Discover Your Interspecies Governance Style
Eight questions with five governance scenarios each. Discover which species archetype matches your leadership instincts, and what it reveals about your strengths and blind spots.
3.8 Billion Years of Governance R&D
Your first instinct might be skepticism. Business schools don't typically recommend studying octopus neurology or fungal networks as preparation for board service. We've been trained to keep strict boundaries between organizational theory and biological systems.
But consider what that boundary costs us. When we refuse on principle to examine how other species coordinate, decide, and adapt, we're not being more rigorous. We're limiting our datapoints to roughly 10,000 years of human organisational history while ignoring 3.8 billion years of tested solutions to the same problems we face: resource allocation under scarcity, collective decision-making under uncertainty, resilience through disruption.
Why This Tool Exists
Life has been running organisations longer than boardrooms have existed, navigating complexity for billions of years. Nature knows:
How to decide when information is incomplete, like bees. How to balance speed with wisdom, like cheetahs. How to govern for the long term while surviving the short term, like trees. How to coordinate across differences, like coral reefs.
The playbook exists. This Toolkit has translated it for your board.
How It Works
Select every option that reflects how you naturally lead. There are no wrong answers.
Your responses map to one of fifteen species archetypes, each with a percentage match score.
Dive into boardroom applications, blind spots, and which species complement yours.
Your Governance Archetype
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Beyond Your Archetype
Nature has been governing complex systems for 3.8 billion years.
The question is: are you ready to learn with the greatest strategist?
Work with Us
Ready to bring nature's voice to your boardroom? Our team works with organisations to embed nature representation into governance, strategy, and decision-making.
Get in TouchSources & Acknowledgements
- Tero, A., Takagi, S., et al. (2010). "Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design." Science, 327(5964), 439–442.
- Seeley, T.D. (2010). Honeybee Democracy. Princeton University Press. See also: Seeley, T.D. & Visscher, P.K. (2004). "Quorum sensing during nest-site selection." Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 56, 594–601.
- van der Heijden, M.G.A., Martin, F.M., et al. (2015). "Mycorrhizal ecology and evolution: the past, the present, and the future." New Phytologist, 205(4), 1406–1423.
- NOAA. "Coral Reef Ecosystems." National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/marine-life/coral-reef-ecosystems
- Ballerini, M. et al. (2008). "Interaction ruling animal collective behavior depends on topological rather than metric distance." PNAS, 105(4), 1232–1237. See also: Young, G.F. et al. (2013). Princeton University.
- McComb, K. et al. (2011). "Leadership in elephants: the adaptive value of age." Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 278(1722), 3270–3276.
The 15 governance archetypes and their mapping to boardroom applications are original to Nature on Board, an initiative of Diversity on Board & Earth Law Center's Nature Governance Agency. Species behavioural data draws on established research in behavioural ecology, marine biology, mycology, and entomology.