As global markets price in Nature’s living world, there is a growing global movement amongst business pioneers and disruptive innovators to use a different design thinking playbook.

Not human design thinking but Nature’s design thinking.

Why? Because it doesn’t just protect from risk, it opens up huge market disrupting opportunities for innovation, new revenue streams, and profitable growth.

If we use Nature’s design playbook, we can radically reinvent the business world around us, that’s been designed with dysfunctional 20th (and sometimes 19th) century thinking.

Nature’s design thinking isn’t just less polluting, it’s higher performance, higher efficiency, higher scalability and higher resilience.

But it requires a big shift in our thinking and practice.

The big shift is from human-centered to life-centered.

As a strategic practice it means a big shift in how we sense, sense-make and then seize opportunities. For example:

• Instead of asking “how might we?” in an innovation design challenge, we ask “how does Nature?”.

• Instead of diagnosing market trends in a strategic review, we diagnose the market ecosystem and industry system that the market rests on.

• Instead of using standard systems thinking to aid us in future planning and opportunity mapping, we use Nature’s living systems thinking.

• Instead of looking at exemplars across industries for design inspiration, we look to champion adapters in Nature - those species that have radically adapted to extreme conditions.

• Instead of learning about Nature and our footprint, we learn from Nature to emulate the deep design patterns and principles of evolutionary advantage from 3.8B years of R&D practice.

Our sensing, our sense-making, our benchmarking, our seizing of opportunities looks to the functionality of how life functions, in living systems, in lived relationships, leveraging life’s principles.

We get really curious about how Nature solves for the same problems we face. For example:

How does Nature build resilience? How does Nature deal with disruption? How does Nature do resource management? How does Nature do information management?

This is why we call it Nature’s playbook. Not Nature-positive but Nature-played.

Our research shows that Nature functions by designing across not one, but four value axes. They each work interdependently together.

i. Value flow, ii. Value regeneration, iii. Equitable value exchanges, and iv. Value potentiality.

We don’t have to be scientists, we just need to be open to a little reprogramming in how we think about value, value risk, and value potential. So that, when we re/engineer our strategy and business models, or re/design our innovations, we’re better able to:

1. Create value, deliver value, leverage value and convert value (the foundation of design thinking)

2. Sense value, seize value, scale value and transform value (the foundation of dynamic capabilities)

If we get technical, it’s a shift from ordinary capabilities => dynamic capabilities => bio-dynamic capabilities. It’s why we call it building your BQ™. Your biological smarts.

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* Poor dynamic capabilities are already cited as the #1 capability barrier behind business innovation and new venture failure. (see links below

Why do we work like this? Because the rewards are big. 

When we use Nature's playbook to better sense, seize and scale, we don’t just play at the highest order of sustainability, we open up the potential for:

1. New revenue streams

2. New markets

3. Scalable demand-led growth

4. Lower costs

5. Improved access to capital

6. De-risked profit margins

(It also brings you all that nice stuff like industry recognition and awards).

Welcome to the bright side.