My reader, I invite you to explore this article with an open mind. It is an exploration and may not make sense immediately. Thank you for receiving and reflecting about it for a while. Give it a chance. As usual, see it more as philosophical than scientific (and we know that philosophy helps science).

Life expands by diversifying and replicating. Both are vital. Proportions vary. On a tree, no one leaf looks exactly like the other. But they are all leaves. Each human being is unique, but we are all human beings. We share similar characteristics (eyes, limbs, etc.), but we are all different. We are all unique.

The fact of being unique is the same for all things in the universe. So, in a way, similarity seems to apply to the fact of being unique. “One” is being replicated, including in its being different. We are all one, both separately and together. Interesting, don’t you think?

In my Season I article, The Deadly Sins of Sustainability Leaders – Part 2: Underestimating Biodiversity, I described why it is deadly to underestimate the importance of diversity. There can be no life without diversity and diversification. And, for those who are not familiar with my prose, allow me to clarify that I consider biodiversity to include human diversity, corporations diversity, etc.—in a nutshell, the diversity of everything that humans do and produce. Nature’s laws apply to you as a leader and to your company, as living systems.

We human beings can be very stupid in how we play nature’s laws, particularly as we vastly over-transform our natural systems unnecessarily. Nature has both life and death possibilities. We may not do it voluntarily, but, collectively as a species, we seem to be dominantly choosing actions leading to our premature death. Why? And to play the diversity and replication pair, to survive and thrive as a team or an organization?

In order for life to expand there must be both diversification and replication in certain specific ways and proportions depending on where we are on Earth. Many human organizations, like private corporations, oversimplify and over-replicate in order to increase efficiency and margins. This may work for a while (for these goals). But it can only lead to the decay of these corporations and the systems they influence, after a certain time. Like everything else, any fixed situation cannot survive for long. We are ourselves a new and different person each new day, each new moment. So is a corporation or any system.

As Nietzsche wrote, “Out of life’s school of war, what does not kill me makes me stronger.” Systems react well to disturbance if the disturbance is such that the system develops and expands, as in certain minimally “managed” forests or agricultural systems. Systems do “become stronger.” But excessive disturbance causes decay, as we can observe with excessive deforestation. Loss of biodiversity and over-replication is very easy to observe in human systems. But it is also possible to kill a system by trying to increase it’s inner diversity. We cannot make a system “more diverse” than what it can naturally be. Or too quickly. Introducing new species can constitute an “excessive disturbance” to a system and cause it to decay. Conversely, if I take a rare plant from the desert and try to replant it in Amazonia, the plant probably won’t survive. Amazonia will probably remain undisturbed.

We live in (sufficiently) like-minded communities for a reason. Here again, as regards how diverse an organization can be, there seems to be an optimal point. A “just right”, Goldilocks point. This point of course varies from one system to another, one group to another.

Can you see examples of these excesses–excess replication or excess diversification–around you? Human beings do not often observe or communicate with the systems they live in enough to behave so that there is a mutual strengthening and development of both the systems and the human beings living in them. Industrialization has often over-disturbed systems, causing accelerated decay. The earth-system is currently being over-disturbed, mostly by humans. The planet will still be there for a while. But what species, what sub-systems will manage to survive on it?

Life will find its way. The choice, really, for us humans, is between maintaining ourselves as a species on earth, by maintaining our life systems, or extinction. Leaders and corporations: observe nature, including and especially your own. Have conversations and be intentional. Does the ratio of replication to diversification in your company’s activities and products seem optimal? Does it help your corporation, and the overall system it belongs to, regenerate and expand? Can you monitor this ratio over time? How does your organization replicate diversity and diversify replication?

Manage, in real time, how disruptive you want to be. Or you could die.