Gardening Manual for Post-natural Business
An exploration of corporate metaphysics in an age when culture, technology and nature are morphing into one.
Part 3 / 3
Gardening Manual for Post-natural Business
Imagine if you could accelerate your deadbeat sustainable company to a swagger post-natural business – one that can live in a sweet symbiosis with changing nature, culture and technology. Your beloved enterprise could evolve into a thoroughly resilient and truly pro-nature creature, with a unique ability to thrive through the unforeseen future. Perhaps, if the stars align, it could even live forever.
As we illustrated in the first post in the series, The Death of Sustainable Business, the prospects for making it big with a standard sustainable business are extremely thin. The only way to riches might well be a post-natural business paradigm that is fit for this weird epoch we are living in. But this paradigmatic shift requires almost instant redesign of most corporate operations, including biz strategy, management, innovation and branding, as we described in the previous post The Birth of Post-natural Business.
To lay the more detailed, yet speculative groundwork for a 21st century post-natural corporation, we have cultivated a set of ideas for the required corporate mutation. These new business fundamentals are mapped over the 2x2 business transformation matrix, which allows the tweaking of the respective five core elements of your future enterprise.
Right in the middle, at the heart of the model, lies the big idea behind your post-natural business model that defines why your company exists in the first place and what it aims to pull off. The deriving vertical axis is built to describe the two basic, yet most profound dimensions of any corporation: what your business should do in new ways and who your business should be in the post-natural world. Finally, the horizontal axis breaks the corporate functions into internal and external ones, helping to comprehend how your natural capabilities enable your products grow and how your culture constructs your corporate’s living identity.
According to the model, the 21st century post-natural corporation #0 has incorporated the biomimetic principles deep into its core business model, #1 nurtures a spongy and fluid corporate culture, #2 operates with a vibrant and swarming organizational structure, #3 allows abundant value to emerge, and #4 generates a transmuting and perpetually evolving living brand.
Principle #0: Create a Biomimetic Business Model
The post-natural corporation excels in seeing the natural patterns that shape the external business environment. It observes how nature organizes itself across economy, society, politics and technology – and gains understanding about the morphing seasonality, hype cycles and disruptive evolution of the markets. The holistic foresight and insight will provide it the ability to create a biomimetic business model with a unique edge that helps it to adapt, survive, grow, flourish and breed in the world where flux is the only constant.
A BIOMIMETIC TECH STARTUP GARDENED A NATURAL BIZ MODEL FOR ITS SEAWEED CHARGED ELECTRIC CAR PLATFORM
The post-natural corporation creates both very short-term and very long- term value by mimicking the cyclical nature of nature. It runs a living business that moves with a reptilian agility, innovates with small modular bets and develops vital revenue streams from an assortment of adjacent consumer biomes. It also believes in the wisdom of permabusiness: it exists to sustain and advance its societal, environmental and economic patrons and stakeholders, and aims for year-over-year organic growth to distribute steady, holistic value throughout the whole business ecosystem.
Principle #1: Nurture Porous Company Culture
The post-natural corporation is a reversed social structure compared to the archetypical, intransigent corporation with artificial internal communities, feeble values and casual Fridays. It nurtures genuine human culture that is built on real bonds within the organization and brave interactions across the industry. It acts like a cultural sea sponge, a porous structure that absorbs rousing ideas and diffuses them rapidly throughout the organization, creating a perfect social environment for technological transformation and social disruption.
A SMART NORDIC CAPITAL NOMINATED BALTIC SEA SPONGE AS ITS NEW TOTEM ANIMAL
This spongy behavior empowers the organization for a thrilling quest for new knowledge and better ways to apply it, rapidly obliterating the archaic practices of ‘market research’ and ‘competitor intelligence’ as information just flows through and enlightens the algorithm-empowered intrapreneurs. The porous company culture brings the corporation to life and creates a sentient mighty creature for natural value creation and biomimetic innovation.
Principle #2: Produce a Self-organizing Organization
Long gone are the days of periodic reorganizations and pretentious corporate box-shuffles. In the new world the venial concept of organization-as-machine belongs to the corporate boneyard – where it has indeed shoveled many 20th century conglomerates.
The imaginary idea that an organization should be organized has lost its luster. The 21st century post-natural organizations are not managed or structured per se, but they rather evolve naturally. These living social systems adapt and self-organize when conditions change, emulating the swarm behavior of flocks of birds and schools of fish – or emergency departments for that matter – where the real-time, collective decision-making keeps the system alert and alive.
A SELF-ORGANIZING DRONE MANUFACTURER CULTIVATED A VIRTUAL WORKPLACE MOVEMENT TO ADAPT TO WHIZZING COMPETITION
The leap towards a self-organizing organization should start from replacing the mediocre mental models – such as the chart of boxes or the matrix of functions – with more realistic ones that can grasp the complex social arrangements where work happens. When we think the organization as a virtual, rhizomatic and modular social graph, a model derived from the network theory and accustomed for the natural complexity of human systems, we can create an organization that is loaded with emergent intelligence and is naturally born for eternal innovation.
Principle #3: Allow Emergent Value Creation
Would you believe that future corporations create new value by innovating offerings for consumer pain points through puzzling out jobs-to-be-done, championing consumer insights and managing pipelines, gates and funnels? Neither would we. Innovation, that increasingly awkward postulation of corporate creativity is finally going yo-yo, as it fails to deliver on its desperate promise for novelty and growth.
A BIODYNAMIC FASHION BRAND CO-GENERATED A COLLECTION OF NATIVE AMERICAN WEARABLE SENSORS FOR A/W 15–16
In the age of post-natural corporation, there’s no winning formula and synthetic innovation has no vitality. Rather, more and better value emerges from dexterous and purposeful organizations, where generative design is used to organically breed hybrid products and managers garden service ecosystems with great gusto.
The most fertile and fortunate businesses with the right genes will survive and keep the categories fresh through evolutionary memetic drift. And some lucky mongrels occasionally manage to mutate their offerings into category-bashing constellations of ideas, algorithms and atoms that create the post-natural future and shape the natural history.
Principle #4: Generate a Breathing Brand
Our deeply emotional response to pixel-level brand renewal (look, a new logo!) reveals an important collective moment of cultural clarity. We freak-out because our life-long suspension of disbelief on corporate mythology evaporates every time we realize how contemporary brands are inherently synthetic and require regular maintenance. These brands ramble into the uncanny valley when they frantically try to look and behave like they would live next door but always fall short with their efforts.
AN ORGANIC TECHNOLOGY BRAND ENGENDERED A LIVING, SENTIENT VISUAL IDENTITY FROM GARDEN FRESH CHINESE APPLE STEM CELLS
Our post-marketing society requires post-natural strategies for corporate branding. The brands need to lean on biomimicry principles and the philosophy of biophilia to remain authentic amid the increasingly fluid, mutating and weird brandscape.
The post-natural brand identity should therefore act like a living skin, constantly reflecting the vitality and atrophy of the functions it protects, creating a real-time representation of how the corporation glows. Once programmed, the transmuting brand identity should use a generative algorithm to build endless permutations on top of the main composition, creating an essentially breathing brand.
This is the third and last post in a series about 21st century corporate metaphysics in an age when culture, technology and nature are morphing into one. The resulting multi-part business intelligent dispatch aims to propose both epic questions and speculative answers for the contemporary corporate condition.
You can find the two previous posts here:
The original publication, Gardening Manual for Post-natural Corporation can be found at http://postnaturalcorporation.tumblr.com
