Thriving in times of change: what we can learn from biology

When I was given responsibility for the marketing team that would develop what became the Nissan Qashqai, I brought with me a reputation built over years in communications and media relations. But I was conscious that it counted for very little in the new role. The rules had changed: the skills, the relationships, the ways of reading a room that had made me effective in one context were not going to make me effective in this one. I had changed level, and the game at this level had its own logic.

That experience stayed with me because it captures something true about how professional life actually works, especially in times of structural change. We are living in times of turbulent change, indeed. At the level of individual careers, the effect is immediate: the positioning that made you valuable and relevant in one configuration of the business world may have limited traction in the next.

What got us here will not get us there. This may sound like a provocation, but it is actually a systems observation. Our business strategy, and our personal brand with it, must evolve to cope and thrive.

A systems view

When change is so fast and deep, understanding the system you operate in becomes very important. Systems thinking offers tools for this. Donella Meadows was a pioneer in making systems thinking accessible and practical, but it is Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, in The Systems View of Life, who offer the frame I find most illuminating for personal brand. They begin with biology, with the behaviour of living organisms, and extend that understanding to other realms of our life, including society and business. The biological starting point tells us how systems maintain coherence, absorb change and renew themselves from within.

The logic can be applied also to personal brands. Those that thrive in complexity are the ones with a strong centre of gravity, to absorb change in context without losing coherence. A very clear case for how this works in practice is Ferran Adrià.

The elBulli model

Every year, elBulli closed for six months. Adrià and his team withdrew from the market entirely to research and question everything the previous season had produced. The work drew from chemistry, art and industrial design. Nothing was carried forward by assumption. The menus that emerged were radically different each season, and yet while clients would meet a completely new menu with different food, they would recognise the imprint of Ferran Adrià without a doubt: a radical innovator who revisited the very fundamentals of creating food with an artistic intent.

That stable internal nature, the radical innovator who questions everything, is what biology calls homeostasis. It does not change with the context; what changes is the mission.

Changing mission

At a certain point, Adrià understood that his contribution to gastronomy at that level was done and the world had absorbed the movement he had created. He read that and moved on. The elBulli Foundation was born from that decision: a project to catalogue the knowledge accumulated during the elBulli years and make it available to future generations of creative chefs. Different mission, same Adrià.

This capacity to transition from one mission to the next, reading the context and reorganising accordingly without losing your identity, is what biology calls autopoiesis. He did not cling to his success; he recognised when one level was complete and moved to the next.

The idea to retain

Common wisdom asks you to bild on what has worked, but consolidation is always a response to a context that is already passing. Adrià understood that the only way to remain genuinely coherent was to make the questioning itself the stable element; when the internal process defines the brand, every new output confirms the identity rather than threatening it.

This is the quality that a change of level demands. A personal brand with a clear internal logic can move through structural change as a coherent identity, absorbing disruption without dissolving. The idea to retain here is that a personal brand operating in times of accentuated change has to clarify its internal core and preserve it, while evolving its own manifestation in coherence with the external flow of change.