Learning from the Octopus
My book, "Learning from the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters and Disease" (Basic Books) comes out this week and the publisher did a beautiful job putting it together. That bright orange octopus on the cover illustrated by Ernst Haeckel is embossed, so you can feel its tentacles!
INSIDE you'll find sad tales of our failures in society to be adaptable, remarkable stories of the intricate ways in which natural organisms have survived and thrived for billions of years on an unpredictable planet, and hopeful examples of how all sorts of people, organizations, corporations and bureaucracies have learned to be adaptable.
THE MAIN PREMISE of the book is that natural organisms have learned to thrive in an unpredictable and risk filled planet without having the power to plan, predict, or try to perfect themselves. By contrast, we waste endless resources on strategic planning, predictive models, and optimization, with few successes to show for it. Natural organisms have successfully avoided all this waste by being adaptable.
ADAPTABILITY has become a popular corporate buzzword, but few people actually know what it means to be adaptable, or how to do it. This book breaks adaptability down into its component parts and then shows how they can be inserted into any area of society where risk is present and unpredictable.
LEARNING FROM THE OCTOPUS is the result of a long journey, from the tidepools of Monterey Bay, where I conducted marine biology research, to the halls of Congress, where I served as a science advisor to Congresswoman Hilda Solis after 9/11. It was there that I witnessed first hand how poorly adapted and wasteful our massive new "intelligently designed" security architecture was. For the past several years, I have facilitated a series of discussions based on the simple question, "what can we learn from nature about how to keep ourselves more secure?" Participants have included evolutionary biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, soldiers and marines, police and fire chiefs, TSA agents, air marshalls, public health practitioners, business leaders and cyber security experts. The lessons in "Learning from the Octopus" are told through the stories of these people--all keen observers of nature and security--as well as through the natural organisms--from viruses to octopuses--that are all wonderful examples of how to learn from success and adapt to an ever-changing planet.
HOW CAN YOU BUY A COPY? Just go to my friends at Powells, the best book store in the world! http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780465021833-0
MORE INFORMATION AND A VIDEO SYNOPSIS is available at: www.learningfromtheoctopus.com
SOME RECENT ARTICLES & EXCERPTS ARE HERE:
From my favorite news magazine, The Week: What We Can Learn from the Octopus
From the April 2012 Wired: When Catastrophe Strikes, Emulate the Octopus
From Stanford Magazine: Tidepools and Terrorism
