Nature’s lessons for human governance
· 11 min read
I wrote a piece for illuminem last year about applying the Exponential Governance Mindset (a 5-element framework from my book Governing Pandora) to the emerging and growing field of Biomimetics. You can find the article here.
This year, in preparation for my governance presentation at the annual Biomimetics 2026 conference, it suddenly dawned on me that perhaps I should be asking a different question than the one I asked last year which was – how do we govern biomimetics?
This year I am asking the reverse:
What can 3.8 billion years of lessons from nature teach us – humans of the 21st century – about better leadership, ethical behaviours, stakeholder stewardship, resilience building and strategic foresight?
Last year I focused on the governance of biomimetics. This year I’m focusing on the biomimetics of governance – suggesting the reverse approach: taking our cues from relevant examples from nature and translating and distilling those lessons for us mere human mortals to deploy to do a better job of leading this planet through our deeply turbulent times.
Below I use one illustration from nature to inform each of the 5 elements of the Exponential Governance Mindset – to wit: Leadership, Ethos, Impact, Resilience and Foresight.
So, let’s get to it and examine an example from nature that might inform better human leadership and governance, ethos and culture, stakeholder impact, resilience building and better strategic foresight.
This is a definition of what I consider to be “good tech leadership and governance” – adapted for overall good leadership and governance from my book Governing Pandora:
“Successful leadership and governance is about having clarity on the rules of the road, a direct connection to entity mission and vision, freedom from material conflicts of interest, and a holistic, all-of-entity approach to integrating frontline governance into overall governance. The idea of successful governance applies to any and every type of entity – for profit, nonprofit, governmental, and so on. The crux of successful governance is whether an entity is governed consciously and proactively or is ignored, neglected, or discombobulated...The reality of 360 governance is about a synchronous, integrated governance culture from the top down, from the bottom up, and radiating from the middle out.”
Adapted from: Bonime-Blanc, Andrea. Governing Pandora: Leading in the Age of Generative AI and Exponential Technology. Georgetown University Press 2026.
In his book, Honeybee Democracy (Princeton University Press 2010), Thomas Seeley describes an unusual and unusually effective form of democratic decision-making within the honeybee swarm – one that shows that the Queen (the ostensible “leader”) does not really lead but instead a form of decentralised empowerment reigns the swarm.
In their world, the swarm makes every major decision. For example, choosing a new home (which can be a life or death decision) – where hundreds of scout bees take the lead to scope things out and only when the scouts reach a quorum about the new site quality do the rest of the swarm follow.
Seeley specifically draws lessons for humans from his decades of studying the honeybee swarms – among them:
Once again adapted from a more tech-centric definition from Governing Pandora – here are some thoughts about what “Ethos” means:
Ethos is what leaders create, nurture, enable, and disseminate within their organisations – consciously and unconsciously – and the resulting “great, good, bad, or ugly” tenor of their culture. Understanding how leaders use, integrate, and/or deploy technology and exponential technology within their organisations reveals a lot about their overall organisational culture and ethos. Are leaders fostering a healthy, retaliation-free, speak-up, follow-up, and problem-solving culture that puts responsibility, safety, and ethics first? An entity’s internal culture also has both direct and indirect consequences for its reputation risk and/or opportunity for both internal and external stakeholders.
Yes, believe it or not, I have a Halloween themed example from nature that can teach us humans a few lessons. It’s the case of the vampire bat. According to Gerald Wilkinson (in his article “Reciprocal food sharing in the vampire bat,” Nature 308, 1984), when in times of hardship, it is unable to feed on mammalian blood for 2–3 nights, other bats that have fed will regurgitate blood to those who haven’t fed sufficiently. While the author clearly concludes that this isn’t an act of charity, this behaviour tracks both the idea of kinship and the opportunity to be repaid in kind in the future – something that those who are rescued remember. Further studies have shown that sharing beyond the kinship group, expands that group thereby growing and deepening long-term social bonds.
Clearly, there are humans that practice these general principles as well – caring for community, for the less fortunate, fostering a culture of responsibility and care of others. The vampire bat example offers a few lessons for organisational / corporate culture:
Once again adapted from Governing Pandora:
Impact is about the importance of leaders and decisionmakers identifying, understanding and integrating key stakeholders and their primary interests into an organisation’s life cycle – from invention or acquisition to usage and deployment. To do this, we need to understand who our key tech stakeholders are. Concurrently, we also need to understand what their key issues and expectations are – whether economic, environmental, social, technological, or governance.
The example of the Yellowstone wolfpack gives us some clues of how important and how mutually dependent, interdependent and impactful we are on the ecosystem and stakeholders surrounding us.
In their Biological Conservation article examining the interdependency of the reintroduced wolfpack in Yellowstone Park titled “Trophic Cascades in Yellowstone: The first 15 years after wolf reintroduction,” authors William Ripple and Robert Beschta show that after the reintroduction of the wolfpack in that park after a 70-year absence something called the “trophic cascade” took place. Even though wolves weren’t numerous at any given time they had a disproportionate ecological impact on their environment – meaning that other key life forms in the park changed accordingly. For example, as elk numbers declined and where they grazed changed (because of the wolfpack hunting them), trees and vegetation along the rivers grew back which in turn attracted other animals like beavers, songbirds and fish to repopulated river areas in the park.
There are a few lessons from this example:
Again, here is a description adapted from my book Governing Pandora:
Resilience in the Age of Pandora means understanding that because we live in a “polyrisk” and “polycrisis” world, we need to be as prepared as possible to survive and thrive through it all...resilience is about focusing on developing the personal and organisational resilience – polyrisk and polycrisis preparedness – that is needed in this age of rapid and often-dangerous challenge and change. It means that leaders must be continuously prepared for what is next and have the necessary tools to learn, mitigate, and/or deal with downsides while fully taking advantage of upsides. It is a process of continuous learning.
In Ants at Work (1999; Gordon Lab, Stanford), the author Deborah Gordon makes the case that the ant colony builds long lasting resilience based on two critical factors: a system of distributed authority and good information sharing. Focused on the life of the harvester ant, the author shows how the colony operates seamlessly without central authority and with no specific ant directing another. Instead, each ant is built in such a way that it can reliably forage, build, defend and reallocate its own labour keyed to changing conditions around it. It’s as if these ants had a refined sense of situational awareness giving them the ability to adapt and pivot independently as needed. And it does so via the exchange of relevant information not hierarchy or command and control.
There are several significant lessons the ant colony can teach humans about resilience:
Once again, here is a description from Governing Pandora:
Unleashing a future-forward strategy involves having a seamlessly integrated set of practices including having a keen sense of situational awareness; engaging in systems thinking as relevant to the ecosystems that are relevant; gathering accurate risk and opportunity intelligence; and finally, engaging in interdisciplinary scenario planning exercises.
What can be said about the strategic foresight of the elephant matriarch? According to two scientific sources consulted (McComb et al., “Matriarchs as repositories of social knowledge in African elephants,” Science, 2001; Foley, Pettorelli & Foley, “Severe drought and calf survival in elephants,” Biology Letters, 2008), elephant matriarchs have truly evolved intelligence that deploys experience from its and its herd’s history (think about the expression “having an elephant’s memory”) to chart new courses and alternative paths. They demonstrate the value of leaders with long tenure and experience sometimes being a most valuable player when it comes to strategic foresight and moves. In one of these studies, the older matriarchs (over 55 years old) were found to be deeply discerning about separating friend from foe – they had the social knowledge to discern that younger matriarchs did not. These social cues translated into greater survival for the baby elephants in the herd – a strategic asset if there ever was one.
There are some impressive lessons human leaders can learn from the elephant matriarch:
My final overall takeaways of things you can do today to apply nature’s lessons to your organisational governance are the following:
Act like a Matriarch Elephant leading forward – plan ahead using history and situational awareness as your guide.
Build your resilience practices & structures to constantly adapt to changing times
Consider your direct & indirect stakeholders, your influence & their expectations
Acting with integrity, care and ethics for those in your ecosystem is central to surviving and thriving
Adapt and evolve your leadership style from command & control to more of an adaptable, pivotable, mutually respectful and well informed governance 360 where all participate meaningfully in decision-making – top down, bottom up and middle out.
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