051: Jay Harman - Nature Has Already Solved All Our Problems

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing? But you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatalent.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host, growth coach Bill Gallagher. What a great show we have for you today. We're going to talk all about how nature has already solved all the problems that you and I face. In fact, nature's probably solved all the problems that humanity faces right now. And there's a way to learn from this and apply it to your business, to your challenges and profit from it. We have on the show today Jay Harmon. Jay's story is fascinating and amazing. You're going to love the show today. So he joins us from Kauai, but here's a guy who grew up in Australia and has studied sharks and written about him. He's an accomplished business person, entrepreneur. He's grown several multimillion dollar businesses. He's done ocean research. He wrote the book the Sharks Paintbrush. I'm just so excited to have him. He was a speaker at our Gazelle's Fortune Growth Summit. So welcome to the show, Jay.

Well, thank you.

Now you're on Kauai today.

Yeah, I am.

And it's raining there, isn't it?

It's pouring today.

Nice. Well, it's sunny here in San Francisco of all things. And I have a little sunburn because I was out doing a little walking, coaching, chat with a client yesterday. So we trade words. But I guess it's often a little wet in Kauai, isn't it?

There it is. It sounds like I'm in the wrong place because usually people want to come here for sunshine, right?

You know, I, I don't care when it rains there a little bit, as long as it's like warm, you know, I, we do quite a bit of client work on Oahu and every now and then Maui, but I guess also the Big Island. But we Go. And you know, it'll come and pour and then it goes. But it's also warm and you could be in flip flops and enjoy the rain. It's a little different kind of thing than here.

Exactly. And you know, here locals call it champagne rain.

Yes. Does it leave you drunk? You know, when you get a rainier and then it breaks and you get the rainbow. It is, it's pretty moving, right? It is lovely to be in awe of. So my. Here's a little unplanned aside. My son, right, is. He's pretty atheistic. It's okay for me to say that, that on the earth, but he can be pretty spiritual and he's like, you know, whatever that lives for many people, the God, he said, when I look at nature and I see and I gaze into the universe, I'm in awe of something. And I don't know what it is, but it's powerful and it's cool to see him get that.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the beauty of nature for all of us, isn't it? That's why we vacation in nature.

Yeah.

Restorative.

You're there in Hawaii, you split your time between here, Kauai, here in California, Kauai and Australia. And you have some pretty interesting work. But why don't you take us back now, Tell us about how you got started because I think there are many things that I personally related to in your story as a boy and how you've evolved. So go back to the beginning, would you?

Okay. Well, when I was a little kid, I really had no interest in Sewell at all. And I used to go off to the beach. We lived just over the hill from the beach, the Indian Ocean, which is very temperate and warm and clear. And there were reefs where I lived and there was surfing and fishing and spearfishing and skin diving and wading in rock pools and kind of idyllic really, for a kid that likes nature. So that's where I spent every spare minute. And even when I was in school, I was daydreaming about what I was going to do in nature and, and what I, you know, so I, I just loved it. And what I noticed over a period of time and the one thing I did like at school was physics and how things work. And I noticed in nature things were working in a different way from how I was being taught in school that humans think they work. And for example, I noticed that if I was swimming along the edge of a reef and a wave came and I wanted to save myself from being Washed onto the rocks, I'd grab seaweed. Well, seaweed breaks off pretty easily in your hand. Most of it's pretty fragile. Yeah, but I noticed over and over that even in the wildest storms with the biggest waves, most of those seaweeds don't suffer at all. They don't break off. And so I found that quite intriguing. And. And then I noticed that the seaweeds, when a wave came, all took on this swirling pattern, and it became pretty obvious that this must be the path of least resistance or least drag. Well, in physics, we learn that the path of least resistance and least drag and least energy use is a straight line. Right. And so you see it, and it makes sense. The shortest distance between two points of a straight line. So if you want to go from one end of a football field to the other and use the least energy, you really should go in a straight line between the goalposts. Well, nature doesn't do that. In fact, ever since then, I've been studying this, and turns out nature has never moved in a straight line since the dawn of existence. You know, there's not a single example of that. So I was seeing this as a kid, and these swirling flows. And then I saw these swirling flows mimicked in the way that fish swim, how their fins move, and then how an octopus moves, and then the shape of seashells. And it became apparent to me, even though my physics teacher thought that I probably wasn't paying attention enough in school, I'd ask questions about this, and he disavowed my ideas on it. But it became apparent to me that the shape of least resistance in nature was exactly the same as the whirlpool in your bathtub when you pull the plug. Yes, it's the shape of a whirlpool. And that shape we see everywhere, whether it's in a hurricane or a tornado or in the cochlea of our ear or in the way that blood flows in our cardiovascular system. It's everywhere. SAP flows in a tree this way. And so as a kid, I was also always daydreaming about making surfboards and dinghies and things like that. And I started incorporating these swirling shapes into my pretty crude attempts at making floating craft. And I noticed they got better and better. And the more faithful I was to these shapes, the more slippery and less effort I had to put into making propelling these devices. I was away and running.

When I was a boy on the North Shore of Oahu, I made a surfboard for myself, and I bought a blank foam and I shaped it, you know, and then I glassed it, I laid the fiberglass on it and, and I think I was 11 when I did this. Or late, almost right about 11 or almost 11. And it was a pretty big undertaking. It made the whole garage a mess and smelly and all that kind of thing. And it was horrifying, it was lumpy because I had all the patience and focus of an 11 year old with my nature. And I never made another board, but I surfed that thing again and again because I was so proud of what I created. Now, you know, I didn't bring it around too many popular breaks where other people would laugh at it because it was pretty bad looking, but I was really proud of my surfboard.

Well, that's a great achievement. And probably because it had a rough surface, it was probably fairly non skid on top.

It had, yes, right. Especially the rails had quite a lot of dimpling. And you couldn't call those any kind of boundary layer inducing.

Well, you might be surprised, you know, dimpling. Nature uses dimpling, right. You know, if it wants to go fast. You know, you look at a mako shark that can hit 50 miles an hour in the water, it's got a rough skin. And dolphins, when they, when they're on the hunt and are going fast.

Yes.

Get goosebumps.

Yes.

And so nature dimples things. It doesn't go for slick and smooth, so you might have just cracked.

I think it looked like the, the fins on. What's the whale that's got the really ugly looking fins that are.

Oh yes, the humpback whale.

The humpback.

That's very effective. Dimples.

Yes. Yeah, it was like that.

You're a biomimic at heart.

Accidental, beautiful. So go on. So you started noticing this kind of thing and, and what there was and you started applying it in a. Just a practical sense.

Yeah, I did. You know, I just got fascinated by it and I, and I, as I say, I daydreamed about it all the time. And, and what was interesting, just as an aside, I went to a religious school and I noticed that all the iconography in the school and I wasn't paying too much attention to what I should have been learning. But I noticed that all of the pictures and statues and all that sort of thing had these same swirling shapes on them. And so that became pretty fascinating. And so it really just, I found myself completely immersed in the, in the thinking about, imagining and trying to create things that conformed with these spirals of nature. And it just became apparent to me that nature really had all the answers and really the only answers that I was interested in. So that is. Yeah, so when I left school, I. My. My mother really wanted me to do an academic career. And so reluctantly, I went off and studied electronic engineering. I didn't like going to college to study that. But one thing I did discover is, of course, when you learn about electricity, water movement is a metaphor. You know, if you understand water movement, you understand electrical movement. And so then I started to think, well, look, water always moves in vertical shapes, in whirlpool shapes, turbulent shapes. And so I started thinking, well, maybe electricity does. And I established that for myself over a period of time. And anyway, I was so fed up with doing that academic work that I basically ran away to sea and joined the Fisheries and wildlife department and went to sea on patrol and research vessels and did that for quite a few years and became a captain. And it enabled me to be fully immersed in nature, which I just love. And so I saw more and more instances of insects flying and seabirds flying and fish and waves, etc. And good boat design and bad boat design.

So I think immediately comes to mind from what you're saying is, and I just want to plant this for people right away as you continue, but it immediately comes to mind things like the movement of. We've been talking about sea animals and we can think about flying animals and so on. And before we started the show, I started to think, well, this doesn't really have to do with human interaction, and yet I think it actually does. And I think you see instances of that too, so keep going. But I want to caution people not to decide this only has to do with the physical movement of objects through air and fluids and like that.

Absolutely. And you know, my own specialty is drag reduction and saving energy in systems, because nature does that extremely well. But there are biomimics around the world looking at pretty much everything that humans do, and management, financial models, administrative practices, how to reduce traffic jams in congested cities. All of these areas of interest are being studied by biomimics now because nature has modeled optimum solutions for every one of these things that we can imagine. You know, just look at bees, swarms of bees coming into a hive, and there might be thousands of them. They never bump into each other. Well, you see flocks of birds, these huge flocks that you sometimes see on the prairie. There might be 10,000 birds, and they conduct and dive all over the place and never bang into each other. Well, they operate on something called swarm logic. And that's now being adapted to all sorts of management systems. And basically, how is this like the.

Movement of starling birds and that kind of thing?

Exactly.

And the way swarms of fish move.

That's right. And also you see how ants move. You know, if you ever watch ant trails, you might have thousands of ants all going in with different purposes. They never collide, they never have traffic jams. They manage it extremely well. And then we can go even more basic, and we can look at how slime mold, you know, fungus slime that you find in your bathtub if you haven't cleaned it. Slime mold grows in a way that shows us how to build the optimum rapid transport systems. And if you look at the grid for the Tokyo subway system, it actually mimics slime mold and how slime mold propagate, which is also, by the way, the same way that our neural networks and our brains set up. So if you map the neural networks or the nervous system in the body or the venal system in the body, then you find it's also mimicked by slime mold. And these are optimum ways of moving goods and materials and energy around the place. And where humans tap into that and start to model on that, we're finding optimal solution to problems that were intractable.

So I'm just having an insight to share with our listeners from what you're saying. And I'm sure this will be painfully obvious to you, but maybe it'll help to translate it. So I think we've all been around a public space, a campus or another environment where they've put in sidewalks and grassy areas. And then through. Across one of it, you'll see a part that's worn out because people cut a corner somewhere. Right. And people have decided that the path that you've designed is not the one they want to take, and they adopt a new one. And I think we see that sort of thing again and again. Right. That's a little bit of what you're speaking to, isn't it?

Yes.

And here's the thing. I think so. In addition to product design that seems so obvious in this, there's also the process design and optimization. What are the natural barriers? Where is the natural flow of movement? Where are you constraining and obstructing things? If you think about the flow of your business activity, like the flow of people across a quad or water through a system, any bend or unnecessary thing that you put in where you force something where it doesn't want to go or you don't Allow it to move freely, you constrain it. Right. And that creates resistance in the system. Am I, am I getting that right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yes. 100. Okay. Well, here's just a little metaphor for that. If you're driving down the highway at 100 miles an hour and you do want to do a right angle bend. Right. You want to turn at an intersection and you try doing that at 100 miles an hour, you're going to come to all sorts of grief.

Yes.

So, but now nature.

Well, you'll spin.

Yeah. Or roll over. Right, Right. But it's going to be pretty ugly.

Yeah.

So, you know, that's an extreme event. But nature doesn't do right angles anywhere, anytime. And what it does is a very specific geometry that enables extremely high speed maneuvering without coming to grief. Now that's a metaphor for fluid flow or objects traveling. But it also, as you suggesting, it also applies to pretty much any design, any administrative thing. It's really working out the path of least resistance. And nature models that over and over and over again.

You know, I remember a thing. Where is this? It's in Switzerland. Right. It's a building or a series of buildings there where they have not as many right angles and like that. And I went to a school school for a year. I went to a lot of schools as a kid. But one of them that I went to, they didn't let us draw sort of the right angled hard outline and then fill in type drawing. They encouraged us to do shading and to find that. And in this place, I believe it's called the Goetianum, they have these buildings that don't have right angles. Is that right? Am I remembering that correctly? Well, you know, do you know anything about that? No. Okay.

No, I'm not familiar with that. But, but typically where we have right angles, often that's a legacy of the start of the Industrial revolution where we were hammering out flat pieces of steel and, and cutting straight pieces of wood without saws, etc. Right. But that's not the strongest shape. It's not the most energy efficient shape in any manufacturing process. So what we've done is we're now living in the legacy of 300 years of this kind of thinking. And even our analytic tools are based on this kind of thinking. And if we get away from that, if we start to get away from flat surfaces like you imagine if you're the bonnet of the hood of your car were a flat sheet of material, it had vibrate and like crazy it had probably. It would certainly have A lot less strength, and it probably dent very easily. Right. So if you put in compound curves, the strength goes up dramatically. Strength to weight. And nature always builds with exactly the right compound curves. And they're not just arbitrary, they're not just ad hoc. They conform to a very specific set of algorithms. And if you put those compound curves into things, whether it's buildings or spaceships or cars or stents in your body, if you use those exact algorithms, you get a far superior result and less material, greater strength, and less energy used.

Really, really interesting. So we can begin to see and hear a lot of connection to things and things that don't look like some of what we are accustomed to seeing. So I think we're seeing more and more of it in product design. And you're talking about application across the board. It's the world of biomimicry. And I think you're. So you mentioned really ancient things as well. Right. In our preparation for this, you talked about boomerangs and armor that looks like scales and that kind of thing.

Well, exactly. And, you know, a lot of people, particularly in Europe, think of, instead of biomimicry, they say bio inspired or nature inspired, anything that we look to nature to see how nature's done it. And if you think back, humans, of course, came out of nature. We are part of nature, and we've been inspired by nature since time began. And the Australian boomerang, which has been around at least 40,000 years, is a. An absolutely superbly evolved wing. It works extremely well, and it's a direct takeoff bird wing. And if you think of barbed wire, the modern world has been built on barbed wire. And barbed wire is a copy of thorny bush in Africa. You know, the original peoples of Africa used to create corrals for their goats and animals out of weaving thorny bush together. And in the 1850s, some Westerners were smart enough to replicate that with wire. And that opened up all of the rangelands of the new World. So. And then, you know, we come forward a little bit. There's Velcro, A gentleman walking in the Swiss Alps getting burrs on his socks and on his dogs.

We get those all the time.

Yeah, exactly. Drove him nuts. He looked at them under a microscope and replicated it and created Velcro because we're all familiar with. And. And then even scale armor, which modern militaries are using as well, was used for thousands of years all around the world. It's a replication of the scales we see on snakes and lizards and fish and gives mobility and A great amount of armor to warring nations or warring tribes. So pretty much, I mean, it's not a whole lot that we're doing as a modern species that hasn't been inspired by nature, even if we haven't optimized it currently. But most of what we do is actually come out of nature. Now it's time for us, with modern tools and computers to be a lot more faithful to the, to the true designs of nature. We can, and we've been coloring outside the lines, we can actually get much more precise.

Well, I think the ability to study nature is greatly increasing. Right. The super slow motion photography is becoming much more widely accessible. And the ability to capture all kinds of imagery and study things over time and observe gives us a lot of insight to that. Right. Makes it not as narrowly held as maybe it it was in the past.

Well, we have incredible tools now. You know, there's a new camera that's being developed that takes over a trillion frames a second. I mean, what an extraordinary thing. And then we have supercomputers that are stunning and we've got quantum computers coming that are going to be infinitely more powerful than what we have today. And we've got nanotechnology. There's so many materials. We've got remarkable materials now. And a lot of the new materials are coming straight out of biomimicry. And nanotechnology is straight out of biomimicry because nature builds everything one molecule at a time. It doesn't have any off cuts, no sawdust, no wasted transport costs. So nanotechnology is the way of the future. 3D printing is converging on that. It's a, it's a rough copy of nanotechnology strategy. So, yeah, so I mean, the lid is blowing off this subject. And the Fermanian Institute has predicted that there'll be a trillion dollars of GDP generated from this within the next 20 years. And there are people that think it's probably going to grow even more than that. The fact that nature always uses the least energy and the least materials, always does the job better than human design technologies today means that we have to converge on that if we really want to optimize in the future.

Well, I think that we see. Right. If you follow and you look at videos and news articles and things like that on product development, if you look at the evolution of novel kinds of flying craft and you look at different motor vehicles and you look at the evolution of robotic designs, we see quite a lot of experimentation, development in these things and in the examples that you cite, we Maybe don't think of at first as having natural inspiration. We do. But what I'm excited about for our listeners is the challenge of each of them to think that's not just for those other guys, that's for each and every one of us. And what I'm wondering about as I get off as we wrap our show today is going to be what are the constraints and the unnatural and the forced kinds of things that I see around in our work and with our clients work, where I might instead look for a natural inspiration of an approach to that that is more flowing, more. What could I learn and what could I apply from someplace like that?

Okay, well, you know, there's some fantastic resources because biomimicry, if anybody's never heard of it before, it's because the word was only coined about 15 years ago. Yeah. And it's only in the last three or four years that there's enough inertia that is starting to come into the vernacular. So there's now at least a hundred thousand initiatives happening around the world. They're great resources. There's a big. Biomimicry.net yeah. Or asknature.org asknature.org Fantastic site. There's Biomimicry for social innovation. There's my book the Shark Paintbrush, which has more than 100 examples of biomimicry across pretty much any field that anybody is possibly interested in or working in. And there's a new book coming out called Teaming that's T E E M I N G by Tamsin Woolley Barker. It's about to come out in this month or next month. Great book for anybody that's in administration or looking to improve their company organizations, etc. So it's called Teaming.

Yeah.

And then there's a book that's about to. It's just come out called Adapt A D A P T by Amina Khan. And that's also an interesting resource, all of these things. And I'd urge everybody that doesn't matter if you're in product development, in administration, in education, the way of the future is absolutely going to be inspired at every level by biomimicry. And so I think it's terribly important for all of us not to miss that boat to actually start looking now. It's very interesting. I mean, it's fascinating stuff, all the discoveries that are happening. And so I encourage everybody to take this on board and look at how their businesses and how their lives might be impacted and how they might take advantage of what's coming up Beautiful.

So our guest has been Jay Harmon. He's been talking about biomimicry and the lessons of his book and his work Shark's Paintbrush. We'll have all the links in the comments and the show notes here so that you can find them and go right to them and begin to think about how to apply this to your business. If you loved it, please like it, share it, subscribe to it. That's how we increase our audience and helps us keep bringing these shows. I really enjoyed having you. Let me tell you about a couple of the other things we have so you'll find our podcast every Wednesday at wherever you get your podcast but itunes, Stitcher, the places like that. So subscribe it, like it, comment on it, share it with people. That helps us and we really appreciate that when you do it. When we have videos we put them up on YouTube.com Bill Gallagher. You'll find our podcast, summary notes and our occasional blog posts at our website along with a growth kit. So we've got a free growth kit there that you can download and it it gives you an overview of the scaling up methodology. It tells you how to start running your own strategy and planning sessions with your team, gives you a sample agenda, pre work homework, follow up kinds of things, and a set of worksheets that make putting on your first or your next planning and strategy session makes it all a lot easier. So go ahead. ScalingUpBusiness.com is the web address where you'll find that. Go there, download that, subscribe and all of that kind of good stuff. It's been such a pleasure to have you on the show and it's a pleasure to have everybody tuning in and sharing the stuff as well with us. Thanks Jay Harmon. Once again, I'm Bill Gallagher, Growth Coach. If we can help you with anything, please drop us a note, leave a comment here, email us, whatever. If we can help you figure something out, solve something, figure out how to apply it, find a coach for yourself or whatever you need, let us know. Thanks so much. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software. It's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams unlock clarity and results with scoreboard by aligned to try it now go to aligntoday. Com Bill G. One more time. Aligntoday. Com Bill G. That's aligntoday. Com Bill G. Check it out and try it now.