I’m not disagreeing deeply… but… your evaluation depends very deeply on how you are defining ‘on time’ ‘on budget’ ‘zero waste’ and ‘no worker injuries’… etc
every oak tree produces millions and millions of acorns and, on average, only one forms a new oak tree. Waste? Or just food? It depends…
the human eye is terribly designed. We eat and breathe through the same hole. We flip-flop between our ancient reptilian brain and our ‘rational’ brain. We get sick, and we die. Worse, we kill each other… and the incidence of worker mortality in a beehive… in an ants nest… in wars… human and ant!
pandas
global warming and cooling. Ice ages. Volcanoes. Super volcanoes. Asteroids, meteorites. Mass extinction events
millions of years of evolution, billions of failed or deadly mutations…
that sounds right, though I have no evidence to be completely sure about it.
- aren’t humans part of nature? (And project managers, for that matter ;-) )
- do any other animals produce things that aren’t recycled? I don’t know - what would happen if it were true?
- does it depend on timespan? It took an awful long time for fossils to become coal and oil and get recycled by us… maybe the garbage will be useful to some creature within the next million years?
Understand that I’m not challenging the thesis - and perhaps I’m just being mischievous. But I just see these statements thrown around from time to time and I’d like to see if there is rigour behind them, or just assumptions…
so another way of approaching this is to say: for a project manager, attracted to doing the wrong thing righter - what would you offer them from nature’s portfolio?
well, look - all the project managers need is several million years of evolution and they’ll get there just like nature did!
;-)
I suppose my point, if I have one, might be that the assertion of nature’s efficiency and effectiveness, from a subjective human viewpoint, depends on perspective and timeliness. The efficient and effective reintegration of your nutrients back into the soil might not seem so great if you don’t want to die, the termite analogy works as long as you’re not in the ants nest which is attacked by the anteater or another colony or zombified by bacteria, the beaver dam that collapses, killing the beavers and flooding a section of forest killing off hundreds of other animals, the whales and dolphins beaching themselves, the salmon that don’t make it back to spawn but fertilise the trees when discarded by bears… (that’s amazing, I saw it in a documentary).
There IS something to this, of course, and the termite nest is cool - everything you listed above, though, is in every single project management manual, isn’t it? I’m still trying to get at what the prescription you so elegantly put above might mean in practice - “in my view, nature offers a vastly more viable and attractive alternative”.
1) how do we operationalise this viable alternative?
2) all the uses of nature that end up being prescribed depend on deliberate, ‘artificial’ application of human intent and planning - aren’t they, therefore, by default, artificial, intentional, planned attempts to model or create a natural state? How then are they to be properly distinguished from other human acts of artifice, intention, and planning?
BTW I noticed in my post above, as well as some ant/termite confusion (well, there are over 12,000 species of ants - it’s confusing - if not a little wasteful ;-) ) I put ‘zombified by bacteria. Ants are of course zombified by a fungus - which I see even the Daily Mail has covered :-)
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I’m not disagreeing deeply… but… your evaluation depends very deeply on how you are defining ‘on time’ ‘on budget’ ‘zero waste’ and ‘no worker injuries’… etc
Elegant, organic solutions - yes please… But… ‘on time’? ‘on budget’? ‘zero waste’? ‘no worker injuries’? Where?
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that sounds right, though I have no evidence to be completely sure about it. - aren’t humans part of nature? (And project managers, for that matter ;-) ) - do any other animals produce things that aren’t recycled? I don’t know - what would happen if it were true? - does it depend on timespan? It took an awful long time for fossils to become coal and oil and get recycled by us… maybe the garbage will be useful to some creature within the next million years?
Understand that I’m not challenging the thesis - and perhaps I’m just being mischievous. But I just see these statements thrown around from time to time and I’d like to see if there is rigour behind them, or just assumptions…
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true dat. Unless to kill off the humans? ;-) PS - rigourous resources are expensive, aren’t they! :-o
so another way of approaching this is to say: for a project manager, attracted to doing the wrong thing righter - what would you offer them from nature’s portfolio?
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thanks for the links - and good point. How might a project manager learn from nature?
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well, look - all the project managers need is several million years of evolution and they’ll get there just like nature did! ;-)
I suppose my point, if I have one, might be that the assertion of nature’s efficiency and effectiveness, from a subjective human viewpoint, depends on perspective and timeliness. The efficient and effective reintegration of your nutrients back into the soil might not seem so great if you don’t want to die, the termite analogy works as long as you’re not in the ants nest which is attacked by the anteater or another colony or zombified by bacteria, the beaver dam that collapses, killing the beavers and flooding a section of forest killing off hundreds of other animals, the whales and dolphins beaching themselves, the salmon that don’t make it back to spawn but fertilise the trees when discarded by bears… (that’s amazing, I saw it in a documentary).
There IS something to this, of course, and the termite nest is cool - everything you listed above, though, is in every single project management manual, isn’t it? I’m still trying to get at what the prescription you so elegantly put above might mean in practice - “in my view, nature offers a vastly more viable and attractive alternative”. 1) how do we operationalise this viable alternative? 2) all the uses of nature that end up being prescribed depend on deliberate, ‘artificial’ application of human intent and planning - aren’t they, therefore, by default, artificial, intentional, planned attempts to model or create a natural state? How then are they to be properly distinguished from other human acts of artifice, intention, and planning?
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Thanks for your inputs… I’m still thinking!
BTW I noticed in my post above, as well as some ant/termite confusion (well, there are over 12,000 species of ants - it’s confusing - if not a little wasteful ;-) ) I put ‘zombified by bacteria. Ants are of course zombified by a fungus - which I see even the Daily Mail has covered :-)
Cross-linking this discussion to https://model.report/s/fn77c0/inefficient_nature_-_and_buckminster_fuller because they cross-link…