How We Evolve Part 4: Architecting for Resilience

Diversity, Collaboration and Innovation are all key to evolution - and you need to architect for them.

Looking for advice on how arts and culture can evolve after COVID-19, I consulted with Dr. Shannon Bennett, Chief of Science at the California Academy of Sciences to explore what we can learn from the evolution of biological communities. 

The result of our conversation is this 4-part series:

In Part 1, Dr. Bennett suggested that the most resilient communities are highly diverse, allowing them to adapt quickly to new environments. From here we drew parallels between the natural world and the business of arts and culture.

In Part 2, we looked at how diversity can mitigate risk at cultural institutions, especially around diversity of revenue streams.

In Part 3, we considered how diverse teams and collaborations can lead cultural institutions to innovate and adapt quickly

Shannon’s final insight wraps it all together into a larger framework. A colleague of Dr. Bennett’s at Cal Academy, Peter Roopnarine, has spent several years researching the resilience of biological communities after mass extinction events, such as that asteroid strike 66 million years ago.

(A biological community is defined as a collection of individuals of multiple species who interact with each other and their environments. A forest, and all its residents, is a biological community, for instance. As is a savanna or a coral reef.)

One key finding of Roopnarine and his colleagues, is that a healthy biological community appears to take on its own kind of sentience to ensure the resilience and stability of the greater community. 

In one example, an ancient biological community “allowed” certain species of carnivores to go extinct when they began to throw the community’s food chain out of balance.

In biological communities, a higher level "architecture" encourages diversity and rewards adaptations that better meet the needs of the community

Dr. Bennett suggests that this represents what she calls a higher level biological “architecture”. It is this architecture that encourages diversity, fosters new species to appear and rewards adaptations that better meet the needs of community itself.

What does this suggest for business of arts and culture? If the resilience of your arts and culture organization requires diversity, collaboration and innovation, then you need to have an architecture in place to facilitate it. It is one thing to say you value diversity, collaboration and innovation - chances are most of our mission statements include those words. 

Words are just words unless you have built your business around those words.

Dr. Bennett returned to the example of the forest to make her point. “An old growth forest isn’t simply a diverse collection of species. It is a biological community made up of species that have co-evolved together.” 

In some cases, the flora and fauna have evolved alongside each other over millennia, creating rich connections and symbiotic relationships. It is the foundational community architecture that has allowed this. 

You cannot force diversity, collaboration and innovation. Each of these aspects needs to be a core part of your architecture: from mission to values to strategies to culture.

The lesson for the business of arts and culture is clear: you cannot force diversity, collaboration and innovation. Rather, each of these aspects needs to be a core part of your architecture as a business: from mission to values to strategies to culture.

Each of planet earth’s mass extinctions has been followed by an abundance of new life that could never have been imagine prior to the calamity.  I look forward to watching our diverse, collaborative and innovative sector evolve on the other side of this asteroid strike.

Art imitates Life. And life, as they say, always finds a way.