105: Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker - Innovation Inspired by Nature: Biomimicry for Your Business

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. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxataalent.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out Today, what can your organization learn from nature? From the way animals, insects, well, plants too for that matter, what can we learn from nature to make our organization stronger? The way the companies and the people interact with each other, that's what today's show is all about. Biomimicry applied to your organization. We've talked about this before with regard to PDF product innovation. We'll touch on that again. But we're going to focus today's show all about how to use lessons from nature to improve your business, the organization, the interaction of your people. So listen in. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and growth coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Dr. Tamson Woolly Barker. So she's from San Diego, although that name sounds a bit more British. We're going to talk today about what your organization, what your company can learn from nature. You know, we've addressed this or the aspects of biomimicry in the past with a show with Jay Harmon talking the shark's paintbrush. Dr. Tensen has a book called Teaming and in this case we're going to look at what can we learn about the way you run your business. And she was a speaker at our recent Scaling Up Summit in New Orleans and had great stories and takeaways for all businesses trying to grow up. So welcome to the show.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, it's great to see you again. Before we get into kind of the core idea of how do we create an organization that grows more naturally, more organically and more easily, how do you get into this line of work? What is it that led you to studying nature and growth in nature?

Well, it's been a really interesting trajectory. I mean, I always knew I wanted to work with animals. I mean, even when I was 2 years old. My parents drove in this Volkswagen Bug down from Canada and we stopped at every Arco gas station because they would give us a pair of animals. Get it Ark. But I still had this huge collection of these animals and. And so I was already ingrained in that, you know, and of course, being a backyard biologist at a really young age, I would pour out maple syrup in the yard and watch the ants come and time them and see those kind of things, you know, and how do they communicate? How are they finding these things so quickly? It was always interesting to me.

I tried to trap a bee when I was a kid. It stung me. And that was the end of my interest.

That was the end of your scientific career?

Well, at least with regard to insects.

So I was really into that. And then I discovered photosynthesis and I had an epiphany about the way evolution works and things just going to where they want to be, they find their natural rhythms and things like that. So I ended up majoring in botany and backpacking in Hawaii for four months just studying the shapes of the leaves and what the function is, the form and function relationship and redwoods and Santa Cruz and that sort of thing. But then I really started applying it to human evolution. I was interested what makes humans tick. So I started looking at brain evolution and social evolution. And then I ended up as a primatologist working in Ethiopia with wild baboons. So kind of the Jane Goodall model. Follow these baboons around. But I'm a geneticist by training, so I did. I'd look at their social behavior and then I would map it onto the genetics and look at how that affects social evolution on a bigger scale. What was really interesting to me is, you know, I was there to study, you know, basically human evolution through these relatives of ours. But it wasn't very complete picture, I felt, because we really. I kept thinking we're so much more like ants than we are like apes. I mean, we're like both, but we really. Our social system has made this radical jump to this collaborative, what we call a superorganism social system where none of us can survive on our own. We all have different jobs, you know, we're just, you know, intrinsically entwined in our lot. So that became my focus in my studies. But then, you know, of course I had kids and I took over my ex husband's media arts company. And so I ran that for 12 years and really got a feel for the business world and I loved that work. I also worked as a bench scientist for a Biotech, but. And I had a nice exit from that, from that first business that we had. But then I kept thinking like, oh, I'd see these patterns. And I was like, oh, that's like what an ape or a monkey would do. But that's like what an ant would do. I mean, I couldn't put aside my biological lens. So I started really thinking about that. And then I discovered biomimicry. And I was like, this is it. This is what I'm doing with my life. And so I ended up doing product innovation for Biomimicry 3.8, which is Janine Benyus organization. And she really wrote the book on biomimicry. So I ended up working with her. And then I got the first master's degree in biomimicry, which was, you know, I already had a PhD in evolutionary biology and anthropology. So it was a really nice combination with the business world. And I started working in sustainability and then into executive leadership coaching, which I'm just, I know all over the world. It's a crazy quilt, but somehow it all came together. And so I worked with these companies.

You know, I think it's actually, it's interesting, it's worth noting because my own career is really super eclectic and my dad bounced between academia and entrepreneurship and sales, which work. And I think the mix of things makes us interesting and unique and helps us find our differentiation so we're not simply trying to be and compete like everyone else. So it's cool and I think it's relevant.

Yeah. And it definitely sets you apart, but it also gives you a passion for what you're doing. And of course, in nature, that's where innovation comes from. Ecotones blending things that weren't previously related. So that's really the story of my education in that respect. But what happens was I did all this product innovation for Fortune 100 companies and the engineers would get so excited about it. And we come back six months later and nothing happened. And the engineers are frustrated, disengaged by the bureaucracy. And the fact is these organizations weren't adapted to change. You just couldn't handle it. And so I thought, you know, we really, we have to address the way that these organizations are structured if we're going to make these kind of changes. So that started me writing the book and really putting all this together.

So you started to study then what it is. So what is it that. And not all aspects of nature work differently. Right. The way a group of primates works is pretty different from the way ants work or bees Work.

Right, right. I mean, there's this whole continuum of collaboration. You know, some, you know, a spider works completely alone. They're a sole predator, and they, you know, meet their mate and then they eat them. You know, that's all. That's the extent of their social life. But then you get, you know, schools of fish that have to stick together for their safety. But they really all do the exact same thing. They don't have different jobs, they don't have that kind of. They don't really depend on specific individuals. And then you go to the further end. You know, the apes or wolves are working together, hunting together, but even so they're all related or they're all doing trading of mating opportunities or whatever. They're doing a lot of dominance hierarchies in that. But then you go further into the ants and they're literally all having a different job to the point where it's more like an analogy of our body, where even the queen is like an ovary. She does all the reproduction, but they're all depending on each other and none of them can survive alone. And that's really, I think, the way our human societies are. You know, I mean, I didn't make all the clothes I'm wearing. I don't grow all my food. We're just fundamentally entwined. So that's something you don't see in our closest relatives at all.

It's a radical shift, so specialization and efficiency. And that has us living closer and closer together in cities or connected communities where we can trade.

Exactly. And of course, it has the Adam Smith analogy, and it's really a continuation of that.

So tell us about a couple of the companies that you've studied that applied some of these principles successfully.

Well, a lot of them were in the product management field, but now I'm starting to really. The book just came out in July. We're seeing people go, ah, but there's also the Frederic Laloux book, Reinventing Organizations, which I highly recommend. And that's gathering a lot of steam from the other end, the organizational design. And so now we're getting quite a few examples of companies that are successfully applying this. And the results are amazing because it just increases the employee engagement, it increases the innovation, and the productivity goes through the roof. So it's been pretty exciting. You know, Interface, the carpet company, when they started looking at how would nature make a carpet? And it began on the surface level of, well, nature's kind of random. These leaves have a nice random pattern. It pleases us. How could we make that and they came up with the tiles. Now the best selling carpet product of all time. They've done so well.

So we're talking about carpet tiles where we can replace one after one's worn out and they're all made of a recycled fiber.

Yeah, well it started with just the tiles and what you say like, but they could, anybody could install them because they could go in any direction. And yes, even if the color batch has changed, it doesn't matter. It has this nice, pleasing, just the pattern. Right. And it cut the waste dramatically. Employees got super excited about it and they said, well, we want to do more biomimicry. So then they started saying, well how would biomimicry, you know, how would nature stick these things? They started looking at geckos and they mimicked that and now that's a product on the market. These tactiles that are mimicking gecko feet and there's no chemicals in them. It's all shape based so it's completely non toxic. And then they started going, well, but nature would make it from sunlight and nature would make it from carbon in the atmosphere. How could we do that? So now they're collecting nets from Philippine fishermen the that have lost their livelihood because of rubber fishing and turning that into the tile. So it's doing good. But it's also got the employees so excited about what they're doing. It set apart the company in a radical way. I mean Interface now has this whole mission, this mission zero. They're going to make it eliminate all environmental damage they've ever done by 2020, which is ambitious. But their productivity went up, doubled from this. And it's because the employees love it.

This is engagement to do with product design tied to something learned from nature, something more natural. You had another example I think with Dutch health care group whose name I can't pronounce.

Bertzorg, Burtzorg or they say it not being Dutch. This company is so cool. So this is the fastest growing company in Holland. They started 10 years ago with four employees and now they're at 14,000. They have a waiting list of employees that want to join from 4 to.

14,000 employees in what time frame?

10 years.

10 years. Yeah.

Yes. So what this is, it's a holistic neighborhood health care system. But they work on neighborhood networks. So previously they would have district nurses and regional nurses and all this administration that would be a traditional provider and the patients would get a different nurse each time. The nurses were prevented from doing what they thought was best. So this organization, they scrapped all that, they just made these small modular teams, which is the way ants work, and said, you know, you get a neighborhood and you're gonna do what you think is best to create this neighborhood support network for them. And it's been amazing. So the nurses love it so much they've left the traditional providers and to the point where they're closing and jumping ship to Burt's. Org, because it's just such a hit.

Well, what sort of work are they doing?

So what they do is, you know, it's mostly elderly patients that are living at home but need some assistance.

Got it. So in home nursing care, type.

Exactly right. And so, but now, like, eliminating that bureaucracy and putting it. There's only 50 administrators for 14,000 nurses. And most of them play the role of coaches, actually. They just call them in for conflict resolution and having an idea problem. But basically, they have total freedom to solve their problems and take care of their patients the way they want. And they measure their success. Their only metric is how much time do the nurses spend with the patients, how happy are the patients? And it's 60% of their time is spent with the patients. So it's been incredible. They've saved 40%, which, if you scale it up, will be a 2 billion euro savings a year. And half the time, the patient spent half the time in emergency room. I mean, it's just been through the roof. The results, the bottom line, the happiness, all of that and the way they do it is just by working in these small modular teams where the teammates can do whatever they want, but they're mutually accountable to each other. And the thing is, the employees are just so passionate because they're doing what they love and have all this bureaucracy, this organizational drag.

So less administration, less paperwork, less reporting, less set procedures around the whole thing, higher empowerment. And they're measuring then quality by. Or efficiency on time spent with the patient.

Right.

And quality based on patient happiness only.

Yeah, patient happiness. But what that includes is, you know, how many visits to the emergency room, how long did you have to stay there? And everything is half of what it was before. So it's just. And so now, like Sweden, England, Taiwan, they're starting to move to that model as well because it's been such a hit.

This is really consistent. We were talking just before the show about Stanley McChrystal, the American military special forces commander, who talked about transforming the way that they manage that in his book Team of Teams. He was also speaker at our Scaling Up Summit, and he talked about changing the tempo and what they did by removing the control. So giving parameters to here are the objectives, here are some broad target categories, here are rules of engagement. And then they would do daily huddles to share information, really global daily huddles by video conference, share information, empower teams, learn from the recent ops and then apply that. But much more distributed. So there wasn't the same rolling up of, well, here's my plan. The President approves, it rolls back down and they execute and they do. That was more happening continuously on a rapid pace.

If you look at an ant colony, there's no administration, there's no management, there's no meetings. They don't have to wait for approval to do something. All the action and decision making happens on the front lines in these small modular teams. They work in modules of three and one is a leader. And the leader's role is just to take in details on what's going on and create a vision out of that and share it with other teams. So it's really that daily huddle that making sure that everyone has the information they need. And then the shared purpose, like you say, is really compelling their identity, they have a shared identity and their norms and their values and their rules are well set. Other than that, you're free to do what you think in the moment.

In scaling up, we begin with having teams create purpose values. A big hairy, audacious goal, a more realistic, highly achievable three year goal, a range of things like that. A framework that creates a vision for the future and then gives the structure that we can begin to plan. So we've got a vision and then we got a plan and then we create operational rhythms to do it. But the best teams realize that the weekly meetings, the daily huddles and even the quarterly planning updates, all of those things are best done when the CEO is removed from the driver of them. The CEO is not doing the bulk of the speaking in the meetings, they're providing and reminding people of that cultural background, the purpose and the values. And the brand promises things like that and just referencing people back to that, putting the right people on the team, making sure the team's healthy and that kind of thing. But all of those regular decisions are being driven by the team and frequently in a rotating fashion. So like who leads the daily huddle is not the same person every day. It's the team's huddle, not the leader's huddle.

Right? And you see that like in pelicans in biology we talk about the pelicans is one of the birds, they fly in These big V's. One of the birds is always at the front, but it's not that leader takes turns with the other birds when they're tired or when they're not sure of the way another bird takes over the leader. So they have that distributed rotating leadership.

So when the pelicans and the migrating birds fly, they're flying off the wingtip of the other because that's favored air. They get a little windbreak there. Less effort required. You see the same thing if you watch professional cycling. They'll line up behind each other, either directly behind or just off depending on where the wind is coming from. And then they'll rotate so somebody pulls on the front for a little bit and then falls back when they can't hold anymore. And the team member who's got maybe the make to be the general winner will get protected. They'll spend the least amount of the time on the front of anybody until just the very end. But. But the whole team's working together to produce a win for that. Rotating off.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean you see these same patterns and I think the way the ants kind of combine that bottom up emergence and autonomy with a little bit of this hierarchy where these. Cause every ant team has one leader and two specialist workers that just get to business. And so what the leader does, they don't do any work really. They just wander around and they just, yeah, they're just assessing the deep patterns. And it's kind of like Tom Peters in there. Tom Peters, the aunt managing by wandering around, you know. But the critical thing is that that leader is spreading the shared identity and reinforcing the purpose but also communicating those details to other teams so that that ties together their vision of what's going on.

Somebody told me years ago to manage by wandering around, get in touch, go wander around and pay attention to what people are doing, learn what they're doing. Just make sure that when you show up the association is when Bill walks by, I'm going to get in trouble, so I'm going to hide what I'm doing. Right. We don't want people snapping to attention or covering up what they're doing or like that. So we want people as the leader walks by to the leader should bring curiosity and appreciation. So I would come by like, oh, what are you dealing with? And even if they seem to be really struggling with something, I wanted to understand why they were struggling. And then I would pull back like oh, maybe we should address that process or maybe our values are out of whack here or Maybe that person should be in a different job or something like that. But never were you going to get in trouble from my walking around. I don't know, unless you're on an inappropriate website or something like that.

Right? Well, I mean, yeah, the ants are doing that too. And people always say, well, how are we going to make an organization like an ant team? Because if you watch ants, a lot of them are really terrible at what they do. I mean, they wander around in circles and they're stupid. But it doesn't matter because overall those errors and those individuals cancel out.

See, this is brilliant. Let me underscore this because I get this frequently and I just had this like two days ago I was talking to a CEO, a newer CEO who was complaining about a particular individual. They're like, try as I might, I can't train this person to take on this new set of tasks. I just keep pushing up against and they don't seem to be able to manage what I can do, what a couple other people could do. I'm like, great, let's stop worrying about them and let's make your process foolproof so that anyone could do it. And it's self reinforcing so that there's cross checks, there's checklists, there's things like that so that virtually anyone can do it. And they're like, really? Do you think you could do that? I'm like, look, McDonald's scaled to how many billions of burgers served and they did it with almost anyone walking. They could train you to do their process because they keep engineering the process and, and there's a jillion other businesses like that. So how do we engineer the process, the structure, the culture so that it's reinforcing and we don't have to worry about having. I mean, an ant is not a brilliant higher brain.

Right. And the other thing, we have this preconception of these ants as a clone army. People always say, well, I don't want to live like that. But the reality is that each ant is so different that you can't even statistically group them behaviorally. And the researchers that I know can identify individual ants by their behavior. They're so different.

Wow.

Yeah. Which shocked me. But there's even ants that'll hide behind a rock, do nothing all day, wait till another ant comes by with food, take it and go down in the nest like, hey, look what I did, you know, in our organization. What happened?

They should run for political office.

Yeah, right. But they work in these little modularized teams. The other aunts will just say, well, I don't want to work with that guy woman. Actually, they're all female and cut them out. And so they end up drifting to the periphery and becoming patrollers and soldiers and doing the more dangerous jobs.

So they find another role because they've been shunned by the group in some fashion.

Exactly, exactly. And there's even companies like Gore W. Gore that makes the Gore Tex.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

They run their company on a similar model which they came up with in the 50s, but they even put bucket. You rate your team members and they get put in pay buckets. So if you're really awful at your job mutual accountability, you'll just end up not getting any work from your teammates and not getting paid for it. So you just leave.

You talked about organization growth versus city growth. Can you share that picture with us?

Yeah, this is really interesting to me that, so cities, this is work that was done by some physicists at the Santa Fe Institute. And so as a city grows in size, productivity and innovation increase. And that's not just overall, it's like a 30% increase in those things, but it is also a 15% increase in individual productivity and innovation. So that's great. But then when you do the same thing with a company, we see that individual innovation and productivity go down and it doesn't scale the way the city does. And so that's interesting. But then when you look at Ant Nest, they scale much better. It's a whole other trajectory on that. And the reason is because they're growing their organizations from the bottom up like a living thing, instead of engineering it from the top down like a machine. So if you can, you know, and of course we're not cogs, you know, we don't like having fixed job descriptions. I mean, what is it, 26% of people just hate their job and then, you know, 70% of us are kind of disengaged. So if you can get that engagement, the productivity, I think they said an inspired employee is 144% more productive than a satisfied one. So it really comes down to finding those shared purposes but not telling them what it should be. It's growing it from the bottom up. Finding like minded individuals that have a passion for something and letting those teams naturally emerge.

Interesting. So more organic, more bottom up. But in an organization. So we're looking for autonomy and diversity, but then also the thing that ties us together makes us an organization and not a random city organized around a geographical feature. We instead have purpose and values. We usually say that there's four big things. Purpose is the why of the work. It's that emotional center that drives decision and action. The values describe how we do things one way versus another way. Who gets hired, where we're willing to take a financial hit the way that we get it done. And then the bhag or the big hairy audacious goal is this thing that we're striving for, our mountaintop that we're reaching. And the brand promises then are the thing that the customer, the marketplace can expect from us. We know we can deliver on these things pretty consistently and we may even promise them or bake them into our operations in some way. But those four points anchor an awful lot of strategy when we try to figure out what to do. And if you just keep refining that back and forth. Pat Lencioni is a total people team guru. Right. And he says that when your employees can do a funny impression of you speaking the purpose and values and the other things of the company, then you're probably starting to get in the ballpark of saying it consistently and up. Right. You want to become like a caricature.

Oh, I might use that as an activity. Workshops, imitate your CEO.

Right? Yeah. And if you're imitatable, then maybe there's enough consistency. If you're a new vision every day, the team's all over the place.

Right, Right. I don't know if, you know, HCL was an Indian software company and they were suffering from terrible disengagement. I mean basically everybody was just dialing in a paycheck and so. But they had a new CEO came in. I think this was 2007. And he stayed 2013. This is Vineet Nayar and he moved the company from 743 million revenues to I think 5 billion. I mean it was like a radical shift in a very short time. And all he did was put in these Internets where people could just talk about what they were into. They created self organized passion groups around these things. And then they started like a Quora type of thing where you could ask any question, you could answer it and then upvote it. And so experts moved to the top and he selected those to run new initiatives. And then he also put in places for whole culture that it's okay to fail, it's okay to put out your crazy idea. You know, we never shut anyone down for that. And it turned everything around and the engagement went through the roof. And it's kind of a similar thing to what you're saying.

Yeah, it's really brilliant. Well, this is a really great conversation and I want to let folks know the book is teaming. It's Dr. Tamsenwilly Barker. And you'll find her at DrTamson D and I'll put the link in the show notes. BuT-R-T-A-M-S-I-N.com I think it's really consistent with all kinds of things we talked about. Right. We create a powerful vision for the future, a set of values. We teach ingrain those really well. When I did this in my last business and then I went to work on the execution habits, so they became more self organizing in a period of high growth. I took an entire month off with my family and we bombed around Europe and went sailing and did things like that. And I was completely checked out because we'd baked that stuff in long enough, the vision and values piece, and then put in all of the execution habits and then the team could sort of self organize. It was a liberating moment as a CEO and it's one that I strive for with clients all the time.

I mean, once you put the culture in place, I mean, that's what the Ant Queen does. She never goes outside. She just has this culture, a pheromone culture that's spread throughout and these basic simple rules and then lets people go to town on it.

Awesome.

And that's why they're productive.

All right. The book is teaming Dr. Tamson. Huh? Teaming with two E's? Yeah. And you'll find it there on the website or on Amazon. And thanks so much for having us or being with us and talking with our listeners today. I want to thank everyone for coming by. We'll be of course back next week with another interesting story or idea around scaling up growing your business. We've got these kinds of things on the podcast and blog every week. We've got free tools, downloads, descriptions, how to get your team scaling up worksheets, all that kind of stuff for free@scalingupbusiness.com so go there and find out that. Also look for our regular workshop schedule. We'll put upcoming things like that all there. You can find all that. Thanks again for listening. We'll talk to you next week. I want to give special thanks again to our original growth guru, Vern Harnish. Our show is produced by Nio Bade with audio production by Podfly Productions. Audio editing is done by Albert Burge and our show notes are compiled by Ein Kadina. We with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of our show today. Please share it with somebody else and let us know the parts that you love by dropping us a line, email, carrier pigeon, what have you. Thanks again for listening and keep scaling up. 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 Align 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.