Biomimicry as a teacher for leadership.

These images are a visual representation of the elements of my work. I am entangling myth, biomimicry and ecology in everything that I am now creating.

I took this photo of the bird here in Sweden, it is a Wheatear and rather special. I wanted to place it here as it represents some of the work of the amazing biomimicrist, Janine Benyus. She explains that when land has been damaged, birds come and land on sticks and poop. They leave seeds in their droppings which form the start of a small island of fertility. One little island appears, then another and another.

Only 16% of a field needs these islands in order for complete healing of the land to take place and nature does the rest. She explains that first the weeds protect the top soil, then shrubs and bushes form, creating shade and pushing deeper roots into the soil and these then give the protection needed for saplings to grow. She also goes on to explain how this is mimicked in the human body - a scab forms on the surface of the skin to enable the deeper healing below.

I actually think of this knowledge as a leadership model and I built a very successful course around the image of the bird on the stick - inviting the leaders to think of themselves as the poop-sticks. I offered the participants the concept of leaders as seed developers, moving across an organisation, helping create fertile and safe soils, in order for growth and change to take place and creating the conditions for biodiversity to take root in hardened places where a certain monoculture had settled in. Such as bullying, racism etc.

I truly believe we need to move away from the old model of Joseph Campbell and the individual hero on his quest - we need a mycorrhizal network, stretching out horizontally, not a hierarchical approach and I have written a lot about how this is an unsustainable model. Toby Herzlich has extended Benyus’s thinking brilliantly - into biomimicry for social innovation. She asks what organisational and community change might look like if it followed nature's patterns rather than fighting them.

I love both these bodies of work, but I also think something is missing from them and that is Myth.

I believe Myth was the original knowledge system for exactly what Benyus and Herzlich are mapping - it is our translator regarding ecology and our place within it. In my favourite, (and I feel one of the most powerful myths,) Inanna, the ancient Sumerian Goddess of all the above (who you can see in the image above,) descends to the underworld and becomes a piece of flesh hanging on a hook - stripped of everything that gave her power. But, she is then restored because she is remembered (re-membered) and the abundance of the earth returns with her. Her myth is not just a story about a goddess, I see it as a map of regenerative cycles that we are still, slowly, and scientifically just catching up with it. (There has been some incredible work between First Nation People and NASA regarding their myths of the solar system and Red Star Boy - who is Mars.)

We are absolutely moving in the right direction - Rivers in parts of the world and in the UK, are now being granted legal rights and being recognised as entities with agency. However Myth never forgot that - every river in the old stories had a name, a voice, often a nymph-like female deity and knowledge it was willing to share - but we unfortunately have become illiterate in our landscape and so much of my work is now focused on becoming literate in it again, in order to become more literate as ourselves as part of it.

This post is not saying that we need to become biomimicry experts in order to lead regeneratively - It is an invitation for us to return to the stories that were already teaching us how living systems work and I think if we do - if we entangle the work of Benyus with Inanna and Herzlich's social innovation work with Sisyphus at the base of the mountain again and with Gilgamesh offering us tenderness and sorrow - the gifts given to him for his hubris - then our work as leaders will become incredibly rich.

That is the entanglement I keep pulling on and you are invited to join me.

Thanks so much for reading this and please share your thoughts with me.

Katrice

P.S - if you are interested in this approach and want to explore it further in your presentation/communication work, I am offering a masterclass on August 8th - details can be found here

Plus, the Wildlings Path Course - that works with personal story to understand the narratives that shape us begins in September and you can find out more here.

And finally, I am working with a wonderful woman in order to create a more coherent online ecology of my work - this will mean some work being done on my website and social media sites. Just to give you a heads-up and hopefully make it all a little easier for you to become entangled in my work.