Towards the end of the 20th Century, E.O. Wilson proposed in a book called Biophilia that humans have an innate biological need to affiliate with life, a genetic "tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes." Biophilia--literally a love of life or living systems--accounts for the centuries-old practices across diverse human cultures of caring for the natural world. According to many, it is also central to our competitive advantage and genetic fitness as humans.
Now, in the first decades of the 21st Century, we humans not only find ourselves facing a possible mass extinction of species--a terrible loss of living systems--but we also find ourselves empowered by the tools to create and design life itself. This seems a critical crossroads in human evolution. And it demands a kind of leadership that we seem to be hard-wired for: we might call it bioempathic leadership.
Leading Life:
A Shift in Perspective
Over the last century, leaders became increasingly efficient at managing large-scale, complex technological systems. Using computers and their metaphors, they built rational systems on a scale never before seen on the planet, connecting countries as if they were neighborhoods, and directing the flow of goods, services, and wealth through channels they themselves designed.
At the current crossroads, however, leadership seems to be shifting toward an intelligence of the natural world. This intelligence is not only a new knowledge of the biological and natural sciences. It's not just the ability to sequence genes and proteins and create new life forms from open-source biobricks. It's also a surrender to the patterns and cycles of nature in their most sophisticated forms.
Consider swarm intelligence: the bottom-up emergent patterns of organization that we observe in the world of insects like ants and bees. The science of swarms has become the basis for everything from artificial intelligence in computing to factory design. But there's an inherent contradiction in these engineering projects. By nature, swarm intelligence is more emergent than designed. Even as we build more "natural" systems, we're turning our built environment into one that follows its own rules and cycles, very much like nature. Sometimes it's even built from biological components that exercise their on intelligence.
In this world, leadership is more about sensing, clustering, and engaging. In short, it is about empathy--or feeling into. And it's specifically about feeling into the complexity of the biological living world. It's about bioempathy.
Leading the Transition:
A Shift of Human Activity
If the past century was about amazing feats of engineering in the built environment and the wiring of the planet for global connectivity, the coming century will clearly be much more focused on the challenges of restoring a battered natural environment and sustaining complex natural systems. On every level, humans are facing biological challenges--from personal health to our food systems to alternative energy and our climate. The natural world is necessarily the focus of our most heroic endeavors for the coming century.
Already we see the goals of sustainability moving front and center in our markets, our technologies, and our government policies. In companies where sustainability was a fringe project for much of the past three decades, it is becoming a strategic initiative. Not surprising: remember that biophilia is a self-interested concern for the environment that provides competitive advantage.
Bioempathy is about seeing human activity as nested within environmental vitality and vice versa. Ecosystems are lives in a dynamic balance. For bioempathic leaders, ecosystems are not problems to be solved. They are life systems that need to be nurtured as delicate and constantly shifting balances smong life forms.