Making Mutualisms
Designing Symbiotic Partnerships at Work
Among my favorite relationships in nature is the bond between ravens and wolves. The bird and the canine hold a common core desire–find and consume carrion–but they hold different skill sets that allow them to work together to amplify each animal’s ability to achieve that goal. With the gift of flight and their strong social connections, ravens are able to locate dead animals that wolves might not otherwise know about and then alert the wolfpack to its existence through their abundant noisy chatter. Wolves, of course, are skilled at working together to bring down prey to transform it into carrion, and their sharp teeth can tear through tough animal hide and sinew to open up a carcass for ravens to get their fill. The connection appears to go beyond hunting parthers; as scientists observe these relationships, they are starting to see ravens possibly even playing with wolf pups, and close bonds potentially forming between individual ravens and wolves.
Do I romanticize these kinds of symbiotic relationships in nature, known as mutualisms to denote the fact that each partner derives a net benefit from working together? You bet I do. It’s tempting to give into the warm, fuzzy feeling that arises when I hear stories like these. It generates an instant desire to author a children’s book detailing the friendship of two fully anthropomorphized animals, collaborating Wondertwin style, to illustrate for the young leaders of tomorrow that teamwork really does make the dream work.
But then I return to the reminder I received recently from biologist and biomimic Dr. Dayna Baumeister that we are not ravens. Nor are we wolves.
Among the toughest nuts for me to crack in my work directing an academic center within a college is how to forge meaningful, truly mutualistic partnerships with other areas of campus. Like many institutions and organizations, our college is a constellation of units and departments, centers and offices, institutes and initiatives, which function as a set of loosely connected but remarkably isolated islands. Each island contains its own little habitat that evolves largely on its own. Perhaps some ideas or inspiration from one island might grow wings and migrate to another, but for the most part we’re all trying to achieve our version of the college’s mission through whatever means we can and with whatever resources we hold. Rarely do we pause to consider what might happen if we stitched our islands together to allow our separate ecosystems to collide.
It’s not that our institution isn’t committed to collaboration. Particularly when we have a moment to pull our heads up out of the dailiness of our work, there is an earnest desire within our culture to reduce repetition, to stop over-programming, to pool resources, and to work together in generative ways. Nevertheless, I’m convinced we aren’t entirely sure what we mean when we say we want to collaborate. Nor do I think we would know how to collaborate fully–in a ravens and crows sort of way–even if we set out to try. And, if we’re honest with ourselves, there isn’t a systemic incentive structure in place to encourage us to do so.
Baumeister is right: we are neither ravens nor wolves, but what we can do (and what she actively encourages us to do) is to move beyond individual organisms to look for and learn from the patterns in the more-than-human world that might shape our work together. The mutualisms between clownfish and sea anemones, or between leaf-cutter ants, bacteria, and fungi, or the magnificent wonder that is a lichen, are all unique in how they structure the relationship. But examined together, examples like these can illuminate some common elements that could help us shape our partnerships.
Here are the four criteria that Baumeister and other biomimics have identified as necessary for sustainable mutualisms in nature:
Both partners experience a net benefit from the relationship, and that creates a reinforcing feedback loop. The relationship might help a partner achieve a function they can’t achieve on their own, or it might amplify their ability to pursue a particular need. Each partner brings offerings, in the form of resources or services or knowledge, and each partner has needs fulfilled in some way. The combining of forces allows all parties to achieve their goals better than they might have alone.
Partners bring different offerings to the table. The beauty of the mutualistic partnership is in the diversity that exists between the two (or more) partners. Birds can fly and wolves have sharp teeth. Sea anemones can sting predators and clownfish can provide nutrients in the form of poop. The net benefit each side receives stems from the unique resource or service the other partner can provide.
There is a readiness on both sides to engage in the partnership. By “readiness,” I don’t mean everyone is in the mood to work together. Instead, I mean that each partner can readily provide their offering to the partnership without too much strain. Partners might be near each other, embedded in the same ecosystem, and perhaps already doing the thing they provide to the partnership. Ravens already take to the wing and search for carrion. Wolves already tear carcasses open with their teeth. There is an ease in combining those functions to amplify both partners’ effectiveness in the hunt.
Partners respond and adapt to each other and the context as both of those change. Nothing in nature is static. Successful, sustainable mutualisms require all partners to be sensitive to shifts in their partners’ needs and behaviors, while also keeping an eye towards the dynamic environment in which the relationship is being played out. In order for the relationship to survive, it needs to adapt (or end, if that adaptation proves impossible or the relationship no longer serves all parties).
As our team is beginning to think about the next phase of our center’s work, I’m experimenting with taking the above criteria as our guide for evaluating both the partnerships we currently have, and for helping us design new ones with other units across the college. So far, I’ve found it much easier to look backward at what already is and ask: how mutualistic and sustainable are our partnerships, if we take these as our criteria? Does the partnership really fill needs on both sides in a deep and meaningful way? Are we leveraging our differences as well as we could? Is the partnership built to adapt?
The bigger challenge, of course, lies in inviting colleagues into an attempt to design new mutualisms from scratch. This involves doing some big picture thinking about questions like: What are our units’ core functions within our larger organizational ecosystem, and what are each partner’s greatest needs and challenges for achieving those functions? What does each partner have to offer, distinct from each other, that could help fill those needs? What are we already doing that could assist us in that, rather than creating something new? How will we make sure we’re responsive to each other and build in mechanisms for adaptation in whatever relationships we build?
As ecologist Rob Dunn illuminates in A Natural History of the Future, population growth and human attempts to control and manage the natural world have resulted in the creation of countless isolated, island-like habitats interspersed between cities and farmland, fragmented by settlements and roads. This has resulted in unintended consequences, including a rise in “pest” organisms and marked decrease in overall species diversity. Dunn highlights the importance of developing wildlife corridors to facilitate migrations and create connections across habitats.
Within an institution, it’s far easier to design and manage an island than it is to build meaningful and lasting mutualisms that link our habitats to another. As I begin this work in our section of the institutional ecosystem, I’ll continue to look for tools and frameworks that can help us to invite others into dreaming up new collisions inspired by the more-than-human world.