We are asking people to solve the most complex living systems problems in history. Yet, ironically most of us spend the majority of our professional lives inside urbanized environments, interfacing with nature primarily through screens and spreadsheets. That is the texture of our shared modern professional life. But it raises a question worth sitting with: what does it cost us, and the organizations we are trying to move, to design strategies for living systems from inside built ones?
Researchers studying coastal communities made a curious discovery. When they asked urban residents to describe how coastal ecosystems work, like how species depend on each other, how disruptions ripple through a system, something was missing. Urban residents systematically left out the feedback loops. The interdependencies. The web of relationships that make a system a system. Researchers called it “Urbanized Knowledge Syndrome”: the longer people live disconnected from living systems, the more their mental models of those systems flatten out. (Aminpour et al., 2022)1
This is not about values. These weren’t people who didn’t care about nature. This was about cognition. About what we lose the capacity to see when we spend too long away.
The research on nature connectedness has established something both remarkable and intuitive. People who feel genuinely connected to the natural world, not just near it, but in relationship with it, think differently. They are more likely to notice feedback loops. To hold longer time horizons. To resist the urge to optimize one part of a system at the cost of the whole. (Barragan-Jason et al., 2021)2
And this shows up in organizational outcomes. A study of CEOs found that leaders with stronger preferences for nature protection ran companies with significantly greater carbon reduction and more meaningful participation in environmental action. (Zhi, 2025)3
Pause on that for a moment. Not the leader’s policy positions. Not their educational background. Their relationship with nature. That is what predicted what their organizations actually did for the climate and the environment.
The good news is that this relationship can be cultivated. But not through passive exposure. A green wall in the lobby or a nature photo in the conference room are pleasant. They are not transformative. What actually moves the needle is direct, repeated, mindful contact with living systems, the kind that invites genuine attention, not just proximity. (Sheffield et al., 2022)4
Biomimicry practitioners have understood this for years. When leaders spend real time observing how living systems solve problems, such as how a forest manages resources or how a wetland filters water, the quality of the questions they bring back to their organizations changes. Not because they learned new facts. Because they trained a new kind of attention.
There is a version of sustainability strategy that is technically sophisticated and perceptually impaired. It has excellent metrics. It tracks the right indicators. And it systematically misses what it cannot see- the feedback loops, the slow accumulations, the interdependencies that don’t show up in a dashboard. Species lost quietly. Watersheds degraded incrementally. Relationships between organisms and landscapes fragmented.
Reconnection restores something foundational: the ability to perceive the systems we are responsible for. What an organization is capable of seeing, it is capable of solving for. The work of reconnection is not separate from the work of regeneration.
It is its precursor.
Erin Rovalo is the Interim Head of Impact at The Biomimicry Institute, where she focuses on advancing an impact-driven approach to biomimicry across the organization’s programs, strengthening alignment and accelerating real-world application in critical, systems level challenge areas such as climate resilience, regenerative materials, and the built environment. Learn more about Erin, and the rest of the team, here.
- Aminpour, P., Gray, S. A., Beck, M. W., Boyle, K., Romany, S., & Carr-Cornish, S. (2022). Urbanized knowledge syndrome — erosion of diversity and systems thinking in urbanites’ mental models. npj Urban Sustainability, 2, 11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-022-00054-0 ↩︎
- Barragan-Jason, G., Loreau, M., de Mazancourt, C., Mills, C., & Dajoz, I. (2021). Human–nature connectedness as a pathway to sustainability: A global meta-analysis. Conservation Letters, 15(3), e12852. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12852 ↩︎
- Zhi, W. (2025). Do nature-loving CEOs make the world greener? Journal of Accounting Research, 63(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-679x.70033 ↩︎
- Sheffield, S., Sherwood, N., & Irvine, K. N. (2022). Improving nature connectedness in adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis of interventions. Sustainability, 14(19), 12494. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141912494 ↩︎
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