Queen Bee & The Drones

07 Sep 2007 – John Elkington

OK, the title is a stretch for a World Economic Forum session, but I’ll explain that in a moment. The background is that I managed to squeak my way in to a second session in the WorkSpace this afternoon, called ‘Building a Sustainable Company.’ Fascinating, with participants encouraged to think out of the box by viewing the sustainability agenda for business through the lens of a number of biological metaphors.

WorkSpace, for those who haven’t encountered, is a bit like a giant olive oil press used to encourage creativity in bust people and to squeeze out their best thinking in short order. This WEF offering is delivered by The Value Web, alongside Forum staff. Having led a couple of sessions on the future of cities in variants of the WorkSpace, one in Davos in January and a second yesterday, focusing on WEF’s evolving SlimCity initiative, I recommend it highly.

So back to the WorkSpace today. I was part of Group 1, which focused on the prairie as a metaphor, while the other six groups variously took the human body, meerkats, lions, tropical forests, coral reefs and bees as their guiding stars. In the case of prairies, a key text came from Kevin Kelly’s wildly wonderful book Out of Control – specifically Chapter 4, ‘Assembling Complexity’. I love his work – and managed to track him to his lair in California early in 2005 (see 13 April entry under http://www.johnelkington.com/weblog/2005_04_01_arc.htm).

I found the metaphor particularly engaging because I still have the diaries of a great-great-whatever grandmother who crossed the prairies (the ‘Great American Desert’ as some then called them) several times in prairie schooners in the 1840s. Those would-be settlers generally experienced the prairies as harsh, unforgiving environments, whereas those they rudely elbowed aside had come to see them as richly nurturing. I also have the patchwork quilt she made on one of those trips, stitched together from fine gowns she had worn out east, but thought she would have little need for in the west.

But one of my favourite stories, once the family reached Colorado, was the way, once they had set up a trading post in the hills above Denver, a store where many of the miners paid in gold dust, my great-great-whatever grandmother would dig up the dirt floor at the end of every week and pan it – successfully – for gold. They ended up founding a bank, which I believe still exists.

From such small seeds companies can grow, even in fairly hostile environments. But today’s session was an attempt to divine the characteristics that enable businesses to sustain themselves over time. In the case of our prairie metaphor, the answers included diversity, deep roots, symbioses, grazing and excretion, fire (whether lit by lightning or man), growing shoots tucked far enough below the soil to escape incineration, and so on.

But when it came to the report-backs, the best presentation – by far – came from my co-author Pamela Hartigan and her group. Unlike the other teams, that reported back in ones and twos, she brought her entire group (otherwise males), focused on the honeybee metaphor, spotlighted herself as the Queen Bee and her colleagues as worker bees, and has us all in stitches. Which led me, in the final discussion, to underscore a point David Christie – one of the organisers – had made right at the beginning, that unless you’re having fun you’re not going to change very much.

And that, in turn, put me in mind of the early days of SustainAbility when, instead of panning trampled dirt for specks of gold, we were looking for specks of green in the grime of capitalism. At the time, we called ourselves ‘The Green Growth Company’ and had just three missions in life: (1) to make a difference, (2) to make a profit (because that provided the wherewithal to do (1), and (3) to have fun in the process. Now, twenty years on, it’s all got a little more complicated, but apparently simple things – as many of the early pioneers viewed prairie ecosystems – often mask great complexity, diversity and resilience.