Future of work: Treat your staff like mould

It is my view that you should treat your staff or team members as if they were each a single cell amoeba.

But not just any amoeba. I would like to introduce you to physarum polycephalum, which can be thought of as semi-intelligent slime mould. I learnt about this fellow living organism through a compelling Ted talk by artist Heather Barnett. It is certainly worth watching regardless of your take on people management.

I won’t transcribe her talk but in essence this slime when left to its own devices, with the right incentives, will find an optimum path between where it is and where it wants to get to. Put a maze between the goal and the slime and it amazingly finds the best path.

Set up a distributed array of food and the slime will work out the best network to ensure all food nodes are connected. This mould is not a mammal. It’s not even an animal. Yet like ants and termites it has an innate ability to collaborate with colleagues to solve complex problems.

Perhaps this is something innate to all living organisms including humans. Perhaps it is time you stepped back from imposing your solution on the team and let nature take its course.