I’m Not a Tree

I’ve heard them all. The efficiency of the flocks, the wisdom of trees, the intelligence of bees. It seems like nature has all the answers for human collaboration. We just have to look, learn, and replicate.
But here’s the thing: I’m not a tree. You’re not a bee. And maybe it’s not such a bad thing.

The ability of nature to create ingenious, wise, and efficient systems is nothing short of mesmerizing. How can you not fall in love with such incredible beauty?

Bees coordinate perfectly, building intricate hives and working in seamless harmony. Trees share resources through extensive underground networks, supporting one another during tough times. Birds fly in gorgeous, flowing formations without any apparent leader. And all these incredible examples of collaboration look effortless. Almost magical.

They work beautifully without the messy complications of human politics, ego clashes, or ethical dilemmas. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want their organization to hum along like a well-oiled biological machine? Right? Well, then we just have to work like bees and cooperate like birds, don’t we? Or maybe not.

Before you start transforming your team into a flock or your company into a beehive, let’s dig a bit more. Things may not be as magical as they look.

Here’s what never makes it into those inspiring presentations about nature’s wisdom:

Bee colonies are elimination machines. When larvae become infected, weak, or fail to thrive, their siblings don’t offer support or rehabilitation programs. They simply remove them from the hive, along with any parasites they may be carrying. Recent research shows that in some species, weak individuals literally sacrifice themselves for colony survival, dying faster when infected so they can be eliminated before spreading disease. No remorse. No tears. No compassion. Just brutal efficiency.

Now, imagine your HR department implementing a “weak member disposal” policy.

Bird flocks run on cold social calculus. When a flock member is lost, others don’t pause to find it or grieve. They quickly fill the social gap by strengthening existing bonds or forming new ones. The flock is all that matters. No loyalty to the fallen, no emotional processing. Just efficient restructuring. It’s the organisational equivalent of replacing colleagues who can’t keep up with the pace.

Forest networks practice resource redistribution, not charity. Trees that can’t compete for light or resources don’t get bailouts from the underground network. They simply die, and their resources get redistributed to more successful members. The forest doesn’t save strugglers; it recycles them. Imagine your organisation’s response to underperforming departments being “let them die and redistribute their budget.”

No doubt, the brutal efficiency of all these systems is impressive. Would you actually want to work in these systems, though?

While I was reading about natural systems to compile this article, I had a flash. I may be wrong, but I’ve noticed a fascinating paradox: the more “intelligent” a natural system appears, the simpler its individual components tend to be. And the more complex the individuals, the less coordinated the collective behavior.
Bee colonies look incredibly smart because individual bees follow relatively simple rules. They don’t debate strategies, question authority, or wonder if there’s a better way. They respond to biological impulses and environmental cues with algorithmic precision. The “intelligence” emerges from thousands of simple agents following basic programming.

But humans? We’re quite the opposite.

As neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky posits, the core of being human lies in the inherent conflict between our biological impulses and the capacity for reason and self-control, often mediated by the frontal cortex.
This tension gets even more complex when you consider the free will debate. Sapolsky himself argues that humans don’t actually possess free will—that our choices are entirely determined by biological and environmental factors. Others like philosopher Daniel Dennett argue that free will is real but not magical—it’s our evolved capacity to make reasoned, non-coerced choices.

But here’s the fascinating organizational paradox: whatever you believe about free will shapes how you’ll design systems. If you believe people have a genuine choice, you can’t expect them to blindly follow algorithmic rules. If you believe we don’t have free will, then any human system is just as “natural” as a beehive—we’re all just following our programming.

Either way, the result is the same: human systems require different design principles than natural ones. Each individual is a complex system capable of questioning, doubting, creating, and choosing (or at least experiencing the sensation of choosing). Put us together and you get… well, you get human organizations. Messy, inefficient, full of politics and personality clashes, but also capable of innovation, ethical reasoning, and conscious deliberation.

What if this isn’t a design flaw but a fundamental trade-off? You can have simple parts that create elegant collective behavior, or you can have complex individuals capable of ethical reasoning and creative thinking. But can you have both in the same system? And if yes, how? That’s probably a billion-dollar question. To which I obviously don’t have the answer, otherwise I would be somewhere enjoying my billion.

However, I wonder if when we suggest a team or organization to coordinate like bees, we aren’t essentially arguing they should think less, question less, and follow algorithmic responses more. A solution that might create smoother operations, but could eliminate precisely what makes human organizations capable of innovation and moral progress.

When we try to model human organizations on natural systems, we’re essentially arguing that what is natural is automatically good or right. Philosophers refer to this as the “naturalistic fallacy,” and it has been recognized as flawed reasoning for over a century.
Natural selection has produced systems optimized for survival and reproduction, rather than for human values such as justice, compassion, dignity, or fairness. Natural systems don’t agonize over whether it’s right to exclude weak members; they just do it. They don’t wrestle with ethical dilemmas; they operate according to algorithmic responses to environmental pressures.
Human organizations, by contrast, must grapple with questions that have no natural answers: How do we balance individual needs with collective goals? What do we owe to struggling team members? How do we maintain both efficiency and humanity?

There’s another thing that often goes overlooked when discussing natural systems: they aren’t designed solutions; they’re successful prototypes that have happened to survive.

Nature doesn’t sit down with a strategic plan and design optimal collaboration systems. It proliferates countless random variations and keeps whatever survives. The systems we admire today are the survivors of millions of failed experiments we never saw.

That bee colony coordination? It’s what remained after countless less-successful variations were eliminated by environmental pressures. The forest network? Same thing. These aren’t perfect solutions. They are more like good-enough systems that outcompeted their alternatives.

For now. Because nature keeps experimenting. What works today might be obsolete tomorrow if conditions change. Evolution never stops prototyping, never settles on a “final” design, never says “this is the optimal solution”. And nature never rushes. If there’s no final goal, there’s no deadline. The flock we study and admire is a system built over thousands of years of experiments.

What about human organizations? Do we have time to wait for random mutations and natural selection to occur? I guess not. But we can design systems intentionally. We can consider ethical implications, plan for multiple scenarios, and consciously balance competing values. We don’t have to wait; we can think our way to better solutions.

I believe we can learn a lot from natural systems. We absolutely must study how they work, understand their mechanisms, and extract useful principles for human application. But we need to do this consciously and selectively, not blindly.

Instead of asking “How can we be more like bees?” we should ask “What can we learn from bee coordination that aligns with our human values?” Instead of mimicking forest networks, we can study their information-sharing mechanisms while maintaining our commitment to individual dignity.

Here’s a perfect example of how to learn from nature without losing our humanity. In their book “Simple Rules,” Kathleen Eisenhardt and Donald Sull describe how honeybees select new nest sites—not by becoming mindless drones, but through elegant coordination principles we can adapt for human organizations.

When bees need to choose a new home, scout bees explore potential sites and return to perform “waggle dances” that encode information about what they found. The system works through simple rules: “Dance longer for better sites,” “Follow the first dancer you bump into,” and “Head-butt scouts promoting inferior alternatives.”

No single bee visits all sites to compare them. No queen makes the final decision. Instead, hundreds of individual bees follow simple guidelines that allow them to gather information, debate alternatives, and converge on the best choice. As Eisenhardt and Sull note, these rules work because they provide “minimal coordination while leaving ample room for individuals to pursue their own objectives.”

This is brilliant organizational design, and it’s exactly what humans can adapt without becoming bees.
Instead of trying to eliminate human complexity and self-interest, we can design simple rules that channel them productively. Rules like “Share information about what you discover,” “Give more attention to higher-quality options,” or “Help teams reach decisions rather than remaining deadlocked.”

The beauty is that people can still think, question, and innovate within these frameworks. They’re not algorithmic responses; they’re guidelines that preserve human agency while enabling coordination. We get the benefits of collective intelligence without sacrificing individual complexity.

This approach lets human organizations operate on what complexity theorists call “the edge of chaos”: structured enough to coordinate, flexible enough to adapt, complex enough to innovate. The key is remembering that we’re not trying to become natural systems; we already are (because we are nature). What we need is to use the lessons we can take from those systems to create organizations that combine efficiency with ethics, cooperation with compassion, and collective success with individual respect.

When someone suggests your organization should be more like a hive, a flock, or a forest, remember: you’re not a tree. You have the magnificent burden and privilege of being human. You can cooperate not because you’re programmed to, but because you choose to. You can support struggling colleagues not because it serves collective survival, but because it’s the right thing to do. That capacity for ethical choice—for choosing cooperation over compulsion, compassion over cold efficiency, dignity over mere survival—isn’t what makes us weaker than natural systems.

It’s what makes us human.