Special Edition - What Slime Mold Might Know About Leadership

Every Friday morning, five of us have breakfast together. We have been doing it for almost ten years, and the conversation tends to wander in the best way through family, faith, work, something somebody read, or a problem one of us is trying to make sense of. This week, my friend Nick brought up slime mold and the Tokyo rail system. It sounded strange enough that I went home and started reading.

In 2010, researchers were studying a difficult network-design problem: how do you connect many different locations efficiently without creating a system that is either too expensive or too fragile? Tokyo offered a useful comparison because its rail system had evolved over decades through engineering, geography, cost constraints, changing demand, and constant adjustment.

The researchers built a simplified model of the Tokyo region, placed oat flakes where major population centers were located, introduced geographic barriers, and put a yellow slime mold called Physarum polycephalum where Tokyo would be. The organism has no brain or nervous system. It was not shown the railway map and it was not told which connections mattered most. It was simply given destinations, constraints, and an environment to move through.

At first, it spread broadly. Then, as nutrients began to move through the network, some pathways strengthened while others weakened and disappeared. Over roughly a day, the organism settled into a network that researchers found surprisingly comparable to Tokyo’s actual rail system in the way it balanced cost, transport efficiency, and resilience.

The researchers were studying whether a good network could emerge through feedback, local information, testing, and adaptation rather than through centralized control alone.

WOAH. That part has stayed with me.

We often want the answer before the system has finished speaking

I spend a lot of time with organizations trying to make sense of what comes next. Sometimes they are wrestling with structure, sometimes strategy, sometimes roles, culture, leadership transitions, or the kind of slow drift that everyone can feel but nobody has quite named yet.

There is usually a moment when the pressure rises and people want an answer. What should the org chart look like? Who should own this? What are the priorities? Which program should stay? Which one should go?

Those are legitimate questions. They matter. But I wonder how often we ask them before we have listened long enough to understand what the system is already telling us.

The slime mold did not begin by selecting the final network. It encountered the environment first. It explored broadly, received feedback, and gradually reinforced the pathways that carried the most value.

That makes me wonder about the kind of information organizations produce all the time that leaders can easily miss. Where is energy already flowing? Which relationships are quietly doing more work than the formal structure acknowledges? Where do people keep creating workarounds because the official process no longer fits reality? What are the people closest to the work seeing that those farther away cannot see yet?

Those questions do not eliminate the need for leadership. They change the posture of leadership.

Instead of assuming the answer lives at the top, they make room for the possibility that some of the wisdom we need is already distributed throughout the system. Just like the slime mold was showing those engineers.

Good process helps that wisdom become visible

This is where the experiment starts to feel familiar to me.

The organism learned as it moved. Useful pathways strengthened because they were useful. Weak pathways disappeared because the flow did not justify them. The shape of the network was not imposed all at once. It emerged through repeated interaction with reality.

Organizations do something similar, whether we acknowledge it or not.

People learn which meetings matter and which do not. Teams discover who they actually need to talk to in order to get work done. Staff find ways around procedures that no longer serve the mission. Programs gather energy or slowly lose it. A role may have changed in practice long before anyone changes the job description.

The system is constantly generating information.

The question is whether leaders know how to notice it.

That is part of what I mean by good process. Not endless conversation. Not avoiding decisions. Not pretending expertise does not matter.

Good process creates enough space for people to notice what is happening, make sense of it together, clarify what matters, and then act with greater wisdom.

And sometimes the system is asking us to release something

The slime mold did not keep every connection it explored, and that may be one of the harder implications for organizations.

We are usually better at creating than ending. We add programs, meetings, roles, partnerships, committees, and priorities, and over time each one gathers history, ownership, and emotion. Something can stop serving the larger system long before anyone is ready to say so.

That is why pruning is not simply an efficiency exercise.

A program may have been deeply important and still be complete. A structure may have served one season and become restrictive in the next. A role may have made perfect sense five years ago and now be absorbing energy the organization needs somewhere else.

The better question may not be, “Was this good or bad?”

It may be, “What is this asking of us now?”

That is a much more human question, and usually a harder one.

Maybe leadership is not always about seeing the whole map first

I do not think slime mold gives us a leadership model. I would not want to force the metaphor that far.

But I do think the experiment presses on one of our assumptions.

We tend to imagine leadership as the ability to see farther, know more, and design the answer for everyone else. Sometimes that is necessary. There are moments when leaders have to decide, set direction, or act before everyone is ready.

But there are other moments when leadership may be less about seeing the whole map and more about helping the organization see itself.

That means listening carefully enough to understand what people are experiencing, helping them name what they are learning, clarifying what matters most, and paying attention to where life, trust, energy, and usefulness are already moving.

Then, when the picture becomes clearer, leadership still has work to do. Choices have to be made. Things may need to be strengthened, changed, or released.

But the process begins in a different place.

Not with, “What should we make this become?”

With, “What seems to be happening here?”

Maybe that is what I keep carrying from Nick’s breakfast story.

Not that nature has solved organizational design.

But that sometimes a system can teach us more about its future when we stop trying to force the answer too quickly and start paying closer attention to what it is already becoming.

Sources & Further Reading

• Tero, Atsushi, et al. “Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design.” Science, Vol. 327, No. 5964, January 22, 2010, pp. 439–442.

• Katherine Harmon. “Slime Mold Validates Efficiency of Tokyo Rail Network.” Scientific American, January 21, 2010.

• Tero, Atsushi, Ryo Kobayashi, and Toshiyuki Nakagaki. “A Mathematical Model for Adaptive Transport Network in Path Finding by True Slime Mold.” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2007.