Adaptive Path Blog

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.

In April, I shared my thinking about slime mold and organizational culture at the IA Summit in Memphis. There I met Stacy Surla, who invited me to write an article on the topic for the  August/September 2009 issue of The Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

The article went live this week, so you can read the full story on learning from slime mold. Thanks to the great editorial team at the Bulletin for the guidance and editing work. We’re also excited that this article debuted video examples for the first time in Bulletin content.

Article in the August/September 2009 issue of The Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

You can read the full article here:

• Web version (html)
• Print version (pdf)
• Current Bulletin issue (html, not a permalink)
• Complete Bulletin issue, August/September 2009 (pdf)

And to whet your appetite, check out this marvelous slime mold video by Thomas Gregor in Princeton University’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. It shows the first 2 stages of the lifecycle.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Behavior Change, Collaboration, Communication, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.