It’s no mystery many of us feel like we have hit the skids. National unemployment heading toward double digits, economic paralysis freezing our capitalist structures and AIG bonuses rubbing more than just salt in our wounds. Given this backdrop its clearly time to examine original cultures; time to examine age-old tools that can provide important lessons about human ingenuity. These lessons sit in the petri dishes of bacteria, lie dormant in the psychology of moral behavior and take flight in the patterns of small birds. All of these unlikely agents provide timeless lessons for survival in a challenging environment.

Lets first start with the lowest-laying support network. Long before humans were around, bacteria led a robust life. Bacteria had a head start in learning to adapt, organize, and communicate. This first-to-market positioning played a critical role in surviving harsh environmental changes and even modern medicines couldn’t always wipe them out.

A closer look at bacteria reveals another layer. Bacteria exhibit strong traits of social intelligence -engaging in unique collective decision-making, hierarchical organization and linguistic communication. And, when bacteria is stressed from say, lack of food, it will band together and use collective efforts to evolve mechanisms of survival. Instead of competing with one another, bacteria will choose to act in collaboration.

From a business perspective, we’re starting to see the benefits of collaboration across multiple fronts. This leads me to believe our human tendency for “circling the wagons” and working together is part of a fight or flight dynamic that doesn’t depart too far from our bacterial cousins. But let’s take it to the next level and examine an evolved form of collaboration found in insects involving moral behavior.

This dynamic is most often found in insects exhibiting what is called kin altruism and is actually counter-intuitive to survival; that is, altruistic behavior doesn’t pay off. In hard economic times, for instance, it is rare to see an extension of kindness, generosity or selflessness.

But flying in the face of Darwin’s theory, worker bees approach altruism as a tool to survival and rear another’s young. This is not because kin altruism extends their own individual survival rate, but because it extends the competitive advantage of the colony as a whole. Certain insects devote their entire lives to raising broods completely unrelated to them. Their role in the colony is so crucial, that collaborative altruism is the anchor to certain species survival. As a result, insect colonies eliminated internal competition and set up a framework of collaboration that relied on altruistic behavior as the keystone to success.

But perhaps the human species isn’t up to this evolved collaborative state. Most poignantly demonstrated is how different our economic crisis plays out if the sacrifice of the few (AIG bonuses) served to strengthen the economy as a whole. Tragically, Wall Street’s selfish approach has done more to undermine the national mindset of economic recovery than anything else. These are not the worker bees of the future.

Finally, there exists the example set by the collaborative efforts of a small bird species. Here in the northwest, flocks of starlings romance bystanders with their aerial displays. Hundreds of birds swoop and dive and undulate in concert, transforming the many into a single dancer in the sky.

Any observer would quickly agree that these starlings surrender any individual pursuits for the health of the flock. You don’t see any birds darting out of the group to hunt food, rest, or create a mutiny. Their lock-step orchestration illustrates how entire flocks (or financial markets, or fashion trends or language or consumer goods or politics or even gossip) swing on the collective choice of individuals.

What would happen if we consciously took collaboration, blended it with an altruistic mindset and applied it in a concerted approach to drive market change?

With our organizing principles broken, we ought to turn our attention to ancient species that have survived thousands of years and have had the wisdom to naturally develop highly evolved collaborative systems, providing important clues on how to weather this, the tempest of our times.