The Mushroom MBA: What Organizations Can Learn from Mycelium

             Life, death, renewal. It is true for humans; it is true for what David Abrams calls the “More-Than-Human World” (MTHW); it is true for organizations. Change continues to be both an organic process of natural evolution and instigated by the human species. Yet the modern world many of us know is one that often relies on perceived divisions – human/animal; human/plant; human/human; and all the different ways in which we can separate ourselves as independent units. We often mistaken survival of one species for destruction of something else. We often structure our societies and organizations with a winner-takes-all approach.

A myopic view on survival overlooks the reality that we are part of a closed, regenerative, living system. As Sally Helgesen portended over 30 years ago, “the old long hero leader is increasingly being recognized as not only deadening to the human spirit, but also ultimately inefficient.”i We now have an opportunity to revisit and strengthen the obvious connections between the physical natural world and human-driven organizations. For some time now, we have spoken of organizational design as a “science” to understand the “machine” of organizational behavior and dynamics. We have separated Marketing departments from Legal departments. We “innovate” with “human-centered” organizations with ESG (Environmental, Social, & Governance) initiatives as add-ons. Such separations, as well as the placement of the human at the center (and the top), have often led to short-term solutions and long-term inefficiencies.

The physical natural world doesn’t waste energy or time. As brown notes, nature makes use of everything. Leaders who understand this embrace an ecocentric ethic, as Andrés Edwards calls it, and act with a “reverence for life and the surrounding natural environment.”ii In his book, Principles, hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio notes that “all the laws of reality were given to us by nature. Man didn’t create these laws, but by understanding them, we can use them to foster our own evolution and achieve our goals.”iii

In fact, the study of biomimicry, rooted in ancient Greek bio or “life” and mīmēis or “imitation,” is about looking to the models and systems found in nature to solve complex, human problems. For example, mycelium, or what Entangled Life’s Merlin Sheldrake calls, the “living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation,”iv has much to teach humans about network and movement efficiency. For example, Sheldrake points to how researchers studying the Tokyo train network looked to slime molds and fungi to make urban transportation networks more efficient.

We humans have an exciting and urgent opportunity to learn and adapt teachings from the physical natural world to organizational structures and goals that are not in opposition to our collective survival. After all, nature prefers what is good for the whole. This is an invitation to learn from the teachings of the MTHW.

 

The Minds of Mycelium

Mycorrhizal networks, which have been around for some 500 million years, die and regenerate up to 60 times a year.v Through tumultuous climate changes and human-initiated causes that have eviscerated micro-ecosystems, mycelium seems to have figured something out. As weblike networks comprised of individual fungi, plants, and other life, individual actions dictate the health of the entirety. Each individual has a responsibility and a role to play, even though there is no center of control or small management team at the top. The entire network is potentially infinitely regenerative, coordinating with adaptive resiliency and opportunism to live, survive, and grow. Each part holds merit and wisdom. In fact, any one part of the network can regenerate and regrow and entire system.vi Imagine if any one individual, be it the person who waters the office plants or the chief compliance officer, could be the impetus for a struggling company’s reemergence.

            Understanding how the human brain and the mycelium ‘brain’ make connections and organize offer insight on how our intradependence impact organizational, societal, and global dynamics. The human mind’s capacity for the flow of information is not made by one singular decision point made or by a singular ‘ruler’ of the brain. Neuroscientist David Eagleman notes that the way in which individual neurons reshape themselves is always in relation to each other.

This self-organizing, recursive, relational human mind is not dissimilar to that of mycelium. In fact, the term mycelium means “more than one.” Just as the human brain must change in its very essence though not in its nature, so too do mycelium adapt and regenerate without a central brain, or at least the way that traditional cognitive neuroscience has defined as a brain. The wisdom lies in each tip of the many individual parts that make up the whole for mycelium is the webbed network of fungi. Whether tiny or kilometers wide, it is one organism made up of many, many, many – they can number in the billions – individual tubular, threadlike filaments called hyphae. The hyphae have tips that are the ones that grow, branch, and fuse. They are simultaneously “integrating and processing information on a massively parallel basis,”vii transmitting information and data about where they should go and what to avoid.

 

Organizations as Living Systems

Decades ago, Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers stressed that humans interfered with the natural process of self-organization, “the way the world has created itself for billions of years.”viii Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations calls attention back to the emergence of organizational consciousness that mirror that of human evolution. Making connections to the energy vibrations of color, he notes that human organizations have shifted from authoritative, power-focused red; to stable, top-down amber; to growth, management-control orange; to empowered, culture-driven. Laloux now calls attention to what is necessary now: the emergence of the conscious, living-system teal (as in, the blue-green color, named after the Eurasian bird of the same name) organizations. He defines “teal organizations” as having three characteristics:  1) self-management; 2) wholeness; and 3) evolutionary purpose. If these characteristics seem by now somewhat familiar (did anyone say mushroom?), it is because teal organizations recognize that they are “living systems [with] the innate capacity to sense changes in their environment and to adapt from within.”ix (215).  

Mycelium (and plants) have thrived because – not despite that – they have “no operational centers, no capital cities, no seats of government. Control is dispersed. Mycelial coordination takes place both everywhere at once and nowhere in particular.”x In fact, a distributed “decision-making” structure allows for wiser decisions. If each hyphal tip were to wait for another hyphal tip kilometers away before responding to impending danger or replenishing food sources, they could not adapt and survive.

The connection between the physical natural world and human teal organizations are not lost on Laloux, who writes:

“Living systems have the innate capacity to sense changes in their environment and to adapt from within. In a forest, there is no master tree that plans and dictates change when rain fails to fall or when the spring comes early. The whole ecosystem reacts creatively, in the moment. Teal organizations deal with change in a similar way. People are free to act on what they see is needed; they are not boxed in by static job descriptions, reporting lines, and functional units. They can react creativity to life’s emerging, surprising, non-linear unfolding.”xi

 

The Rewards of Reciprocity

Another critical characteristic of thriving living systems is reciprocity. In both teal organizations and the MTHW, no being is more important than another, one does not take without giving, and one does not give without taking. There is no hierarchy, no leader at the top, “there are no unimportant [beings].”xii

When exploring these ideals, it is important not romanticize them as some utopian, selfless, always giving, never taking system. Power is simply distributed differently, not in a top-down continuum, but in a web-like connective structure, the more these underlying social networks breeds creativity and progress. Laloux comments that in teal organizations:

“Power is not viewed as a zero-sum game…. Instead, if we acknowledge that we are all interconnected, the more powerful you are, the more powerful I can become. The more powerfully you advance the organization’s purpose, the more opportunities will open up for me to make contributions of my own. Here we stumble on a beautiful paradox: people can hold different levels of power, and yet everyone can be power.”xiii

 

At the root of it, individuals in a teal organization – and in a mycelial network – exist because of the relational. The Bantu word, ubuntu, refers to the concept that “I am because we are.” The relationship networks that allow the individual and the collective coexist without competition is a critical component seen in the MTHW. For example, lichen is not one thing. One cannot “see” lichen. Lichen itself is a symbiotic partnership, often between a fungi and an algae. Making up 8% of the planet’s surface it is nearly impossible to see the lichen itself because lichen is the symbiosis itself. By cooperating, the fungi and the algae survive. Sheldrake sees this as true collaboration – where individual parts gain by the survival of the whole.

 

Applying Mycelium Teachings

Like mycelium, the human ability to adapt and innovate in symbiosis with others is key to our individual and collective wellbeing. Even if we cognitively understand the relational, when we experience and embody it, we can better incorporate and embed them into the very systems we organize and structure. As increasing research shows the physical, psychological, and socio-emotional benefits of forest therapy and forest bathing, we also cannot forget the benefits of all the teachings that the MTHW offer us. What lessons might we find if we look?

1.     Get curious. Open your awareness to how the MTHW is efficient and innovation – perhaps the shape of packrat nests or plant hibernation behavior.

2.     Seek patterns. Look for patterns of behavior in the MTHW – perhaps a spider web or a honeycomb. See how each individual part informs a collective whole.

3.     Invite perspectives. Challenge yourself to whose perspective might you be missing – perhaps it’s from the MTWH or the human world. Be proactive in seeking wisdom.

 

By immersing ourselves in nature and paying attention, we may gain the benefits of teaching with a fuller sensory approach. As teal organizations learn from the teachings of mycelium, we can better see how individuals acting in their own best interests can and do facilitate the survival and health of those around them in the entire ecosystem. This is the potential if we seek wisdom from mushrooms.