The idea is to emulate nature’s genius – Biomimicry – Stuff We Love 007 – Melanie Farmer

Martin Henley 0:16
Hello there, my name is Martin Henley, this is The Effective Marketing YouTube channel and if you’ve spent a second here, you will know that I am on a mission to give you everything you need to know about sales and marketing to be more successful in your business. This is taking various flavours I’m talking to anyone I can find, I’m sharing anything I can find that might be valuable, I’m talking about the news with people, there’s going to be some reaction type stuff coming and our WTF thing is back in production in the next couple of weeks. So this slot is Stuff We Love. In November, I got a rather excited message from Melanie telling me that she’s discovered this new thing that is absolutely going to blow my mind. We haven’t spoken about it, but we are going to speak about it now. So no pressure, Melanie, you now need to blow our minds with this new thing that’s got you so excited. So today with us Concierge of Co-creation at remind us the name of your business.

Melanie Farmer 1:19
Crazy Might Work.

Martin Henley 1:21
Okay, I didn’t want to say that because it sounds so crazy. Concierge of Co-creation at Crazy might work. Melanie farmer, how are you doing?

Melanie Farmer 1:31
I’m doing really well. I’m really excited. And yeah, loving my job as Concierge of Co-creation, which I guess is bringing stakeholders together to tackle big complicated challenges together.

Martin Henley 1:46
Yes. Well, we had quite a wide ranging conversation. When was that? That was a long time ago. It was August time. Okay, cool.

Melanie Farmer 1:58
I’m just gonna give myself a little bit more light.

Martin Henley 2:01
Okay, there we go. Cool. So some thing has caught your attention and got you excited Melanie. Are we going to love this? This is the question and the challenge.

What is biomimicry?

Melanie Farmer 2:12
Right, hot or not? Now, I think it’s hot. I think it’s really exciting. It’s called biomimicry. Basically, what we do as an organisation is we look at methods for breakthrough thinking, to solve whatever wicked challenges in front of us as an organisation or an individual. We look to Nobel Prize winners, we look to thought leaders across the world in history. A lot of the methods that we use might include systems and design thinking, which many people will be familiar with and biomimicry has not been around very long. I guess that you could say that Leonardo da Vinci started playing with it, and I’ll talk about what it is in a minute, in the 1400s, when he started to draw flying machines inspired by birds. Actually, now in the last few years, we’ve started to understand that nature has incredible solutions that have been field tested over 3.8 billion years and we’ve shown up, humans, we’ve only been here a short time, and we’ve not really understood the gift that that brings. We have started to see design, be inspired, innovation, inspired by nature, in product design but now we’re starting to see that we could use it also in how we organise ourselves. So we were turning to ants who have successfully been organising themselves for 100 million years and they do some really amazing things. For example, they’re dropping pheromones to say go this way and different pheromones to say don’t go that way. They can communicate without actually going back to head office, if you like. In the digital world, some of our clients are using that to consider how their clients are dropping digital pheromones, if you like, and tracking and getting information that way and using that information in sort of advanced analytics.

Melanie Farmer 4:24
There are massive lessons from nature, the idea is to emulate nature’s genius, which has been field tested, is usually sustainable, and is certainly connecting us more to our origins, which is nature. So we know it’s nice to go forest bathing, and walk in the forest and all of that, but do we realise that forests are successful because of mushrooms? It’s mushrooms who feed sugar to the trees and take sugar, excess sugar from trees who got too much of it and feed it to a tree that needs it. This is what mushrooms do. So we can, for example, in our organisation, say, if we are part of a system, where supply, we have customers, but there are also government bodies, policymakers, other stakeholders, pressure groups, who are part of the system in which we operate. If we were to look to a rainforest, and we were to notice these trees, and there’s mushrooms, and there’s all these other parts of that ecosystem that make it successful, perhaps we are the mushrooms, or perhaps were the trees, but are we aware of all those other parts and cogs? Have we thought about how we’re activating those as partners?

Melanie Farmer 5:43
We did work with one client who, when they did this map of the rainforest ecosystem, they said to me, you know, we don’t have mushrooms, who would the mushrooms be. We started to think about who would their mushrooms be, and for them, it was actually consultants who would come and say, here’s the latest, and feed them new ideas, and also learn from them and go and share it with, you know, with other parts of the of the system, let’s say. So they were like, we don’t have mushrooms, you can be the mushrooms but actually then they realise they have to activate us in a different way and then then we start to really drill down and say, what is it that mushrooms actually do? And and how do they interact with ants? And how do they interact with these trees? And what can we do to emulate that, in our own worlds?

What are the practical examples of biomimicry in effect?

Melanie Farmer 6:39
We’re seeing some amazing stories coming out of, of India, they, for example, had some real challenges with waste management. So their rivers were, not everywhere, but the had rivers that had so much waste that the waste was getting on fire and it was too expensive to build a western style treatment plant. So a local citizen, took inspiration from a cow’s stomach to build a waste treatment plant. Cows have four stomachs. So this waste treatment plant has four stomachs and the waste comes in one end of this treatment plant and the outputs are half. So two of the outputs are soil and water and the other two are actual waste. So now already they have halved the amount of waste that this system is producing. They also have the cost of building the facility. So now built more than 50 of those across Indian and are starting to roll them out in Africa. Because they’re half the price to build, they produce half the waste and the other half is productive, reusable materials, soil and water. They also, they use something like 80% less chemicals to run these plants. So in many ways a lot more sustainable. So who would have thought that a cow’s stomach could be the inspiration for solving the waste problem in India? This is what biomimicry does.

Martin Henley 8:20
Okay, well, okay, so you’ve achieved the first thing you’ve blown my mind.

Melanie Farmer 8:26
Yes.

Is the usefulness of biomimicry limited to communications challenges or is the application broader than that?

Martin Henley 8:27
Okay, good. To think that mean, to take the grown ups, like high ticket consultants are now talking and comparing themselves to mushrooms. It makes perfect sense. The cow one makes more sense because that is a waste disposal system. Do you know what I mean? It’s a nutritian extraction waste process. Okay, so you’ve absolutely blown my mind. It makes absolute sense in in that, so your business is called Crazy Might Work. This sounds absolutely crazy. Your business is about resolving these really difficult challenges for businesses, is that right? They people come to you with the most difficult problems. and is this limited to, like communication type issues and marketing type issues or is it broader than that? Is it broader than that?

Melanie Farmer 9:30
So we have a taxonomy of, of strategies that nature uses.

Martin Henley 9:38
Right?

Melanie Farmer 9:39
We know that there are about 1700 species, we’ve categorised these species and we we know what they do, so we have a resource that we go to for that. We know that these strategies is about 10 major strategies that are useful, useful in marketing and useful in growing your organisation. So For example, if you wanted to ….

Martin Henley 10:02
Okay, so sorry so it’s internal and external communications type problems that people come to you with. Is that right?

Melanie Farmer 10:10
Yeah, well, we have challenges like, let right help us run our business strategy, right. Then you have challenges like, can we sort out how to activate the sustainable development goals in Australia, or in the world, or in the world of finance.

Martin Henley 10:28
Right.

Melanie Farmer 10:29
So it could be something like the sustainability development goals, sustainable development goals, or it could be one of the goals.

Martin Henley 10:38
Yeah.

Melanie Farmer 10:38
Or it could be our organisation has to rewrite this strategy and we have to think about the future, and we don’t know what the jobs are gonna be, and so forth. So it could be something like that. So a whole range of challenges. We do breakthrough thinking, so that you have find new ways and crazy ways of approaching and thinking through those challenges. We create the conditions for breakthrough insight, which it will be no surprise happen in the shower, or on a walk with your dog, or that sort of thing, typically, not at the desk, not at your office.

Martin Henley 11:13
Yep.

When is biomimicry most useful in addressing really difficult problems?

Melanie Farmer 11:14
When you’re sufficiently relaxed, that you’re not even thinking about the problem. So if we want to solve a really hard problem, thing we should do is have a nap, a shower or go for a walk, rather than sit there and try and think our way through it. So we kind of turn off the intellectual brain and engage the subconscious. So we do these sorts of conditions to create insight. Then we take a person or an organisation or a team or a collection of teams and stakeholders through the process of designing a solution. One of the methods we might use is biomimicry.

Martin Henley 11:51
Cool.

Melanie Farmer 11:51
In biomimicry, just looking at the taxonomy and the strategy. One biological strategy nature uses is maintaining community. So there are 214 life forms that we’re aware of, that we’ve categorised, who do things to maintain community, which is a really important part of marketing, if we think of our clients as community. Within that, we say, do you want to cooperate to maintain community? Do you want to coordinate do to we’re doing something together? Do you want to provide services? Let’s say more to cooperate, to maintain community, then we can start looking at what dolphins do what chimpanzees do, and I’m just looking to it through my list of, of different animals and so on. There’s all sorts of early warning systems that penguins offer, things that spiders do, dolphins, flamingos, those those things we can turn to and start to codify that and say, well, maybe killer whales is the answer, because we know what they do is X, Y and Z. How does that look in our own world as a marketer? Can we adopt some kind of vocalisation pattern so neighbouring species understand us? So you know I’m using the language of nature, but it resonates for the human world. There’s things that we can do that echo through the channels that we’re using and the segments that we’re targeting and so it’s trying to codify that.

Martin Henley 13:30
Yes. So, okay, so just to give people a sense of how excited about this, you are, you’re now thinking about doing a Master’s in this thing? Biomimicry.

Melanie Farmer 13:46
Yeah.

Martin Henley 13:46
Okay. So you, are you because it sounds crazy. It really does sound crazy. Okay, so are we talking about finding .. instead of saying, Okay, so you’ve got a problem, the problem is waste disposal. Instead of thinking, what on earth are we going to do about this waste disposal, you’re thinking already, let’s go to nature and find nature’s most effective waste disposal processes, and see if there is something in that that makes sense. So is this this isn’t literally, we’re gonna behave like Orca, this is an analogy. This is how Orca behave is there something in there that might inspire a solution? Okay, good. It sounds less crazy.

Melanie Farmer 14:30
Yeah, well, you know, it’s kind of, it’s kind of one or the other. So it’s either being inspired by nature as an analogous inspiration, or it’s literally seeing what we can do. So there is a company in New York that has managed to harness the strength of spider silk to produce a material that will never need to be replaced. It’s incredibly resilient, strong and durable. So we don’t realise how strong spider silk is because we could just walk through it. They’ve taken that spider silk, stuck it under a microscope, and now they are reproducing spider silk level fabrics which is which is so strong that they predicted that you’ll never have to throw that T shirt out. It’s made out of this material is incredibly strong. We wouldn’t think of spider silk as being very strong because it is so tiny but once you start getting thicker. You think about it they can catch a fly, so with this material they can catch a 747 is what they’re saying. When you think of what is possible from nature, sometimes it is literal, that they actually take that thing, breaking it down and replicating that material. In other cases it’s inspiring for example, from the cow’s stomach, and other examples are organisational. So for example, in Southwest Airlines in America, they took inspiration from ants, and reorganised how they manage overnight freight by copying what ants do. Ants don’t go back to the head office and check, and ants don’t go in a straight line when they’re delivering resources. So they thought, we are always shipping stuff from A to B but is that the best way because ants don’t do that and they’re far more efficient than us in the long run. So they gave the night teams carte blanche to use some parameters, but make decisions about what plane to put parcels on. The effect of that is they saved something was $80,000, I think maybe more than that, but just almost instantly, and they have significantly reduced the requirement of night staff and they’ve filled cargoes by actually sending parcels in the wrong direction at first. So if you’re trying to get a parcel from New York to Pasadena or something, you might say, well, you should just go this way. They’re going actually we’ll send it to Detroit first because we know that there’s a plane leaving Detroit immediately so ultimately the thing will get there quicker because the next train, plane, whatever to Pasadena is not for three days. So this is what they did. And you would think they’re going to lose parcels, but they didn’t. So they’ve actually been more effective at tracking because they’re the ones deciding on the ground, what’s going to happen to things and so significant savings, but it was mimicking what ants do. Weird and wonderful.

Martin Henley 18:00
Okay, but the danger must be like you say, you don’t necessarily think that a spider’s web is very strong and what was the other thing that you said? Like you said the danger might be that our perception of what’s going on in a Orca society is incorrect. Do you know what I mean, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. Okay, that’s really weird and interesting.

Martin Henley 18:32
The other thing that occurs to me is that Michelangelo did try and kind of reproduce what was happening with birds to get things to fly but it didn’t work. You know, if we look at the way that animals get around, we had to come up with the wheel, so we had to come up with something quite different. Our method of flight is quite different from everything else in nature.

Melanie Farmer 19:01
Yes. You know, what’s interesting is where we’re realising that if you look at hummingbirds, we’re starting to think about how they managed to fly very differently to other creatures that fly. They they can hover in one spot. Even now, we are rethinking the design of the aeroplane because we did take inspiration from birds and discover what is needed in terms of, you know, wing torque and pressures. Ee we are rethinking now, how we, how we think about aeroplane design entirely. So we might find that because of biomimicry that you know, 20 years from now, there are aeroplanes that are entirely different because we’ve now stopped our clever mind for a moment to really deep dive on what nature does And we discover we’ve been copying the wrong animal. when we’ve been thinking about fly, maybe we should be thinking about completely different creatures. Yeah, like kingfishers and hummingbirds and so on.

Are there practical appilcations of biomimicry happening currently?

Melanie Farmer 20:13
We know that this is starting to happen with with some design, we’re looking at very, very different inspiration. Of course, if we are to now fly without oil, which airlines are working on. That changes things completely, because we need to be concerned far more about weight. We also know that NASA, if there’s anything that’s going on those shuttles, it better be important. So their whole thing is take it off, because they are entirely consumed with weight and heat. So they’re turning to nature, to think about all wearing nature can something take extreme temperatures nd it’s almost weightless, and spider silk as an example?

Martin Henley 21:04
Yes.

Melanie Farmer 21:05
So we might not be looking in the right places that’s the thing. So it’s it’s quieting the clever human mind. That’s the first step in biomimicry, we first realise that we might not have the answers and that we might be thinking too logically. Then we turn to nature and say, where does this happen in nature where we haven’t looked before?

Martin Henley 21:27
Good. Okay, so your business is called Crazy Might Work. So we have to expect you to be thinking about crazy things. Your customers are people like NASA, is that correct? And people like the Australian Government and health authorities. These are very successful and serious organisations that come to you for this kind of thinking. I just want to give people that so that they know that I haven’t just bumped into a crazy person.

Melanie Farmer 22:02
You know, the funny thing right now, because it’s a kind of a new discipline. And whenever we say biomimicry people ask us to spell it, and then they write it down, and we might talk about 10 different methods, and it’s overwhelming. At the end of that, what we’re finding at the moment is they’re saying, Can I ask a question about biomimicry? Because it’s it’s sort of new to them.

Unknown Speaker 22:27
Yeah.

Melanie Farmer 22:28
It is for breakthrough, like the the methods we use are for when you really struggling with changing your culture around or, you know, partnering successfully. Where better to look, then nature for partnerships.

Martin Henley 22:45
Yeah

Melanie Farmer 22:45
Incredible partnerships happen in any forest you would walk into, or any ecosystem. It’s understanding that a partnership happens when some part of nature relies on another part of nature. Very successful partnerships they’re not both good at the same thing. And yet, we, as humans, gravitate towards our friends, we usually go and say, let’s hang out with someone who’s not at all like me and yethat’s exactly what nature does. Big and small hang out together. Yeah, I mean, you know, you don’t have whales hanging out with whales, you have little fish, kind of hanging out with whales, because it’s safe. If I am a whale where’s my little fish that I need to go and kind of hang out with? So it’s understanding how successful partnerships, in that example, it’s finding who’s not like me, and partnering with them.

Martin Henley 23:51
I suppose in that example, it’s about like, mutually beneficial relationships. You know, the little fish get something out of being around the whale, the whale gets something of having the little fish around. Okay. I mean, okay, so I love let’s say, I love this, it’s good. You’ve passed well done. You have blown my mind to think that senior executives in huge world famous corporations are having these conversations. The thing about mimicking nature is that nature has some really nice things built in, like codependence, like sustainability, those, those kinds of things. So if it is causing people to have a little bit more humility about the way they conduct themselves in these huge corporations then then absolutely, I love it. I think you’ve succeeded today. Well done. Mel.

Melanie Farmer 24:56
Thank you. I will say we recently did some work with The UAE Government on using biomimicry to really think through, help them. Their challenge was they would like to be the best government in the world. So, you know, no pressure. One of the, the, the life forms they identified was date, date palms and what date palms do to distribute resources, and the other was whales. They talked about, you know how government is not trusted, it’s it’s often slow and so they tend to nature and came up with the whale to say, well, whales are slow, you know, by comparison, but what a presence. We want to be around whales because we see them as peaceful. So, you know, we’re big and slow, but people don’t really think of government as being a peaceful whale, can we be more like a whale? So then we did this whole process to sort of look at, you know, what it is about whales that we could emulate? One of the funniest things that came up was their distant cousin was a hippo. So, you know, is there some sort of obligation to consider how we’re working with Africa, where these hippos live? Sometimes you end up going on a tangent that you would never have arrived at if you have thought about it, but in the far more human rational mind.

Martin Henley 26:28
Okay, I am getting this on a open up kind of new channels of thinking or new avenues of thinking or like maybe as a source of inspiration. My mind is blown to think that the the UAE, the United Arab Emirates have engaged you guys and with the with the proposition, we want to be more like whales and you’ve gone back and asked have thought about hippopotamuses at all. It’s insane.

Melanie Farmer 27:03
Who would think that that would be a useful thing to, to what to explore?

Martin Henley 27:12
I’m going to challenge you on that because I would say, rather than who would think this would be a useful thing to explore? I would say how come we’ve moved to a position where nature isn’t the most obvious inspiration for everything? Do you know? That’s what I’d say, I’d say, how are we so far removed from our environment that we’re not looking to nature first, for every solutions. Maybe the solution already exists in nature. Whether you’re looking for a material, whether it or whatever you’re looking for, well, let’s talk about physical things. You’re looking for a material, maybe that material already exists in nature. So you don’t have to go through the process of extracting minerals to produce that material, etc, etc. So, yeah, I would say, for me, it’s only now we’ve had this conversation, of course, nature is the obvious place, it’s the first place we should be looking always for inspiration.

How do solutions inspired by biomimcry compare with traditional problem solving?

Melanie Farmer 28:12
Yeah, look, I think it is the humility of saying, well, let’s just be a field testing these solutions for 3.8 billion years, how could we possibly not respect that experience, that’s your best consultant right there. We have spent since the beginning of time for human history, we’ve spent those 10,000 plus years getting away from nature, finding every possible way to be in apartments and safe from nature. We know that actually, we get a good dopamine hit if we spend some time in nature.

Martin Henley 28:55
Yeah.

Melanie Farmer 28:57
As long as it’s not on fire, or flooded. We are starting now to realise that we have, we have spent a lot of time running from nature and also seeing nature as a resource that we we’re just extracting, versus a partnership, where we’re working together in a partnership with nature. If we were to do that, we’re going to say thank you for that lesson ant you’ve really given me this amazing gift and now I’m going to go and try that in my own organisation.

Martin Henley 29:31
Yes.

Melanie Farmer 29:32
We tend to say let’s crush the ants and eat them or whatever we know, our usual attitude to nature is one of consumption.

Martin Henley 29:39
Yes. Good. I like it. And I think I’ve got an issue with this in my life, this idea that you might be an environmentalist in 2020. Well, there was a time when we were all environmentalist because we existed in the environment and we were dependent on the environment and it’s only now we’ve become so far removed from it because like you say, we’ve cosseted ourselves in apartments, in cities, behind the internet. We’ve extracted ourselves, we’ve removed ourselves so far from the environment. I know, my thing is surf photography, I am absolutely, absolutely at my happiest when I’m in front of a huge wave and I’ve got a decision to make, do I want to actually stay above the surface and be taking this photo or do I want to get smashed to bits? That is when I’m at my happiest, you know, when I’m most excited. So if you say like, if unless it’s on fire or less, it’s, it’s being flooded. I think being in nature, at the mercy of nature, is hugely exciting. I think the reason we’re suffering so much with depression, and anxiety and all of these things, is because we’ve taken ourselves away from where we’re supposed to be. That’s an entirely different conversation than the one you want to have about biomimicry. If it’s having the humility to say, you know, we aren’t right about everything, like, maybe, maybe more efficiency, or more security, are the right goals, but there might be other ways to achieve them. Like you say, we are all so caught up in this consumption mode, that’s really not healthy, consumption is a disease. It’s really not healthy, that we are so stuck on that. If this is about saying, let’s look to other places for inspiration, other than the executives who’ve been extracting resources forever, you know, maybe there’s another way to do it, then I love it, then you’ve you’ve achieved the goal today, this will go on stuff we love next Wednesday.

Melanie Farmer 31:52
Great. There’s a book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. So it’s really to your point that, you know, we seem to get ulcers, but zebras, who get eaten by lions are fine. They don’t get ulcers, they’re not depressed. So I think we need to look at that and there’s a whole book about, you know, how zebras manage stress.

Martin Henley 32:17
Yes.

Melanie Farmer 32:17
And how certain creatures like that are, you would think, with their lives are far less safe, they’re much more likely to need to be stressed or depressed or whatever but actually, there’s a lot more joy in being a zebra, who has nothing you could say. They have belonging and warmth, and all the strategies that they use to have amazing lives?

Martin Henley 32:44
I wonder if this was inspired by Marty off of Madagascar? Because he’s couped up in the zoo, isn’t he, and then they find their way back to Africa.

Melanie Farmer 32:54
Yeah, and then he finds his joy.

Martin Henley 32:56
Yes.

Melanie Farmer 32:58
You touched on something which I’m interested in, and it hasn’t yet made its way into biomimicry, which is that humans are part of nature. Actually, I’m interested in the lessons from the indigenous traditional ways from the past. There are some incredible projects going on around bushfire management, working together with indigenous communities in Australia. There are also many other, you know, incredible lessons to be learned from organisations, organisational patterns and so on, of ancient humans, trying to also partner with with that knowledge, so nature’s knowledge and traditional human knowledge, so that it doesn’t get lost, but also respecting that, you know, for the most part, those old ancient cultures were very sustainable. It wasn’t about consumption, it was about partnership. We’ve only recently taken that turn.

Martin Henley 34:03
So two things I want to say the first is I used to live in Johannesburg. I maintain like Johannesburg is the first or second, depending on which year it is the most dangerous city in the world. I maintain that I was much less stressed when I live when I lived in Johannesburg because in that situation, you know what the danger is. If you get home and you haven’t got a hole in your head, you’ve had a good day. The stress is very real, it’s very real, you know. In South Africa, they don’t have to manufacture stress the way that we do in the West. By the time I moved back to the UK, and I was putting the news on it was saying be worried about your kids, be worried about the schools, be worried about education, be worried about the environment, be worried about the economy, be worried, be worried, be worried. I think that’s a large part of where we’ve got to with anxiety and depression and all these things. This goes to the core of, because there’s a whole other thing that we could talk about another time, but I’m sure not that this is a conspiracy, but the machine has realised that stressed out people spend much more money and so the machine is working to stress people. So that’s the first thing I wanted to say. Then the second thing, what was the last thing you said, about indigenous, about ancient cultures? When everyone was up in arms, because Australia was on fire? I’ve got friends in Australia, other than yourself and when I spoke to them, they were like, well, we’re not surprised, because they haven’t cleared the fuel for 20 years. So this was always going to happen, because essentially, the fuel for these fires has been left for 20 years, because councils have decided we’re not going to prioritise that budget to clear that so hey ho, 20 years later, you have these these huge, these huge fires, because there’s 20 years of fuel there. Like you say, the indigenous people in Australia manage this for hundreds of 1000s of years before, before we rocked up. Or maybe they didn’t maybe they were just moving away. Who knows? It doesn’t matter. So this is, this is what I love about this. If it gets us away from this western attitude of we always know best and what we do, then, absolutely, I love this, because that it seems to me is an incredibly dangerous thing.

Melanie Farmer 36:35
I guess we’re making the assumption that unhappy people spend more but I wonder, is there a way or place in nature or an indigenous communities where we spent more when we were happy. If that was true? Wouldn’t it be great to have a society where actually happiness and spending happens together, just depends on what you’re actually spending on.

Martin Henley 37:00
But they’ve done this as well, haven’t they with that? So I would say, there is nothing going on in nature, where they are inducing a state of stress in the entire population in the way that we are. They’ve done experiments with heroin and rats, have you heard about this? Where they were they laced the food with heroin, and the rats will not touch it, until you really stressed the rat out, and then it will start to use the heroin. 100%, now I get it and I’m with you. Clearly, the rats in that instance, are delivering a powerful message, which is, you have to be completely corrupted to want to take heroin. Even when they put the ants down with the real butter versus the margerine, the ants won’t go anywhere near the margerine

Martin Henley 37:50
Okay, I get it now. 100% I love it. Well done. Thank you.

Where can people go for more information on biomimicry?

Melanie Farmer 37:56
Yeah, look, check out the Biomimicry Institute in Arizona, part of Arizona State University. To my knowledge, the only one in the world that’s an actual institute dedicated to this discipline and Janine Benyus, who, who’s the founder and director spoke at the COP 2016 it last year, late last year, and I think blew the minds of most of the leaders. Her message being, you know, if we don’t do this, if we don’t learn from nature, and we miss out on the wisdom that’s just sitting in front of us, how embarrassing and what our resource and an opportunity to miss out on.

Martin Henley 38:38
Yeah. But not embarrassing, because embarrassing has to be the least important priority. Like yeah, stupid, or how wasteful or how whatever, like, yeah. Yeah. Inspiring. Let’s go positive. Inspiring. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Melanie Farmer 38:59
That’s it. You can you can look to nature and think, what do I need to do I need to communicate better. I need to build a community. Well, what does? Where does that happen in nature and literally, you could just Google a bunch of creatures who you think do a good job of communicating and building communities, and then just examine what they do to achieve that and think how could I mimic that? That would be a great place to start?

Martin Henley 39:24
Yes. And what am I thinking now I’m thinking that so the application in marketing is you want to be communicating effectively. If you’ve got your head screwed on, you want to be going into codependent relationships where you benefit your customers, they benefit you and the same with your suppliers, etc, etc, etc. I love it. Melanie, you’ve, scored. It’s brilliant. Thank you so much.

Melanie Farmer 39:59
Away you go

Martin Henley 40:00
Okay, I love it. I absolutely love it. I am going to look at some stuff and see if I can come up with some inspiration. Okay, cool. So thank you so much for today I need to run. I’ve got another call in three minutes. But we’re going to do the news tomorrow. So I’m really excited about that. Thank you so much.

Melanie Farmer 40:14
Yeah. Great talking to you and good luck with your next call.

Martin Henley 40:18
Fantastic. Thank you so much. I’ll see you tomorrow.

Melanie Farmer 40:21
Thanks, man. Bye bye

WHAT DO YOU THINK?