Whether a species survives or goes extinct depends on its ability to access crucial resources, such as food and water. Species are in constant and fierce competition with one another for limited resources and different species only learn to coexist when they can occupy unique niches within their environments (i.e. when they use different resources from one another).
For example, small beaked finches and large beaked finches coexist within the Galapagos islands because they eat different sized seeds. If both types ate the same types of seeds, one would eventually get better at it, and the other would die out. Luckily for the finch lovers of the world, large and small mouth finches occupy different niches, so they can live in harmony alongside one another.
Given how reliant animals are for resources to survive, it is not surprising that changes in the availability of specific resources profoundly influence the viability of different species. Any time the environment changes, there are winners and losers. Scientists have estimated that 5 mass extinctions have occurred since the earth formed, most tied to large scale environmental changes, such as asteroid impacts or global drops in sea level. The dinosaurs were winners 200 million years ago, when almost all other animals died out, meaning that all the resources these recently extinct animals previously consumed were now available for dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were losers 65 million years ago, when an asteroid impact created an environment in which they were no longer able to access the resources they needed.
Just as mass extinctions of species result from significant changes in the physical environment, so too do mass extinctions of organizations result from large scale changes in the organizational environment.
Organizations are Organisms
There have been a number of organizational “extinction events,” due to changes in the organizational environment, including:
- The industrial revolution, when machines and factories replaced hand production methods, and textiles were the dominant industry.
- The digital revolution we are currently experiencing, in which the internet and computers have shaped nearly every aspect of life, making countless older technologies obsolete.
Ecology and evolution help us understand the interactions between organisms and their environment, and describe how various species adapt to these environments over time. Given how well studied these fields are, it is convenient for business leaders that so many ecological and evolutionary insights can also be applied to organizations1.
Like organisms, organizations are born, mature, and age before eventually dying. The length of their healthy lifespan depends on their ability to adapt to changes in their environment, to overcome predators, and to access the crucial resources they need to survive.
The most crucial resource an organization needs are customers.
In a future blog post, I will explore this in fuller detail, describing how smart business leaders can use resource partitioning theory to get a clear sense for where their industry is headed, using this knowledge to differentiate themselves from competitors and find a unique niche to occupy.
Footnote:
- I wish I thought of this, but there is actually an entire field of organizational ecology, which was the single most perspective altering thing I learned in college. It began in 1977 with this paper, and was formed in my favorite way (bisociation, when insights from one place of knowledge are applied to problems in another plane). If you can’t wait for me to write more blog posts about it, check out the wikipedia, which is my second favorite wikipedia page after the list of cognitive biases.
Intersections 