Lessons from the Panda: Complexity and Interconnectivity in Our World
Let’s say you’re a panda, right? A giant, peaceful panda. And you live in the Wolong Nature Reserve in China. You didn’t pick the name; the humans did. Pesky bastards. They don’t mean to be a nuisance, but they are. Just like they don’t mean to be destructive, but they are. Because they don’t have any fur to speak of, they get cold easily. Plus, they don’t particularly like to eat their food raw. Savages. Thus, their modest dens are heated, and their gruel is cooked, at times, to a dreadful mush, which, they claim, makes their food more calorically available. Whatever. To satisfy their need for heat, then, they must harvest vast quantities of bamboo, which they then burn. “Fuelwood,” they call it.
The Panda’s Plight: A Metaphor for Environmental Challenges
In this beautiful, mountainous reserve, you, the panda, face a dilemma. The bamboo forests you depend on for food and shelter are being depleted by humans for humans, forcing you to range farther and deeper into the mountains in search of sustenance and a quiet place to rest. And when the humans have used up all the bamboo around them, they, too, range farther into the mountains in search of fuelwood, which, in turn, forces you to move yet again. And again. And again.
Technically, the bamboo is a common pool resource. You can’t exclude the humans from chopping down the bamboo, and any bamboo they do take for themselves naturally leaves less for you to munch on. That’s the definition of a common pool resource: non-excludable and subtractable. The bugger is, this situation has all the makings of a tragedy of the commons, with you, dear panda, suffering most of the tragic consequences.
“We’re all in the process of becoming,” some humans say. Well, you’re becoming a panda of the gaps. And those gaps are shrinking.
You could, of course, go extinct. I mean, you’re on the verge of it already. But even a small hit to your numbers has outsized impacts on the local ecological balance. With a keystone species like you out of the way or sidelined, biodiversity takes a hit, and so does the health of the ecosystem in general — the mountains and all the life it supports. Moreover, if you and your panda brothers and sisters are missing from Earth’s equation, natural processes, like the growth of vegetation, get disrupted. In a healthy ecosystem, the bamboo you mainly eat grows back even more vigorously. It’s a positive feedback loop that’s actually, well, positive (not all of them are). Your grazing also helps manage the underbrush contributing to a healthier forest — and one less susceptible to fire, I should add. And you pandas, like your avian neighbors the Spotted Laughingthrush and the Black-browed Tit (they live in the apartments/trees above you) are great seed dispersers (although you really should consider pooping in a toilet at least some of the time). Not to mention the cultural and symbolic loss that would accompany your demise. You’re an icon, panda! Any tragedy that befalls you might demoralize the whole global conservation community and deprive the rest of us of a furry symbol of peace and good fortune. Of course, your loss might also serve as a stark reminder of the impacts of human activity on the natural world. We humans are so blissfully unaware of the relationships — the interconnectivity and interdependence — between ourselves and everything else on this planet. Maybe your loss spurs us, finally, into conservation action. Hmm, don’t bet on it.
From Pandas to People: Translating Ecological Lessons to Human Systems
Your struggle is not just an ecological tale but a metaphor for human organizational challenges. Your home in the Wolong Nature Reserve is a successful example of human-natural system interaction, or a socio-ecological complex adaptive system (SECAS). In such systems, success comes from becoming aware of the deep interconnections between humans and nature (awareness is the first rule of Education Club, by the way). Alas, we are all living, breathing, walking, crawling, flying, talking, squawking mounds of earth bound up in a vast web that knows few if any bounds. This complex adaptive systems approach has led not only to the recovery of your panda habitats but to other common benefits as well, such as cleaner water, fresher air, and an enhanced cultural value of the nature reserve that is hard to put a price tag on.
Applying Nature’s Wisdom to Human Organizations
Can we apply these lessons to our communities and businesses? You bet your prodigious panda butt we can. Just as Wolong integrates ecological and social sciences with local knowledge and good governance, any good team should integrate diverse skills and perspectives, ensuring all aspects of a project are addressed holistically. Such diversity not only drives resilience, but at a more granular level it spells “requisite variety.” If the competitive landscape can throw ten different kinds of pitches at you but you can only hit nine of them, the competition eventually wins. Requisite variety, obtained from integrating diverse methods and perspectives, diverse skills and levels and kinds of education, diverse generations and cultures — integrating them ups your chances of hitting all ten pitches. It provides the necessary variety to hit whatever changeup the environment hurls at you.
Navigating Complexity with Agility and Learning
Teams, like Wolong’s policymakers, also have to be agile and ready to adjust strategies in response to unexpected outcomes. Even Forest Gump knew that “shit happens,” aka the science of emergence. And the avalanches and earthquakes that come hurtling down the pike are often difficult if not impossible to predict. To successfully navigate the turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity, teams must favor a learning mindset over a punitive one. Embracing honest mistakes for what they can teach us, rewarding effort just as much as we reward results, and dialing down the resolution a bit to appreciate the broader situation allows for a more effective navigation through the, at times, dicey seas.
The Bigger Picture: Understanding Interconnectedness
Recognizing and acknowledging that all departments (and all communities for that matter) are deeply interconnected can lead to more sustainable and effective solutions that benefit the entire organization (or region). This concept of “telecoupling” helps us describe and analyze the interconnections and interdependencies that exist between even far-flung socio-economic and environmental systems. Goods, ideas, and capital flow just like species, and impacts in one area, like the choices consumers make, can have outsized impacts in areas where the goods we choose are produced or where the raw materials from those goods are harvested — like bamboo, for instance. A complex systems view ensures we see the forest and the trees.
Sustainable Resource Management: A Key to Resilience
Just as Wolong manages natural resources to prevent depletion, teams must effectively manage their resources to ensure sustainability. Here again, though, one needs to dial the resolution up and down to ensure a more comprehensive understanding, Resources like labor, capital, and material are coarse-grain resources. They are easy to see. But dial the resolution up a bit to get at the fine detail and we see that not all resources are so easy to see. Identity, mastery, and purpose — these are also resources that have to be replenished if we are to avoid complacency, malaise, and burnout. When’s the last time anyone here in the West thanked a teammate for the hard work that he or she was about to do? It’s something to think about. Personal resources, like a sense of meaningfulness, can be depleted without even trying, by taking people for granted, for instance, or by overriding their better judgment, separating them from their values, or depriving of them of the supportive relationships that nurture them. We do this stuff to each other all the time, often without realizing it. Hard to sustain a human ecosystem when all we do is drain the humans of their resources.
Embracing Nature’s Philosophy
Finally, just as protecting pandas serves the broader ecosystem, protecting teams’ autonomy to pursue organizational goals — ethically, that is, and often from bureaucratic processes and people that seek only to sustain the status quo — promotes a shared sense of purpose and better harnesses the groups collective intelligence, not to mention it’s a boon to collective motivation. Nature does a fine job, in most cases, of managing the tension between what’s best for the panda and what’s best for the ecosystem as a whole. But, alas, there is no perfect way to do this, to manage the dynamic tension between what is right for the individual or the individual team and what is right for the broader corporate ecosystem. To say that managing such tension is a full-time job is an understatement.
Nature affords her denizens a great deal of autonomy and uses a bevy of feedback loops to manage the tension between each and every organism and the broader ecosystem. Negative feedback loops put a damper on the trajectory of change and generally maintain stability. For instance, if the panda eats too much of the bamboo, then the bamboo can’t rebound, and so the panda goes hungry or worse, starves. Positive feedback loops, or “more equals more,” amplify the trajectory of change. If you get a cut, you experience this. Platelets show up at the wound site and send a signal for more platelets. When those platelets show up, they send a signal for even more platelets. When the wound is sealed, the signaling stops, and eventually the clot is dissolved. The point here is that teams need feedback — positive feedback to spur them on and negative feedback to reign them in — not micromanaging (a form of toxic feedback, I’d say). The difference between pandas and people? Pandas are wide open to feedback. People, not so much. Nor are we great at giving it. But that’s a simple fix: practice it.
In essence, then, recognizing the interconnectivity and interdependence of various actors in the system, adapting to change by privileging learning, managing personal and organizational resources wisely, and working collectively towards a shared purpose are key to creating a successful ecosystem within any organization or community. Turns out there’s a lot we can learn about complexity from pandas.
