Mary Panttaja

Michael Pollan in “The Botany of Desire” beautifully lays out how species can evolve patterns and mechanisms to help each other through the process of living together in a common enviroment : bees and flowers, sharks and cleaner fish, humans and fruit. The mechanisms get more complex. Fruits meet a need (or desire according to Pollan) of humans and humans provide a service to the fruit. The evolutionary participants uncovered another active member of its neighborhood and found a way to build a relationship that helps the gene pool to survive.

The apple is one of his interesting examples. It has an relatively unusual survival tactic in that its primary form of reproduction produces an excess of variety—its mechanism focuses on the “new ways to get along”-part of the simple evolutionary pattern. So it creates an incredible array of new options. It can always evolve rapidly to meet changes in its environment, which gives it stability in maintaining and spreading its genes as a species. But any given form of the apple is doomed, as cross-polinated seeds do not breed true to the parents. But this pattern of mechanistic evolution is great for another species who comes into contact with the apple: humans. There are lots of kinds of apples with a great many different qualities. And we found many that met some of our needs and desires: sweet, dependable food sources. And, importantly, we discovered that we could control the reproduction of those features we like through cloning and grafting genetic material.

So the apple-human mechanism is based on the apple producing a lot of variety genetically, and the human controlling the apples genetic variation (when it wants) with its awareness and intelligence. The apple’s genes are spread over the planet and people have a manageable food source. The overall mechanism is built out of the skills and needs of independent species. The mechanisms together build a preponderance of potential that the future will continue to meet their needs and desires.

Successful models of business, and many of the “new” business models arising in Web 2.0 style, are evolutionary mechanisms for their markets. That is, they embody mechanistic behaviors or actions that reinforce their desired state of change—growth of their audience or customer base. The early versions of these were called “viral” after one the most successful evolvers we know.

These viral mechanisms—patterns of action and use—reinforce the spread of the virus, which means the adoption of the product. The product’s growth in the marketplace is entrained by the mechanisms. You can watch the mechanism work to change and evolve the state of the market as the potential for the goal to be continually realized is increased by the mechanism.

To cause a change in the state of an organization, whether it be market growth, product development, or improved ROI, you must not just “fix” a problem, but ingrain process mechanisms that reinforce the desired path. We must create dynamic evolutionary mechanisms that default to taking us where we want to go.

One of my favorite examples is an everyday problem: for many people the garage is always a total disaster and they really want to have a clean garage. (It could be anything that is consistently arriving in our present moment which we see as a “problem”—we don’t like it, but we always have it: missing deadlines,  uphappy customers,  processes that don’t meet current needs.)

We think that what we want is just a clean garage. We think that if we had enough time and help we could just get it clean. But this is a wrong-headed idea. We don’t really want just a clean garage—that would just be a moment in time (a brief moment) when we like the state of the garage. What we really want and need is a lifestyle, or a set of mechanisms, that result in a clean garage—automatically.

What does that mean? More tomorrow.