Why Hyphae?

Leadership is in effect both a verb and a noun. As a verb, it is the charge of energy, or the very behaviour, that creates the desired leadership effect, such as encouraging, motivating, inspiring, or enabling others. As a noun, it is a symbiotic complex-networked series of relationships.

Leadership is an ethereal concept, never truly definable by either its form or its function. To help to bring my ideas to life I needed an unassailable metaphoric leader. A superlative, something unsurpassable in its ability to form symbiotic relationships, something largely invisible to us, but fundamental to every aspect of our lives, from the air we breathe to the food we eat and the environment in which we live.

Hyphae, (pronounced HY-fee), are the branching tendril-like filaments that make up the mycelium of fungi. They are unquestionably, the most successful organisms on our planet. Throughout their over one billion years of life on our planet they have supported and enabled both plant and animal life to grow, adapt and flourish.

As you build your leadership ability throughout this program, I will use various analogies relating to these amazing organisms. At this point, I would like to conclude by drawing your attention to what for me are the two most important behavioural characteristics of hyphae pertaining to our own idealised leadership behaviours.

Firstly, their raison d’être is to create symbiotic relationships. Indeed, in 1877 the very word 'symbiotic' was coined by the German botanist Albert Frank to describe fungi (lichen). If there ever was one word to describe the effect that leadership behaviour should have on its recipients, it surely must be symbiotic. Team building, increasing productivity through the sharing of diverse skills, and being able to do more than the sum of your parts, are all essential to the survival, and growth of every organisation in the world.

The second, and by no means inferior, key behaviour of hyphae, is its ability to build organic networks capable of exploring and exploiting the opportunities created by its symbiotic relationships. This systemic effect is a real force multiplier. The key lesson, and maybe most difficult aspect of their behaviour for us humans to mimic, is that, without any central coordination, the hyphae grant themselves freedom of action to explore and simultaneously interact with multiple different environments. The hyphae are able to act in a dual state, as an individual, and as a complete organism. Achieving the parallel processing of all of the incoming data about its environment and being capable of making ‘decisions’ without reference to a central control, is its own very special USP.