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No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
The Buzz on Team Dynamics: A Beekeeper's Perspective with Mick Brian | Ep 32
Imagine having the power to transform your team's dynamics and communication strategies by borrowing insights from an unexpected source: bees.
You're invited to accompany us on this extraordinary exploration into the world of bees, guided by complexity consultant and avid beekeeper, Mick Brian. Drawing on his extensive knowledge and passion, Mick opens up about the intricacies of bee colonies, the different roles each bee plays, and the surprising survival tactics they deploy.
Next, we delve into Mick's captivating experiences as a beekeeper, discussing the significance of understanding the balance between flying bees, brood, and the queen, and the fascinating process of bee reproduction through swarming. He shares insightful parallels between the beekeeping world and managing a team, explaining the profound impacts of maintaining the ecological balance within a hive and addressing the often misunderstood concept of swarming in bee reproduction. We then explore the profound impact honey bees have on an ecosystem and the ripple effects it can have on other pollinators, drawing compelling comparisons to the business world.
Finally, Mick helps us draw intriguing parallels between the decision-making process in bees and humans. Moving away from the buzz of beekeeping, we step back and discuss how the lessons we've drawn from bees can transform the way we approach team dynamics and decision-making. We reflect on the importance of staying present, the necessity of adaptability, and the power of retrospective coherence, all through the lens of a beekeeper. So come, join us on this bee-autiful journey and uncover the complex world of these small, yet mighty creatures.
Mentioned in This Episode:
The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka
NWO Intro with Boyd
March 25, 2025
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Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
So, mick, we're human, we're not bees, we're not data processors and, as humans, our identity, our intelligence and our intent is constantly changing every day, in a state of constant flux that we find ourselves in complexity. Yet, at the same time, we can learn a lot from things that we observe in nature, which are tremendous illustrations of complexity, and you've done a lot of observation in this area and work in this area regarding bees. So what could we learn from bees as we observe them in our world?
Mick Brian:Yeah, so bees are interesting. I mean, I got interested in bees about 10 years ago I suppose, just after I got out of military. I was away from home a lot, so there's no way I could keep bees. So it was COVID actually that prompted me to get beehives, because I was at home more. That's about that time as well is when I started to get interested in people who were sort of talking about. Someone I worked with was talking about things like kinevin and complexity and all these things and I started to do some reading on bees. I started to do some reading on that and I thought this is quite interesting.
Mick Brian:It's like you say we're not bees but there are things that bees get up to and there's things that bees do. And especially now, since sort of getting to listen to your podcast and understand a little bit about UDA, and I look at it when I think God blind me a lot of this is connected in some way. It's like you say what does Dave call it? Was it like retrospective coherence? Is it when you look back at things and make connections? So maybe I'm doing a bit of that, maybe I don't know, but there's got to be some connections in this stuff.
Mick Brian:So a bee colony is quite a brutal place really. What I mean by that is there's three sort of cast of bees there's a worker bee, there's a drone bee and then there's a queen bee. And when the queen bee is almost living up to a reputation of laying enough eggs, they'll get rid of her. They don't mess around Because it's all about the survival of that complex adaptive system. That's what they're interested in. So every single bee in that hive, or the female bees, are related to the queen bee because they're a fertilized version of her.
Mick Brian:The drone bees are unfertilized eggs but they're all related. But they've got no hesitation with saying you're not doing your job, off you go. So they are quite brutal in that respect. But even though there's only three sort of casts within the hive, the stuff that goes on in there is quite amazing, to be honest, when you look at it. If I was to think about Uda, for instance, I'll give you a little example.
Mick Brian:So when bees if I was to take my bee hive from where it is now and move it three miles away, for instance when the bees next come out of that hive, they have to build up a whole new map of where they are. And what they have to do is they come out of the hive and they've got three ways really of orientating themselves to what's going on. One's the sun, one is the sky and the other one's like a magnetic field and, depending on if it's overcast, what the weather is like, is the sun up in the sky, all these things. They'll come out of the hive and what they'll do is they will reorientate themselves. They'll do tiny little circles around the hive and these circles will get bigger and bigger and they're building up an orientation of where they are and what they then do is they come back to the hive and I think most people, when they think about bees, have heard of this.
Mick Brian:It's something called the waggle dance and it was actually discovered by an Austrian Carl von Frisch was his name, and he studied communication and behaviour in honeybees and he worked out that when they would come back to the hive they would do this dance in the hive. And it's all about where. It's all on the comb, based on where the direction of the sun. So they'll go out and they'll run up the comb and waggle themselves in the direction of the sun no-transcript outside. They then loop back, do that again and they'll loop back to the right and do that again and they'll repeat this process over, depending how long they're running on the comb, for the angle that they're running on the comb tells the rest of the bees.
Mick Brian:And oh yeah, you need to leave the hive and you need to fly off at 45 degrees and you need to fly for One kilometer, two kilometers. It's all based on the speed that they do this and when you think they're doing that in the dark as well. So it's an interesting thing when I think of that from the from a new perspective, because when I think, people think of you. Know If I've heard another bee is observing that in the hive, they're not actually observing it through sight, they're observing it through vibration, through their antenna, through Touching the other bee and this sense, they're sense making, in other words, that is exactly what they're doing.
Mick Brian:It's all around sensing. So there's a lot of sense making going on in the hive and this gets passed around. If the bees couldn't do this, they wouldn't necessarily know when to go out and fly, where to forage, where to find the nectar. So it's you know, when you tie that back into sort of and I only started thinking this about when I was a beekeeper and started listening to you I was thinking there's something to do, it's there's something to do with who to here this sort of ties it now.
Mick Brian:I don't know if I don't know. You, you've read every you know, right, john Boyd. I don't know if he ever Read anything about honey, bees or the, the, the, the waggle dance or anything like that.
Mark McGrath:I'd have to look at. I could ask some of his friends if well I know that evolutionary biology was a very, very important topic to him and it was a. It was an input into the version of the Oodleoo sketches. We know it now and one of our guests, gi Wilson, a few episodes ago, was saying that even on his deathbed, that that Boyd was fascinated with evolutionary biology and he kept talking about evolutionary biology and I think that Bees would certain the way you're describing bees, I mean I would you know. I think that the connection is clear In that we can learn a lot from them, in that there's there's similarities and there's also some, some differences.
Mark McGrath:But I think I think that it would would would line up again because you know we mentioned it's all about survival, you know.
Mark McGrath:Yeah you know, evolutionary biology and Darwin, I mean these are. These were big inputs into the development of Uda, from a four-step, simple, tactical process to something more comprehensive that was Helping people understand and not only surviving complexity but but thriving complexity. And what I'm taking away so far is that, you know, the, there is an orientation in the hive, there's a, there's a command structure, so to speak, there's a leadership structure and it's it's, it's built on survival. So if the, if the, if the queen's not getting it done or whatever, as you say, there's a Seems like, there's a market, so to speak, the market will, the market's never wrong, right Like the, the nature's nature's never wrong.
Mark McGrath:And Then I think what's really interesting too is that what you're saying is that the bees, first of all, they sense, make right through their observations and their interaction with the world and the circumstances they unfold In all that time.
Mark McGrath:It sounds like what you're describing is that they're building a, an orientation of their, of their environment, of the orientation of their market, so to speak, for lack of a, for lack of a better term, so that they can gain as much Perspective as possible, so that when something would happen, like the hive moves or something like that Is it? Is it right to say that? Let's say, let's say I went out and I am a beekeeper and I get a call, there's a, there's a beehive that's in a children's place set and it's a threat to my children, and we go out as beekeepers and we pull that hive out and we find the queen and we take them to our farm where we have a series of beehives. That, in that type of Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, that that's sort of an impactful, disruptive event the bees are going to be able to adapt, is that? Is that yes?
Mick Brian:It's well, that's quite interesting what you say there. So so that's Getting into that situation. I I've this year alone I've been. You know, I'm one beekeeper in the area where I live and I know many other beekeepers but me personally I've had over 30 phone calls to go and collect swarms of bees.
Mick Brian:This year that lots of different things you know there's. That's could be down to the weather, that's down to people not Inspecting their hives enough. Isn't there bees not having enough room in the hive, failing queens all these things can force bees to swarm. But what happens is when you go and collect a swarm of bees and and you've got to make sure that you take that swarm at least at least three miles away from where you find them- Hmm.
Mick Brian:Because if you don't, what happens is when they you collect the swarm, you put them in a what's called a little nucleus box it's like a mini hive just so you can move them if you, if you take them somewhere that's within three miles of where you found them, when they come out, they recognize where, where they are and they will fly back to where you found them.
Mick Brian:So there's a rule in beekeeping it's called the three feet or the three mile rule, and what that means is If you have an apiary, you know, if you've got ten hives, like one of my apires, you can move the hive three feet in that apiary, right, mm-hmm? Or you move it three miles away. If you want to do, if you want to, I don't know split the hive or something. If I move that that hive just To 50 feet the other side of the field they will, they will come out and then they will fly back to where they think they're real, where their hive is.
Mick Brian:But there's no hive there, so they have this complete. Their orientation is all based around where they think they were before they left the hive. So, but the interesting thing in beekeeping is a beekeeper can actually use that to their advantage.
Mark McGrath:How so.
Mick Brian:Because I can split a hive of bees down right In beekeeping there's. You know, you must have come across this, the good old fire triangle, from when you were going through basic training. You know you have to have fuel, was it fuel oxygen? And what's the third thing?
Mark McGrath:Water.
Mick Brian:To have a fire. So you have a fire. Oh yeah, I know what you're saying.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, fuel was a catalyst.
Mick Brian:Yeah, that's right. So you've got to have those three things to get like a fire triangle you take one of those things away, the fire goes out.
Mark McGrath:You definitely don't want water.
Mick Brian:It's the same. It's the same in beekeeping. You've got like a beekeeping triangle. You've got what are called, what are called the flying bees Okay, so the bees that are foraging. You have what's called brood. So it's all the bees that are in their development stages.
Mick Brian:They call it brood, and then you have the queen. And what happens to be? Can you have? You take one of those away. There's going to be a consequence to the hive. So what you can do is you can take the queen or you can take the. You can leave the queen and a couple of frames of bees in the original place. You put the rest of the bees in another hive, take them to the other side of the aprie and they'll fly back, and you can multiply beehives that way. Huh.
Mark McGrath:So it's almost like a spin-off.
Mick Brian:if I want to start a spin-off hive, this is the problem with beekeeping you start off with two and end up with 20 very quickly if you don't manage it properly.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, how many things have I heard of.
Mark McGrath:Once you get one, you know you can't have, you have to have two, and then you have to have four and eight, and that's awesome.
Mark McGrath:Exactly when I hear you say so, when we're talking about the, you've got to move them at least three miles, yeah, and you say that if you did it within that, the change won't be authentic or, like the change of location, they're going to continue to kind of gravitate towards their original sort of model, if you will.
Mark McGrath:Okay, so that may be what that made me think of, as when, when an, like a human organization, you know, we think we're making change, we think we're adapting, but we're in fact not because we haven't disrupted ourselves effectively to meet it with some kind of a new design. So, in other words, you're taking a hive and you need to move it at least three miles away, so there's a massive disruption. But it seems to me that the design of bees and how they and how they function, that's exactly what they need. That kind of disruption, that's how they they meet with with that design of being three miles away, to be resilient and adapt to whatever, you know, whatever condition in their quote, unquote market takes place. That's what. That's what it kind of seems like metaphorically.
Mick Brian:So I mean, the swarming that goes on in bees is just for one reason, and that's it's the only way bees can reproduce is when they swarm from a hive right, and then I think there's maybe a misconception.
Mick Brian:It's just again. It's one of those things you sort of learn as you start beekeeping. It's like I said you have a queen, you have one queen in a hive right, you can have two, but very, very, very rare. You have like 50,000 worker bees at the height of summer and they're all descendants of the queen Right. But you have drones as well, which are male bees. When you say that, I think people think that the drones in the hive are mating with the queen in the hive. That's not what happens. The drones in the hive with the queen do not mate with that queen.
Mark McGrath:So this swarming thing has what's the role of the drone in the hive?
Mick Brian:The drone is the male. The drone is the male bee, so they are an unfertilized egg.
Mark McGrath:I see.
Mick Brian:And there's way way less of drone bees male bees, I see.
Mark McGrath:But what happens is so the bees that we see in our garden, those are all female bees. Those are the flyers and foragers.
Mick Brian:Yes, yeah literally so.
Mark McGrath:Bee Movie where they have the bees as top gun pilots that's completely false. That's what I'm hearing you say.
Mick Brian:It's funny because I've got twin boys and we were watching it the other day and they do bee keeping with me and straight away. They were like why are they all men? Was there the thing they literally said?
Mark McGrath:Okay, yeah, so you heard her hear a vote. You heard her hear first. Bee Movie is not accurate to the complexities of nature that we see unfolding in front of us. Is that fair.
Mick Brian:Exactly, that is 100%.
Mark McGrath:No, I'm sure that would make it.
Mick Brian:One thing that's really interesting that happens is when the queen has to mate. She flies off and there's these. I mean it's really interesting. No one really knows why this happens or where it happens, but there are ancient things called drone congregation areas, Right? So all the drones from beehives in the local area all meet up in the same location that they've been meeting for hundreds of years, and the queen flies into the middle of them all.
Mark McGrath:And this is something that's happening over centuries. This is something that's happening over yeah, and they go to the same.
Mick Brian:These places hundreds of meters in the air as well, a lot of them. So they're very difficult to see, but what happens there is. The queen will mate with up to 20 drone bees, and it's to improve the genetics of the offspring.
Mark McGrath:Huh, yeah, so every hive or these locations are, I mean, I guess, throughout the world, wherever bees are, and they've been returning to these same locations globally, yeah. Wow, yeah, yeah, I've heard people say that, like you know, if bees are ancient animals, right, I mean, these are things that have been around for oh yeah, over 100 million years in evolution, and they actually evolved from parasitic wasps which were carnivorous originally.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, kind of to orientation though. So we're seeing something that, within their sort of orientation as a group because, remember, orientation is fractal it would be fractal, yeah. So we see orientation. I mean, this is a continuation of something that's been going on for hundreds of millions of years.
Mick Brian:Yeah.
Mark McGrath:Wow yeah.
Mick Brian:That's amazing. So the queen will mate with 20 drones and this is like a lot of in nature. The male dies after mating with the queen bee. Unfortunately, when they mate, their manhood gets snapped off and left behind. That's literally what happens. And yeah, so she'll mate with 20 drone bees and then she will go back to the hive and then she never mates again. That's it. She has got enough sperm from those 20 drones and a queen bee can last, in the longest case, up to five years. They very, very rarely last that long for lots of different reasons, but she'll have enough drone sperm in her to produce all the eggs she needs, and in the height of summer when she's laying, she's laying 1000 to 2000 eggs a day.
Mark McGrath:What are? So you're in England, I'm in Ohio, across the sea. What are in England? Because you know there's the course parallels, right, this is something that's been going on forever. What are the importance of bees to the greater bigger picture? The pollination of fruits and vegetables and other things Like, what are the impact? The only reason I asked that is because in the United States and I guess maybe worldwide, but as I was reading about it, years ago, it was seen to be happening a lot in America that there was what was called Colony Collapse Disorder, that these bees were just vanishing and they were just, you know, going away and that without bees, you know, we wouldn't have almonds and we wouldn't have, you know, tomatoes or whatever. You know, we wouldn't have all these things because they wouldn't be able to, basically, you know, do their mission within the sort of the greater complexity marketplace, you know.
Mick Brian:Yeah, I think so in America the almond things really interest. I mean I've watched programs on that. It's really interesting because you know a lot of beekeepers in the UK commercial beekeepers do it. They do it for a pollination right. So they'll do like in the almond season they'll take bees to certain areas and they'll pollinate certain crops.
Mick Brian:But it's not to the same scale as what is in America, because in the UK most beekeepers still see their main thing as like is the honey. They sell the honey. But in America I've seen programs where they the honey. It's no one's interested in the honey. It's like for commercial beekeepers, they're just like no, it's the pollination, that's where they're, that's where they're making, that's where they're getting their money. I suppose other income Now the thing with. I say this to anyone that's thinking of taking up beekeeping and you might think this is a bit of an oxymoron thing for a beekeeper to say but in the UK definitely there is nothing. Honey bees haven't got a problem right. There's enough honey bees to go around.
Mick Brian:You know, 10 times over the problem in the UK is with solitary bees, bumble bees, moths, all the other pollinators, because what can happen? And again, you can use this in a God military business, whatever context you want If you go into the ecosystem and you flood it with honey bees, they will take up the resources of every other pollinator in the vicinity. They literally hoover it all up and there's nothing left for anybody else.
Mark McGrath:So if I bring in a big like a massive giant consulting company to boil or plate and push everything top down, I'm gonna push out all the yeah, you'll push out all the little you know, the solitary bees, the sort of, yeah, all the creative power.
Mick Brian:Exactly all the small companies, all the adaptive people that are trying to go around. Yeah, you will just literally push them out of the landscape. So you know, there's some. Really. It's interesting, like moths, for instance, do more pollination at night than honey bees do during the day. But if you flooded the area or if you flooded the ecosystem with honey bees, they will not be able to do that pollination because it's all been taken up.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I just think of so many things where whether it's that kind of consulting or just flooding something with capital or thinking that honey's gonna solve all the problems, and you push away all the creative resilience and cognitive power of the individuals, the humans, the people that you have inside of an organization, that they're gonna get smothered, that they're not gonna get the opportunity to create, collaborate, coordinate, compete effectively, because the it sounds like what you're saying, you know, like all of that's gonna get snuffed out with an influx of something that's gonna offset or imbalance the potential or what people could have been doing yeah, 100%.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, huh.
Mick Brian:Yeah, and it's so. Yeah, I'm always very, you know, I'm very. I'm pro honey bees, obviously, and I really like taking people and showing them the hives and everything. But it's literally one of the first things I say, because the amount of people I've seen that think to help the environment, get a hive of bees and we'll just put them at the bottom of our garden and then in the summer we'll go down and we'll scrape some honey out, and won't that be fantastic for everybody. Yeah, and then they stay Because it's an. This is the other thing I find interesting. Honey bees are tiny little insects, right, yeah, on its own, but it's a complex adaptive system and their class is being livestock, but people, because people see them as insects. The neglect that goes on is quite a lot. People just do not look after them.
Mark McGrath:Even after that's sort of an influx or that's sort of a massive introduction, that there's no follow-up, there's no care, there's no development, there's no learning.
Mick Brian:No, so I mean it's like and the other thing I would say.
Mark McGrath:We started off the conversation. Yeah, one of the ways humans differ from bees or ants or data processors is that we have identity, intelligence and intent that's constantly changing. So it sounds like the intent of something like that is completely misaligned with the realities of the complexity of the environment, but also the complexity of the complex adaptive systems that are being thrust to an environment within an intent that's not aligned with reality, so to speak.
Mick Brian:Yeah, 100%, it's when you do start getting to beekeeping. It takes an awful lot of time and effort. If you're serious about doing it, you know in between the months of April to August you're going to those hives every week and it takes a lot of time. Yeah, and you need to do that because the thing with honey bees is and you mentioned it a little bit about colony collapse. They're very susceptible to an awful lot of diseases.
Mark McGrath:Mm-hmm.
Mick Brian:And if, again you can put this into a sort of context a honey bee hive if it's not nurtured, if it's not allowed to flourish, if it's not well maintained, it will pick up disease, and that it's a vector then to spread disease.
Mark McGrath:And you see that in organizations.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, yeah. So, like you know, they're always willing to bring out. It's this one person that caused the collapse of this company, or it's this one, whatever? The favorite one I always like to point out is Bering's Bank, which of course you're familiar with in the UK. You know we're told that it's this one rogue trader that ruined the bank. That had been around for a hundred years. But I always have thought as I read into those things there was an environment that wasn't nurtured, that wasn't cared for, that wasn't, people weren't learning, they weren't flourishing, and all it needed eventually, after years and years of rot, was one catalyst, like a rogue trader. So it seems to me that that meant is that the same in bees, then? So this disease spreads, and then there's going to be some kind of an external catalyst or internal catalyst that's going to make it extinct.
Mick Brian:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mick Brian:So a good example and I think this is probably if most people have heard of this, if they've looked into honeybees, it's the most famous probably disease that affects them is something called a Varroa mite. So in America a lot of the colony collapses over the past sort of 10, 15 years have been attributed to this little mite, Right, and it's what they call them anthropods. It's so small Arthropods, Arthropods, that's what arthropods. So it's really interesting because the Asian honeybee evolved with Varroa mites, so they have a way of dealing with them. But over the years, as the Asian honeybees or the honeybee spread across from Asia and all the way across Western Europe so it's Apis malifera is the later name for the European honeybee it lost its capability to have an effect against this mite, which was fine until the mite got transported through export of bees, transportation, the weather, and when it then re-caught up with what was now evolved as the Western honeybee, it didn't have a way of defeating it. So the Varroa mite has an if it's not treated, will just wipe out a colony of bees.
Mark McGrath:Wow Ha.
Mick Brian:Unless it's again, unless there's some sort of treatment, yeah Ha. But the problem with a lot of the treatments now they're all sort of chemical treatments, so they're harsh Again, you can look at that from a different perspective, unless how companies evolve and then something massively comes in, just something that no one's ever thought about, and you're then having to take harsh, draconian actions to bring things back. I suppose it's a little bit. If you looked at Canevin, it's like a chaotic situation then. Yeah, you have to do something.
Mark McGrath:To bring it back as a balance. Yeah, yeah.
Mark McGrath:Or bring it back towards complexity anyway, yeah, yeah, because I think with bees, like with any other complex adaptive system, certainly humans, it's a asymmetric, nonlinear. We can't go around with equations and formulas and recipes to fix everything. We have to be, we have to sort of have an open stance and open orientation, if you will, that constantly is changing to help us deal with what we observe and sense make in the environment. So when you speak with, just take it home. And there's two things I want to ask before we close.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, the first one is about just your big takeaway lessons. I mean, we've covered a lot of ground of sense making, mapping some of the similarities and differences, and the last thing is resources that you would recommend for people to. But let's start with number one first. When you're talking with humans on a team in an organization, knowing that humans and bees are not the same, but there's a lot of similarities what are the one or two or even three things that you want to make sure that people walk away with? This is what bees can teach you Boom, boom, boom. What are they?
Mick Brian:Okay, so the first one is and I think about this from almost like a, I suppose, a change perspective right and working with teams, working with a hive of bees is like being part of a team.
Mick Brian:I'm just part of the team when I'm inspecting the bees. So one week I can go there and everything is perfect, the bees are pleasant, they're not doing anything that they shouldn't do, and I put the lid back on and I go away thinking that excellent, or everything sorted. And then the week after I come back I take the lid off and they try to kill me, and that could be for lots of different reasons that I'm not aware of, and I think it's the same in a team. You have team interaction and you could then sort of take yourself away, but there's all these interconnections, there's all these conversations.
Mick Brian:There's a rumor starts and it's like that, and it's in a beehive. If they don't have enough forage, if the weather's bad, if the queen's not doing what she's meant to be doing, I'm not going to see that. All I'm going to see is, when I take the lid off that hive, the next time they're all going to jump out at me and give me grief. So it's this.
Mark McGrath:I've always thought that what you're describing the way I would think of that is that everybody's really good at what they can see. If they don't understand complexity, they don't understand UDA, they don't understand Kinevon, they don't understand human factors, things like that. They're not going to be very good at the unseen, and it's usually the unseen what gets them, not the scene. It's often times the unseen. Okay, that's a good one.
Mick Brian:So you got it. So that's I would say. When you're interacting with bees, you need to take your time, be sort of in the moment with it. When I'm doing a hive inspection, I'm not thinking of anything else. When I'm interacting with the bees. I don't think of anything else. And I think sometimes, again, in a business work environment, you can try to be present and people know when you're not, and so, yeah, I give it my full attention. I leave my mobile phone.
Mick Brian:My mobile phone is near me, just in case, but my mobile phone's in the van. I'm taking all distractions away to focus on. No, this is what I'm meant to be doing now, because this is important For the Americans.
Mark McGrath:Listening, that's a cell phone, but to the point. So Ponch says this a lot, we all say this a lot, and Viv Reed when we had her on talking about sense making. You know, oftentimes when you engage with a team or you engage in an organization, they're gonna tell you where they wanna go, but they don't know where they are because they're not in the moment. And if you don't know where you are, it's impossible to do anything to get you to go in any direction, because you have no idea where you are in relation to what's going on. So it sounds like so when you're interacting with a Hive, and the lesson for teams and organizations is you take the time to be in the moment, to see where we're currently at, and then we can figure out where it is that we wanna go. Okay.
Mick Brian:Because if I don't do that, I'll end up missing something, and the thing I end up missing will have an unintended consequence when I go back to that Hive next time.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, yeah, that's another one, right. So we talked about the scene and the unseen, and then the unintended consequences, because all actions have consequences. That's what we observe in the loop as we reorient. Okay, one more lesson. What do you got? What's the big takeaway?
Mick Brian:One more lesson, but for my beekeeping.
Mark McGrath:Yeah.
Mick Brian:Yeah, you can never expect them to do the same thing twice.
Mark McGrath:Mm.
Mick Brian:You, you know, they're individuals, every bee is an individual, but they all have the survival of that system. It's the, that's the paramount thing. So, again, you can make comparisons, can't you? And, as I say, they're not humans, they're bees.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, but they're similar.
Mick Brian:They're similar and sometimes I think maybe, maybe people lose sight of that they concentrate so much on the individual. I think Dave goes on about this quite a lot, actually Like concentrate so much on the individual. Yeah, on the individual and then it has a consequence for the bigger team, the bigger organization. Yeah, because you're not all working. What Dave says you know. Have a sense of direction, go for a sense of direction.
Mark McGrath:It makes me think. When you say that too, where once something works well, it's obsolete, we have to. You got to break the model and keep refining it and keep reorienting that which is you know, that's the podcast no way out. There's a continuous need to reorient as things like entropy and uncertainty, everything's unfolding around us. So when you say, don't go into something with the same expectations, because things don't happen the same way twice and that we know that everything's in a status useless flux just because another, would this be a way to say it? Just because something worked somewhere at this point in time doesn't mean it's ever gonna work again in some other point in time yeah, okay, yeah.
Mick Brian:I don't take your twins. Don't take your twins. Beekeeping is my other. Don't take your twins, beekeeping yeah how will they?
Mark McGrath:How will they?
Mick Brian:They're eight and they always wanna come beekeeping with me, and then, within about five minutes of our starting the smoker, they're running around like headless chickens and causing me no end of problems.
Mark McGrath:Well, there you go. There's chaos right there crossing the line from complexity and chaos.
Mark McGrath:So all right, so the one, two, three, the scene and the unseen. The second thing be in the moment, because you need to be in the moment, to be present, whether you're beekeeping or whether you're working with teams. And the last thing is expecting the same thing twice, or just because something happens somewhere else or works somewhere else doesn't mean it's gonna work somewhere else. That's awesome. So, closing, so for those listening that wanna learn more about bees, what are some of the resources that you like or some of the things that you found value in where people might be able to learn a little bit more?
Mick Brian:So there is an awesome book. I'll show you it here. Sure, you can follow this guy.
Mark McGrath:It's called the Mind of a Bee, written by Lars Chitka. Yeah, okay.
Mick Brian:That book I mean in there is. If you start reading it it's the sense making, sort of that comes up. The complexity that I mean. The research this guy's done is crazy. I mean to the point where they're looking into if bees are conscious and how intelligent they are. I mean they've done experiments where bees can teach another bee to roll a marble and then they can teach bees.
Mick Brian:bees can be taught to pull on little strings to get sugar, water, all these types, and you start to look at it and then you go back to okay, bees aren't human, but there's some form of intelligence going on there.
Mark McGrath:Yeah.
Mick Brian:Yeah, that is absolutely. That's the book I would say if you wanted to get into beekeeping.
Mark McGrath:Well, we love books on no way out, so we're always talking books and we're always. If you wanna be a leader, you gotta be a reader.
Mick Brian:Exactly, books are critical and just something I found this afternoon actually. So I've got a lot of old beekeeping journals from the 19, that's 1947, that is.
Mark McGrath:Wow, right Okay.
Mick Brian:Yep, and I was just so I thought I wanna have a quick read through and see if anything jumps out. So, and this is what's written here and it just I think it's brilliant, it's beekeeping notes for beginners. I'm just gonna pull it and it's one of the lines is the first point that may be made is that, dealing with bees and connected matters, one should avoid being dogmatic which. I thought was very interesting seeing as it was written in 1947.
Mark McGrath:Yeah.
Mick Brian:And the other part. Another thing that jumped out of me is, again I read this and I thought if somebody I respected in sort of complexity and all these other things, had written this, I'd be like blimey. That's profound and it's literally. It says the edges of the picture are indistinct and, owing to the finiteness of the human mind, will remain so few will be so bold as to suppose that there will ever be an end to the discovery of fresh knowledge. And it is this very fact, of course, that makes the pursuit of knowledge in any direction so fascinating. So that's a beekeeper.
Mark McGrath:Back in 1947, putting a little I don't think John Boyd could have said that better himself. And wow, now let me ask you this for the sake of our audience is that available in PDF, that we could put it up?
Mick Brian:on I can. I'll scan it in PDF for you.
Mark McGrath:Oh yeah, let's do that because it sounds. I think we could probably do a whole episode just on that. That sounded awesome. As you know, the famous Boyd quote is that you have to challenge all assumptions, otherwise what becomes doctrine today becomes dogma forevermore. So it is amazing how we, as complex adaptive systems, we have all sorts of signs telling us not to be doctrinaire, not to be dogmatic, that things are in a state of ceaseless flux, and I think you've just shown us that bees are a tremendous lesson that we can pull some similarities out of and we can start thinking about, and we'll definitely share that, because I think that I'm looking forward to reading that.
Mick Brian:Yeah, that sounds awesome. I'll definitely do that for you, no worries, mark.
Mark McGrath:Well, mick, we're glad to have you on no Way Out. I know that you're a frequent listener and a fan of the show and we're glad to have you on as a guest in the conversation with us, and we're looking forward to great things ahead.
Mick Brian:Mark, thanks ever so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure.
Mark McGrath:Thanks for coming on. We'll see you soon.
