[Me & X] Why do you use biological terms when discussing business?
X: Why do you use biological terms when discussing business?
Me: Because, it's mostly relevant. There are subtle distinctions such as biology tends to be blind in direction whereas strategy is the moment you choose a deliberate path. However, even so, terms like evolution, co-evolution, red queen, adaptive renewal cycle, hormesis all have relevance.
X: Hormesis?
Me: Take C.S. Hollings view on engineering vs ecological resilience. I've roughly summarised in the following quadrant with a bit of liberty taken on the "Fluid" term as the more formal concept of panarchy is a little bit tricky for people to grok. Hormesis is the process by which such systems increase in resilience due to beneficial stressors. Of course, if those stressors are too extreme then it pushes the system into a fragile state. In other words, there's a dose-response relationship depending on the stressor and the system i.e. the amount of stressor determines whether the response is beneficial or harmful. Hence I've added this as green (beneficial) and red (harmful) lines to the diagram. It's a good enough representation but as I said, I'm taking liberties for reasons of explainability.
X: Do systems ever become resilient?
Me: To an extent. Hormesis tends to drive a system to becoming more resilient but there are always limits, always harmful stressors. Life on earth is resilient but it won't survive a supernova. Probably.
X: A bit like Darwin's "survival of the fittest"?
Me: Arghhh. No. First, Darwin never said that. Second, we define the fittest as those that survive, so in effect you're talking about "survival of the survivors" which is probably the most useless phrase there is. There's taking liberties and then there's stretching a metaphor to breaking point. Hmmm, thinking about it, that's actually quite a good example.
Originally published on LinkedIn.