How resilient is your business or organization?  Are you prepared to survive disturbances, even the unexpected? What if you had a mentor that would share her secrets, if you knew how to ask? 

Inspired by nature's deep principles of resilience, the BEND Resilience Workshop [BEND: Business Emulating Nature's Design, a B-Collaborative collaboration] facilitates a unique, immersive experience that through a combination of experiential learning exercises, live lecture, and facilitated brainstorming, gives you the tools of natural resilience and helps you translate them into your context, so that your organization can not only survive but thrive in the face of disturbance. Please contact The BEND Group with inquiries: theBENDgroup@b-collaborative.com

The BEND Workshop Experience

The BEND Resilience Workshop experience translates nature’s lessons of resilience into concepts that can be applied to the world of business and organizational design.  The Workshop targets an audience of decision makers actively working to embed sustainability into their organization and focuses on three leverage points to embed resilience into a system: 
  • Mitigating high probability/low impact disturbance through simple, system-wide rules,
  • Adapting to moderate probability/moderate impact disturbance through thresholds for action and feedback loops,
  • Reorganizing after low probability/high impact disturbance by embedding “Nature’s R&D.”

[Module 1] Mitigating the Effects of Disturbance 

In the first module, we look at adapting to high probability, low impact disturbances through the lens of predation on collective animal behavior, such as swarming and schooling.  The result is a dynamic response from the group as a whole, effective communication, awareness of your immediate environment, and maintenance of cohesion in the face of disturbance.

[Module 2] Adapting to Disturbance 

In the second module, we look at adapting to medium probability, medium impact disturbances through the lens of nest damage in social insect colonies, like ants, as well as exploring antigen invasion in an adaptive immune system. The result is effective, efficient information exchange coupled with a regulated response and held in balance by feedback loops to ensure a resilient system response that is quick, precise, energetically efficient and inexpensive. 

[Module 3] Reorganization through Nature’s R&D

In the third module, we look at reorganizing after disturbances of low probability, but high impact events through the lens mature ecosystems, such as coral reefs and mature forests, which are resilient to disturbances such as fires and floods. By embedding “Nature’s R&D” into the system before the disturbance occurs, functional integrity is ensured and the system emerges resilient.

About the Authors

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Amy Coffman Phillips
Amy Coffman Phillips is the founder of The B‐Collaborative, serving to catalyze and facilitate nature‐inspired projects. Amy makes presentations on biomimicry, facilitates workshops and brainstorming sessions, and develops projects for clients looking to integrated regenerative design into their work. In addition to the BEND Workshop, she is facilitating the development of “The Prairie Project,” a project exploring locally‐attuned, place‐based design for the Chicago region. Amy is a licensed architect, LEED BD+C, MBA and Co‐Founder of Biomimicry Chicago.

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Lindsay James
Lindsay James is the Vice President, Restorative Enterprise for Interface, the global sustainability leader and the world’s largest manufacturer of 
commercial carpet tile (NASDAQ: TILE). She serves as the biomimicry
expert for Interface,  where she expands Interface’s thought leadership and sustainability vision, aligns the company’s initiatives with this vision, and creates initiatives to engage Interface associates in the sustainability journey. She aspires to integrate biomimicry into Interface’s sustainability vision and actions and discover a path for business to become regenerative.

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Maria O'Farrell
Maria O'Farrell, the NCSU Solar Center’s Training Programs Manager, holds both an NCSU Renewable Energy
Technologies and Green Building diploma. She graduated magna cum
laude from NCSU with a B.S. in Zoology and a minor in Botany. She utilizes her biological knowledge and research abilities to offer large organizations design insights that will inspire
innovative and sustainable solutions to a variety of design challenges, from the way make truly innovative products to how we embed resilience
into our organizations, all inspired by design solutions in the natural world.
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Contact biomimicry@b-collaborative.com and follow her on twitter @amycoffman.