Talk :: Learning from Slime Mold [IA Summit 2009]

In April 2009, I shared my thinking about slime mold and organizational culture at the IA Summit in Memphis.

For years, I’ve found creative inspiration in slime mold. The elegance of this lifeform is extraordinary: when times are good, it’s a colony of individuals. When times are bad, the whole colony forms a single organism and makes a getaway. I use slime mold as a metaphor and learning inspiration for how organizations behave, adapt and how they can better embrace collective work.

At one point in the talk, the audience (and selected slime mold stars from Adaptive Path) acted out the lifecyle, which was caught on video.

A paper on the topic was published in the Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) in August 2009: html version | pdf version.