March 10, 2006
Biological ecosystems: what business teams must learn
When a new enterprise enters its market it must quickly find a viable niche in its business ecosystem or it will not survive. Similarly for cross-functional teams in major organisations : if the team does not find a value niche in that organisation's overall ecosystem then it will not deliver its potential. Amazingly certain key concepts in biological ecosystems transfer immediately into the business world.
There are very important lessons we can use here from the ecology of biological networks and food webs [1] and particularly:
- The "Community Assembly" Process
- The Three Types of relationships in a Food web
- The Complex interdependencies between species
Community Assembly
This is the name given to the process of self-organisation within a biological community which only admits a new species (business team or enterprise) into its “ecological niche” if it fits together in a “functional food web” with all the other species (customers, complementors & competitors) already there.
Community Assembly has three conditions which need to be fulfilled for a new species to be successfully incorporated in the community:
- The new species must be adapted to the physical conditions at the site - think market
- The site must have the right kind of food and enough of it for the new species to be able to grow and reproduce - think customers and resource partners
- If the site already has other animals that can eat the new species then deaths cannot exceed births - think competitors and alternatives
Food Web Relationships
Essentially 3 types of relationship exist between species in a food web:
- Predator : e.g. Cats consume Mice
- Competitor: e.g. Foxes and Cats eat Mice, Mice and Sheep eat Grass (competition for food or other resources)
- Symbiant : e.g. Birds co-exist with Ticks for mutual benefit
In business and organisational terms a new entity must identify the other main species in its web and be able to establish which type of relationship exists or will be created – predator, competitor or symbiant.
When we think of competition we often only think of ecological predators, who compete for customers, and neglect ecological competitors who compete for vital resources such as staff.
In ecology the roles of the other species are generally fixed however in the business and organisational worlds the roles an entity can play are much more fluid with for example a company being a predator in one market and a symbiant in another.
More importantly these roles can be shaped as part of the new entity set-up as at this stage most roles in the business ecosystem are only at a potential state.
Therefore the opportunity exists to consider how to convert potential powerful competitors into symbiants or at very least to less direct competitors within the ecosystem.
Complex interdependencies and feedback loops
These exist between species and the outcomes may be counter- intuitive and often only emerge over long periods of time.
For example the relationships between prey and predator [2]:
“As settlers spread into the West, they killed vast numbers of animals, from grizzlies to mice, in an effort to make the wild more suitable for habitation. Hunting on this scale had a variety of effects on the rest of the ecosystem, and one of the best examples is that of hunting in the national game preserve of Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau.
As the number of humans in the area increased, the need (and the ability) to kill the predatory animals increased. In just over ten years 674 cougars, 3,000 coyotes and 120 bobcats were killed. As the number of predators available to kill the areas deer population decreased, so the number of deer increased. With almost all predators being wiped out, the deer population shot from around 3,000 in 1906 to over 100,000 in 1924. This increase meant the rate at which the local fauna was consumed similarly shot up, past its ability to regenerate itself.
With the deer eating vegetation faster than it could grow, soon there was almost no food left, with the result that most of the deer swiftly died, leaving an expanse of largely bare (but predator-free) land”.
In business and organisational terms this principle applies equally well – for example if you go into a price war with your major competitor you are just as likely to destroy the profitability of the market for yourself as for them.
Another example would be destroying your major competitor and then being perceived as having created a monopolistic situation where your potential customers have no choice and causing a market or regulatory backlash.
References
1. Marten. G., 2001, Human Ecology – Basic Concepts for Sustainable Development, Earthscan
2. Davis. M., Ecology of Fear, Metropolitan Books
About the author
Ken Thompson was formerly the European IT Manager with Reuters in London and Managing Director with VISION Consulting in Belfast. At VISION, Ken spent over 10 years successfully delivering services to clients in the Financial Services, Government and the Small Business Sectors. Recognized as a leading expert in the growing area of Virtual Enterprise Networks, Ken also helps distributed business teams in medium and large-sized organizations become successful through a unique approach to team design and working practices. Ken is the founder of www.bioteams.com – a research blog dedicated to how organizational teams can learn from nature’s best teams.
Posted by Ken Thompson on March 10, 2006 at 12:00 AM in BioTeam Ecology | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 10, 2005
Bioteams Glossary
Here is a number of terms definitions that relate to bioteaming and virtual teams.
All definitions from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Visit wikipedia for the full definition
Autopoiesis
Autopoiesis literally means "self-production" (from the Greek: auto for self- and poiesis for creation or production) and expresses a fundamental complementarity between structure and function. The term was originally introduced by Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana in the early 1970s. More precisely, the term refers to the dynamics of non-equilibrium structures; that is, organised states (sometimes also called dissipative structures) that remain stable for long periods of time despite matter and energy continually flowing through them.....
Bioteam, Bioteaming
A Bioteam is an organisational team which operates on the principles embodied by natures most successful teams including ants, bees, geese, cells. micro-organisms and termites. All these teams share common traits which have emerged through millions of years evolutionary experience and include self-organisation (autopoiesis), indirect communications (stigmergy) and emergent behavior....
Caste
The word Caste is derived from the Portuguese word casta, meaning lineage, breed or race. The term "caste", when used in human culture, is usually in conjunction with the social division in Hindu society, particularly in India. This term is also used in entomology to describe social insects species who have a specific sub-type of which is specialised in a certain task. For example, social insects like ants, bees and termites have caste divisions of queen (specialization in reproduction) and worker (specialization in food gathering)......
Cognition
The term cognition is used in several different loosely related ways. In psychology it is used to refer to the mental processes of an individual, with particular relation to a view that argues that the mind has internal mental states (such as beliefs, desires and intentions) and can be understood in terms of information processing, especially when a lot of abstraction or concretization is involved, or processes such as involving knowledge, expertise or learning for example are at work. It is also used in a wider sense to mean the act of knowing or knowledge, and may be interpreted in a social or cultural sense to describe the emergent development of knowledge and concepts within a group....
Complex (Adaptive) System
A complex system is a system whose properties are not fully explained by an understanding of its component parts. Complex systems consist of a large number of mutually interacting and interwoven parts, entities or agents. They are woven out of many parts, the Latin complexus comes from the Greek pleko or plektos, meaning "to plait or twine." (Gell-Mann). Complex systems is also often used as a broad term addressing a research approach which includes ideas and techniques from chaos theory, artificial life, evolutionary computation and genetic algorithms.....
Ecosystem
In ecology, an ecosystem is a naturally occuring assemblage of organisms (plant, animal and other living organisms-living together with their environment (or biotope), functioning as a unit of sorts.....
Edge of Chaos, Sweet Spot
In the sciences in general, the phrase Edge of Chaos has come to refer to a metaphor that some physical, biological, economic and social systems operate in a region between order and complete randomness or chaos, where the complexity is maximal. Stuart Kauffman has studied mathematical models of evolving systems in which the rate of evolution is maximized near the edge of chaos....
Emergence, Emergent Behavior
Emergence is the process of deriving some new and coherent structures, patterns and properties in a complex system. Emergent phenomena occur due to the pattern of interactions between the elements of a system over time. Emergent phenomena are often unexpected, nontrivial results of relatively simple interactions of relatively simple components. What distinguishes a complex system from a merely complicated one is that in a complex system, some behaviours and patterns emerge as a result of the patterns of relationship between the elements....
Eusocial
Eusociality is the phenomenon of reproductive specialisation found in some species of animal, whereby a specialised caste carries out reproduction in a colony of non-reproductive animals........
Fitness Landscape
Apart from the field of evolutionary biology, the concept of a Fitness Landscape has gained importance in evolutionary optimization methods such as genetic algorithms or evolutionary strategies. In evolutionary optimization, one tries to solve real-world problems (e.g., engineering or logistics problems) by imitating the dynamics of biological evolution...
Metabolism
Metabolism (from metabolismos, the Greek word for "change"), describes the biochemical modification of chemical compounds in living organisms and cells. This includes the biosynthesis of complex organic molecules (anabolism) and their breakdown (catabolism). Metabolism usually consists of sequences of enzymatic steps, also called metabolic pathways. The total metabolism are all biochemical processes of an organism. The cell metabolism includes all chemical processes in a cell...
Nervous System
The nervous system of an animal coordinates the activity of the muscles, monitors the organs, constructs and processes input from the senses, and initiates actions.....
Stigmergy
Stigmergy is a method of communication in decentralised systems in which the individual parts of the system communicate with one another by modifying their local environment. Stigmergy was first observed in nature; for example, ants communicate to one another by laying down pheromones along their trails, so an ant colony is a stigmergic system. Another common example is nest-building in termites.........
Requisite Variety
In 1963 Ross Ashby formulated the law of Requisite Variety - when the variety or complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity of a system (natural or artificial) the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy that system....Swarm Intelligence
Swarm intelligence (SI) is an artificial intelligence technique based around the study of collective behaviour in decentralised, self-organised, systems. The expression "swarm intelligence" was introduced by Beni & Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems (see also cellular automata)........
Posted by Ken Thompson on April 10, 2005 at 05:28 PM in BioTeam Ecology | Permalink | Comments (0)