Biomimicry and Leadership

I am a biomimicry nerd, which means I find myself searching for examples of how human systems can learn from the elegant, self-correcting dynamics of the natural world. There is biological brilliance in our midst, yet we often don’t look to a grove of aspen trees for lessons in sharing resources or to an ant colony for insights into coordination and teamwork.

Recently, I’ve been captivated by the process of photosynthesis, where plants intake carbon dioxide and sunlight and transform them into oxygen and sugar. I’m curious how organizations like Uncharted can build cultures of photosynthesis where we breathe in the “carbon dioxide” of the world (whether that’s challenging interpersonal dynamics, disempowering relationships, painful experiences, etc.) and transform that carbon dioxide into the oxygen of greater organizational, interpersonal, and psychological thriving.

Over the years, I’ve observed how our team has inhaled something painful and broken and exhaled something healed and fortified, but I’m curious how to further strengthen our photosynthetic power: collective learning and postmortems, individual reflection, de-stigmatized feedback, practices of gratitude.