complexity of both natural and business ecosystems is much better explained by the principles underlying non-linear disciplines like complexity science, chaos theory, evolutionary biology and ecology. The explanatory power of these disciplines provide interesting metaphors and analogies that are now emerging as competent contributors to management thinking. The astronomer Galileo Galilei famously said, “for everything that was demonstrated and explained… is shown to us by nature so openly and clearly, that nothing can be plainer or more obvious.”[3] The prism of nature is a potent lens that vividly illuminates the power of metaphorical thought, allowing us a tangential perspective to craft adaptive strategies for a complex world.

References

[1] Capra, Fritjof, and Pier Luigi Luisi. 2014. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. New York: Cambridge University Press.

[2] Bernstein, Peter L. 2000. The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business and Society. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

[3] Drake, Stillman. Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography. Courier Corporation, 2003.