This series began as four separate posts and was adapted into a presentation at ISTELive25, embedded below. In September 2026 I consolidated the four pieces into this one essay, keeping what held up and cutting the repetition.
What if nature was a design partner for your classroom, your curriculum, or your organization? That question has followed me around for years, and this essay is what I have to show for it: a way of looking, three examples from the landscape I live in, and an honest accounting of where the looking stops being useful.
Biomimicry, drawing on natural processes to solve human problems, is not new. Velcro came from burr seeds, the nose of the Japanese bullet train from a kingfisher’s beak, passive building ventilation from termite mounds. What makes those cases work is that the designers borrowed a principle rather than an appearance. Nobody built a termite mound. They understood how a mound moves air and built a building that does the same thing. The same move is available to anyone designing learning, and the raw material is closer than it sounds.
How do I use it?
The method is short. Start with a real problem, not a walk in the woods looking for inspiration, because a walk without a problem produces novelty rather than design. Look at your own environment before the famous examples, since the ecosystem you live in faces pressures that resemble the ones your organization faces: limited resources, seasonal cycles, a diverse population, the need to persist. Extract the principle, meaning the mechanism that makes the system work, not the shape it takes. Then apply it, expect some of it not to transfer, and revise.
Two cautions come with that. The first is the appeal to nature: nothing is better because it is natural, and evolution optimizes for survival, not for human learning. The second is that natural systems run on different timescales and under different constraints than a school district. A pine cone can wait decades. A grant cannot. So nature supplies the creative spark and a way of seeing, and learning science, instructional design, and organizational theory still have to do the work of building anything.
Living in the Black Hills makes this easier than it would be elsewhere, or at least it makes it mine. The Great Plains are full of organisms that solved the problems of scarcity, disturbance, and distance a long time ago. The three that have taught me the most are a trickster, a seed, and a root.
What does the coyote know about adapting?
My interest in coyotes started in beat poetry, where Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg carried the trickster of Indigenous North American stories into a modern landscape. That led me to Dan Flores’ Coyote America, which tells the story of an animal that did not merely survive the human expansion across the continent but grew its range because of it. My first tattoo is a coyote portrait on my forearm. It is there to remind me of one thing: adaptation is a strategy, not a failure of planning.
The biology is worth a paragraph. Wolves declined as their habitat shrank and their prey was fenced off. Coyotes spread. The difference is what biologists call dietary plasticity: a coyote will hunt rodents at dawn, scavenge behind a restaurant at noon, and take fish out of an irrigation ditch in the evening, and it adjusts its social structure the same way, running in loose groups when food is abundant and alone or in pairs when it is not. Human development did not just threaten coyotes. It created niches, and they moved into them. Wolves needed a large territory and a specific prey. Coyotes needed a way to eat.
I see the same divide in the organizations I work with. Some are structured like wolf packs: centralized, specialized, and built around one large, coordinated effort to land the funding that sustains the whole operation. That works in a stable environment. When the federal grant ends or the institutional contract is not renewed, the specialization that made them efficient becomes the thing that sinks them. I have watched it happen more than once in the last few years.
The division I work in, Compass Partners in Learning at Black Hills Special Services Cooperative, is a coyote. Baseline operations rest on a mix of recurring streams: subscription-based professional learning communities, workshop facilitation contracts with individual districts, and the sale of curriculum resources we have built. When something unexpected arrives, whether an emergency professional development need or a grant competition that fits, we can shift capacity toward it because no single stream is the whole diet. That requires a different organizational body than the wolf pack: broader skill sets rather than narrow roles, a structure that scales up and down without ceremony, and leadership that is better at sensing than at planning.
The principle is diversification with discipline. Coyotes are not indiscriminate. Ecologists describe optimal foraging, the constant weighing of what a food source costs to get against what it returns, and an organization needs the same instinct, or it takes on consulting work that pays this quarter and builds nothing, or launches products nobody asked for. The question to ask of any opportunity is whether it builds a capability that will still be useful when this particular funding is gone.
The strain in the analogy is also the honest part. Some work needs the wolf pack. A multi-year curriculum build or a serious research effort does not survive on scavenging, and an organization that adapts constantly can lose the ability to say what it is. I will come back to that.
What does the pine cone know about timing?
I grew up hiking Black Hills trails carpeted with ponderosa cones, and it was years before I learned that some pines play a longer game than the ones I walked under. Lodgepole and jack pine grow serotinous cones, sealed with a resin that only melts at high temperature, which means they open after a fire, when the forest floor has been cleared and the soil is briefly rich. The tree does not drop that seed at random. It holds the seed until conditions favor the seedling.
That mechanism describes something I saw first as a classroom teacher and see now as a designer: the learning that matters most often does not happen during the training. It happens months later, when a situation arrives that makes the idea suddenly relevant, and the person finds that something from a session they barely remember has opened.
Most workplace learning is designed as if this were not true. Gather people, present information, expect understanding on the spot, measure recall. The pine cone suggests a different design goal: build learning materials that are meant to germinate later. In practice that means a few things. Memorable phrases that gain meaning through experience, not slogans, but observations compact enough to survive until they are needed. When I work with new teachers I say things like “students remember stories better than slides,” and that sentence does its work months later, in a lesson-planning session where it turns out to be true, rather than in the room where I say it. Stories do the same work at a larger scale, carrying complex ideas that unfold gradually as the listener accumulates the experience to understand them. And flexible frameworks, simple enough to remember and loose enough to adapt, outlast detailed procedures that fade in a week.
This lines up with what is known about spaced learning and with the constructivist point that knowledge gains meaning through application. It also changes what counts as success. If the design goal is delayed understanding, then testing immediate recall measures the wrong thing, and the honest evaluation asks what people did with the idea six months on, which almost nobody is set up to ask.
The limit is plain. Some learning has to work immediately. Safety procedures do not get to germinate later. Technical skills usually want practice and feedback on the spot. The pine cone is a design for ideas that need a context to become real, and forcing it onto content that needs direct instruction frustrates everyone. I still pick up cones on the trail. They remind me that part of the job is planting things I will not see open.
What is holding the prairie together?
Every summer of my childhood my dad drove us into the South Dakota grasslands to camp, and without saying it directly he taught me to look past the surface of what seemed like plain grass. His 1997 book, Ecology and Economics of the Great Plains, is a reference on the relationship between ecological health and economic sustainability across the region, but the version I learned was around a campfire, and what it left me with is a habit of asking what is underneath.
Prairie grass looks like nothing. Big bluestem, one of the tall prairie grasses, can stand as high as a person, and it still puts much of its mass underground, in roots that commonly run six to ten feet down and spread well beyond the plant that grew them. The root network stores nutrients, moves resources between plants, and holds the soil through drought, fire, and winter. The prairie’s resilience is a property of the part you cannot see. Sever the roots and the whole system fails, which is what happened when the Plains were plowed. Farmers saw grass and imagined cropland, the sod was turned in a season, and the Dust Bowl was the bill. The visible change was simple. The invisible infrastructure it destroyed had taken a very long time to build.
Organizations have root systems too: the informal networks, the unofficial practices, the people everyone actually asks. A technology rollout tends to be planned around the visible layer, the interface, the workflow, the devices, and to ignore what is holding the ground together. Picture a learning management system rollout that looks straightforward on paper: migrate the content, train the users, launch. What the plan misses is that teachers troubleshoot in hallways, department chairs are the real technical support, and veteran staff have undocumented workarounds that keep things running. When the launch disrupts those networks without replacing them, the official support channels cannot carry the load, and people start abandoning the platform. The plow has gone through the roots.
The principle is to work root-first. Before changing anything, map the invisible network: who people go to, where information actually flows, which informal leaders decide whether a new practice takes. Preserve the connections that work, and where a department chair is already the help desk, build the formal support around that relationship instead of routing past it. Build deep before building wide. Prairie invests in roots before it invests in height, and a change that trains key people, establishes support, and lets new practice settle before it scales will outlast one that launches everywhere on the same Monday. And accept that this is slow. A restored prairie looks sparse and disappointing in its first year next to the annual weeds that shoot up beside it, and stakeholders who want visible results in a quarter need to be told what is growing underground.
Roots can be the wrong roots. Some entrenched practices are invasive species, and an outside eye is often what it takes to tell the difference between infrastructure worth protecting and habit worth removing. But the default posture should be to understand what is there before plowing it.
Where does the lens stop?
I want to end with the strain rather than the lesson, because the strain is what makes the lens worth trusting.
Nature cannot tell you anything about a cooperative’s budget. It cannot tell you whether a grant will be renewed, whether a state will fund the next course, or whether the informal network you carefully preserved was worth preserving. Evolution has no view on learning outcomes. Everything above is a way of seeing, and it earns its keep only when the seeing leads to a decision that learning science and plain organizational judgment would also endorse.
Each of the three analogies breaks somewhere specific. The coyote strategy is admirable in an animal and, in an organization, is also a description of precarity. A division that must be a coyote is a division that no one has chosen to fund like a wolf pack, and I would not want to dress that up as a virtue when it is at least partly a condition. The pine cone can wait fifty years for its fire; a teacher’s contract, a grant cycle, and a student’s year cannot, so designing for delayed understanding is always a bet against a calendar that does not care. And the prairie was plowed by people who had reasons. They were not fools; they were responding to prices and policies, and the root network they destroyed was invisible to them in exactly the way the informal infrastructure of a school is invisible to the vendor and the administrator who plan the rollout. The lens helps me see what they could not. It does not put me anywhere they were not.
So I hold the metaphors loosely. They have made me more patient and more careful in how I design and implement, and they have given me a vocabulary for things I might otherwise have called instinct. That is what a lens is for. What it is not for is deciding, and the deciding still has to be done by people, with the numbers and the people in front of them.
If you have an organism of your own, something from the place you live that has taught you how to design or lead, I would like to hear about it. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and there are more tools, articles, and resources at bradylicht.com. Two related pieces on this site take the same lens in different directions: “Flow” in Course Design on organic versus modular structure, and Outdoor PD for Educator Wellness and Innovation on taking the work outside.
