Interface explores restructuring ideas based on nature to advance sustainability vision
Biomimicry has innovation potential for sustainability in any industry, say senior managers
Tuesday October 27, 2009 -- Michelle Strutzenberger
On the wall of Jim Hartzfeld’s Atlanta, Georgia office hangs a document summarizing the principles of life. Compiled by the Biomimicry Guild, the principles are based on general patterns and processes found in nature and outline strategies for thriving under the operating conditions on Earth.

“I’m walking over and looking at them now, as they stimulate a thought,” says Hartzfeld during a telephone interview with Axiom News.

Jim Hartzfeld of InterfaceRAISE

The visual display of the principles in the room speaks to their importance in Hartzfeld’s work, as well as the company he’s a part of, global carpet manufacturer Interface Inc.

“We’ve been through several versions of the principles, so those have been in our thinking process all along, (answering) not only how do we create a product that is more resilient, more adaptable, but what do they mean for an organization?” says Hartzfeld, who is managing director of Interface’s sustainability consulting arm, InterfaceRAISE.

He notes as an example of their impact how the life’s principles have gestated fledgling ideas around the organization’s structuring to make it more sustainable, by localizing manufacturing, for instance.

“The old rule is big scale creates big efficiency, which is where you make all your money.

“Well, looking at the way nature does things, intensely locally, you start to imagine ways you could be just as efficient at an extraordinarily smaller scale and do it everything local rather than one big factory somewhere,” says Hartzfeld.

“Instead of having 10 factories around the world, we might have 100 little bitty factories.”

While much work would have to be done to make this concept and others like it a reality, it illustrates the kind of innovations biomimicry is surfacing at Interface, and not just any innovations, but ideas that can help the company achieve its vision of showing what sustainability is in all its dimensions and in so doing “become restorative through the power of influence.”

Both Hartzfeld and another senior manager, Claude Ouimet, are excited about the innovation potential of biomimicry for triggering sustainability solutions in other industries as well.

“It’s always interesting to see how can we influence people in their field of attention” through the biomimicry perspective, says Ouimet, senior vice-president and general manager of InterfaceFLOR for Canada and Latin America.

Claude Ouimet of InterfaceFLOR

Ouimet points to the fact that straight lines and 90-degree angles are not found in nature, a simple insight which could have profound ramifications for the future of architecture.

“By inspiring (people in other fields) to get out of their skin and think differently, it’s amazing what they could come up with,” says Ouimet.

As director of the part of Interface that provides peer-to-peer support and advice to other organizations seeking to become more sustainable, Hartzfeld uses biomimicry as a specific tool to guide innovation activities with clients.

“It’s an amazing way of looking at any system and coming up with ideas that you just never would have thought about it in the old kind of mechanistic, linear mindset,” he says, noting he also directs clients to the people who helped start all this at Interface and who have in the course of their journey together become good friends of his, Janine Benyus and Dayna Baumeister, co-founders of the Biomimicry Guild.

Asked to consider his biggest hope for the future of business, Hartzfeld says he’s not just hoping for, he’s invested his entire career in a vision that sees businesses beginning to embrace issues of sustainability “as an opportunity to completely reinvent themselves in ways they have never imagined, instead of (sustainability) being a constraint on what they can do.”

He would like to see “that race to the next innovation” become the norm, rather than the approach that asks, “How much do I have to do to get a sustainability report this year and not be embarrassed?”

Hartzfeld suggests that accelerating improvements on the sustainability side, and, along with this move, shifting the focus from “solving problems” to “generating value,” across all sectors of civilization, can be the starting point of “reinventing our entire society.”

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