5 Starfish Principles that will Empower your Business

Why and how to make your business more decentralized

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia was suffering from an explosion of starfish that was destroying the coral. A group of concerned divers decided to take action and started killing the starfish by cutting them in half. Do you know what happened? All the halves generated an entirely new starfish. They didn’t solve the problem; they doubled it!

The reason why starfish don’t die is because they have a decentralized neural structure permitting regeneration. The powerful strategy of decentralization is explained and applied to human organizations in the book “The Starfish and the Spider: the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.” I highly recommend reading the book, especially the second half is very applicable for anyone interested in organizational development. My pages are fully scrabbled with ideas. A nice summary of the book was written by Emily Kennedy, a fellow Biomimicry PhD student, you can read it on our Biomimicry blog Germinature.

Spider vs. Starfish organizations

I want to get you thinking about how decentralization might benefit your business. It’s important to realize that depending on which strategy (centralized, decentralized, or hybrid) you choose for your company, this will highly affect communication, both internally as well as with customers.
Let me highlight that with five principles of decentralization.

1. Starfish-like organizations don’t need a CEO; they need a catalyst and champions

→ Keywords: ideology, lead by example (not by control), and champions

First of all, as is true with every organization, there needs to be a very clear and strong mission. In a top-down company the CEO will impose this on everyone in a manner of command-and-control. In starfish-like organizations, this mission will become inherent to everyone because they all believe in it –that’s why they joined– so it becomes an ideology that drives everyone to move forward to achieve the same goal. What you need here is a catalyst who empowers everyone to believe in the same mission.

CEO vs. Catalyst (Figure taken from The Starfish and the Spider: the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations)

Here are some critical characteristics of catalysts:

• They empower, but than get out of the way and give everyone their autonomy because they trust them.
• They have the ability to listen, and let the others figure out the solution themselves. Giving advice creates hierarchy: the advice giver stands above the recipient.
• People work together more effectively and create trust when they have a personal bond; the catalyst helps to create connections between everyone. This requires a high level of emotional intelligence.
• The catalyst needs to be able to handle ambiguity, because it’s impossible to know everything that is happening.
• Catalysts are charismatic but are ok with working behind the scenes. That’s why they need champions that take it to the next level because they are relentless in promoting a new idea. Derek Sivers short TED Talk shows this aspect really well (you have to watch it): https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement

2. Starfish-like organizations need medium-sized circles

→ Keywords: norms, ideology, trust and connections

Whereas centralized organizations have strict rules that are enforced on their employees, in starfish-like organizations there isn’t anyone to impose these rules. In order to maintain all members of the starfish accountable, there should be a set of norms. The best way to achieve the development of norms is by creating mid-sized circles. Studies show the ideal number of members in a circle is not more than 15.

The members of a circle will self-generate norms in order to avoid “free-riders” or “disturbers”. As everyone is motivated to contribute to the best of their abilities because they believe in the same ideology, disturbance will be corrected. Thus, norms are self-generated by the members and become something inherent. Here again trust is what holds the circle together. If members assume the best from each other, then generally that’s what they get in return.

3. An honest and open environment can bring out the best in people

This is easier said than done, but if everyone understands the value of this principle it will be easier to implement.

• Honesty is not always the easiest way forward, but it last longest. Having a framework to provide constructive feedback to one another is key. Personal interactions between everyone are therefor very important: you should receive the feedback directly from the source, as this will be the most honest message.
• Honesty should also be a value towards your customers. Transparency to what is happening inside your organization will help understand why certain decisions are made. Transparency stimulates honest conversations and is the key ingredient for innovation.
• Creating an open environment means that everyone is able to communicate with one another in an honest manner. It allows for unexpected creativity. That is why open-source is so successful: it provides the possibility to get input from the very best, and the one who is most familiar with the problem.
• Don’t make a product or service that makes it extremely hard for your customers to leave; set them free. “If they come back, they’re yours; if they don’t, they never were.”

4. Create a network

Since we are all connected with each other with a level of separation of six degrees, you can imagine the power of a network. The reason why so many decentralized organizations (Wikipedia, AA, eBay, Al Qaeda and now ISIS) are so successful (in their existence, not necessarily in their achievements) is related to the power of scale. If you give people a sense that they are part of a community (= a connected network), they will help you realize your ideology.

5. The moment you introduce property rights, you introduce hierarchy.

If you like to destroy a decentralized organization, you should introduce something that the members will fight over. This will evidently create hierarchy. With power over property rights, the catalyst who has to distribute resources as he sees fit, turns into a CEO. Usually property is money, but this could basically be anything.

The reason why not many profitable organizations have become (completely) starfishes is two-fold:

1. It requires a new way of thinking, functioning and doing business.
   Who -or rather how does the business- manages profit? How are important decisions made?
   None of these questions are trivial, but there are a lot of people working on trying to answer them. Readings based on Biomimicry that I’ve found very interesting (and which I might tackle in one of my next blog posts):

• The nature of investing, by Collins K.
• Biomimetic Management: building a bridge between people and nature by Bogatyreva O.A. and Shillerov A.E.
• Honeybee Democracy by Seeley T.
• Website full of practical resources: http://businessinspiredbynature.com
• The Nature of Business: Redesigning for Resilience by Hutchins G.

2. Certain aspects of the business are better achieved with a more centralized approach. For example, the reason why music lovers started to use iTunes over a free open-source platform is security and accountability. With your purchase you know it’s legal and virus-free. Another good reason is accuracy and guaranteed high quality.

No matter where your perfect “sweet spot” is (chapter 8 in the book), I strongly believe any business venture can benefit from starfish thinking. If you/your organization effectively uses decentralization in (parts) of the organization, power can effectively be distribute over the entire organization, rather than just to one or several key people. As you all know: 1 + 1 ≠ 2. Decentralization offers the ability to move forward faster, and have more resiliencies when the organization is being disturbed.

If anyone has the power to make decisions/take action -rather than only the people at the top- the one crucial thing that is still needed is the ability to communicate and convince peers why this is the right thing to do (= how it aligns with their norms) in order to move forward and get closer to achieving their ideology (= the mission of the organization). Because there is trust among members of the circle, this should be a fairly easy and quick thing to do.

Hope this was helpful and motivating to get the starfish in you thinking: Now let’s get moving like one!