Why Learning from Animals Makes Perfect Sense In Business

The abundance of PhDs and the benefit of man's utilization of conventional pearls of wisdom may have helped us a great deal in solving many of our problems, but animals in the wild operating only on instincts and responding to cause—effect situations afford us better lessons and solutions. At least, they are free of human biases.

Contextualize this. For years on end, our attempts at diluting the salty waters of the Indian Ocean have come a cropper. We've perpetually failed to harvest rainwater, thus watching it flow away into waste. Sending water to a place that already has plenty of it is nonsensical, and so are many other things we've done over the years. But there is hope.

A recent conversation with Jamii Group of Companies Chairman and Founder, Mr. Joshua Chepkwony, yielded very interesting observations as to why we must borrow applicable insights from the animal kingdom. These insights are very much the kinds of things entrepreneurs require to conquer, thrive, and grow in a competitive landscape.

These are:-

1. Adaptability: Perhaps the best over-told story is that of the dinosaur. Its body failed to respond to its changing environment and it became extinct. Wildlife in general is highly adaptable to changing environments. Evolution, over time, has given them a broad spectrum of adaptability features to several conditions. Entrepreneurs ought to adapt to changing market conditions, customer preferences, and industry trends. There are moments too when hibernation is critical. Nothing highlights this better than the covid pandemic. We kept planning whilst lying low and re-emerged from it much wiser.

2. Resilience: The freedom of the wild is not without perils. Animals face predators, natural disasters, food scarcity, and diseases. These animals must have the resilience to make it to the next season. Entrepreneurs must possess this critical quality of bouncing back to grow from hardships. All known billionaires have had to at one or several times bounced back from failures and setbacks.

Resilience has nothing to do with the habit of complaining but a lot with dusting your feet and getting back on track or starting all over again.

3. Resourcefulness: Nothing short of resourcefulness is needed in the wild to find food, water, and shelter. Animals weave together creative solutions to thrive. Businesspeople must continuously generate innovative ways of finding solutions that keep them ahead of the competition curve at all times. Behaving like tamed animals spells disaster in business because that hands the duty of resourcefulness to others who may not have your best interests at heart.

4. Collaboration: Several species of animals hedge their success on collaboration. Bees, ants, and many others collaborate to produce honey and abundant supplies of their favorite food. Humans must do the same because no single entity is fully self-sufficient. Symbiotic relationships across unlikely species bring about birds eating ticks off buffalo or smaller animals picking the teeth of larger ones by eating remnants without getting devoured in the process.

entrepreneurs must be ready for all manner of unconventional collaborations. People from different cultures can collaborate successfully

5. Long-term thinking: evolution has aided animals to work successfully over a long time. They can keep going through several seasons without their existence getting threatened by nature. Humans in business must find that long-term approach to business sustenance. There is no success in the absence of a long-term vision.

Mr. Joshua Chepkwony has over the past 35 years in business borrowed heavily from nature and utilized transferable lessons to propel his business interests forward. You, too, can do the same. His advice to both emerging and experienced entrepreneurs is that you must borrow best practices from unlikely sources for your uniqueness to pay off.