#ThinkfullyHabit: Go natural
The world is full of stories of nature inspiring real-world problem solving - sometimes in life saving ways. Business legend and philanthropist Bill Gates gives one of his favourite examples as being how the kangaroo inspired baby care. In the 1970’s two Colombian paediatricians, Edgar Rey and Hector Martinez, were struggling to care for pre-term infants due to inadequate and insufficient incubators in Bogota, Columbia. They turned to the natural world and took inspiration from how kangaroos care for their young.
A young kangaroo, or joey, is born at a very immature stage of its development cycle and immediately crawls up the mother's body and enters her pouch straight after birth. This idea has been applied to pre-term babies; warming them through human skin contact rather than through the use of incubators. When the practice has been widely adopted, the impact has been truly remarkable. For example, in Rwanda the newborn mortality rate fell by 30% between 2008 and 2015, largely due to the spread of what has become known as “kangaroo mother care”.*
“Good imitators don’t wait; they actively search for ideas worth copying.**”
WHY?
Instead of the paediatricians asking the obvious question of how they could get hold of more incubators, they tried to think about the issue in a different way. They asked themselves, how could they resolve the problem without the use of incubators? And then they turned to nature to see what ideas could help.
So next time you’re facing a problem, try answering the following:
What exactly needs solving? Boil the problem down to its essence.
Where can this kind of problem be found in the natural world? Take fresh inspiration.
What can I adapt to help address the problem? Discern what's helpful and what's not.
How can I apply ideas into a solution using the materials and resources available? Make it practical.
It’s not about waiting for nature to miraculously inspire you. It’s about turning to nature to hunt out whether a partial blueprint already exists; one which can be evolved, adapted or built upon.
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