My Approach to Professional Development

Published on: Wed Dec 04 2024

Slime mold, Steve Jobs, and Connecting Dots

Physarum polycephalum. That’s the scientific name of a bright yellow slime mold, also known as “the blob” or “many-headed slime”. At first sight, it might appear like a simple, ugly case of decaying matter. It really isn’t that nice to look at. If you see it on a random tree trunk, you may think the tree is about to turn into a zombie, by the looks of it. But this slime mold is a fascinating creature. It’s a single-celled organism that can grow to be several square meters in size. It’s also a master of problem-solving, and of connecting dots.

In a famous experiment, Japanese scientists at Hokkaido University placed oat flakes (a food source for the mold) on a scale map of Tokyo, with each flake representing significant urban centers in the Greater Tokyo area. The slime mold, placed in the center of the map, grew and expanded, connecting the oat flakes in a network that was almost identical to Tokyo’s rail system. The slime mold, without a brain or any kind of central control, expanded and explored its environment and its available resources, converging on an efficient solution after experimenting with different configurations of its internal structure.

One key feature of the slime mold’s “strategy” is expansion in all directions. When a path to a food source is found, the mold expands in that direction, but it also keeps exploring other paths. This strategy allows the slime mold to take full advantage of known resource locations, and also explore new possibilities and remain adaptive to changes in the environment. From this approach emerge efficient and resilient networks, paths that may not be evident at first, but seem natural in hindsight.

Which brings me to Steve Jobs. In his famous Stanford commencement speech, he talked about how seemingly unrelated events in his life, such as dropping out of college, taking a calligraphy class, and being fired from Apple, all contributed to his success in creating the Macintosh computer. He said that “you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward. You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Professional development can sometimes be idealized as a linear path; a straight line from goal to goal, from one role to the next. A career is supposed to make sense, to be coherent, to be a logical progression. Life is often anything but. It’s messy, unpredictable, and full of surprises. Moreover, change in all fields has been steadily accelerating: new technologies like Artificial Intelligence have many of us wondering whether our industry is the next one to be disrupted. Increasingly, the traditional notion of betting your professional future on a single “well-defined” career path seems like a risky proposition.

Yuval Noah Harari, in his book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, argues that the most important skill for the future is the ability to reinvent oneself. The most important “mindware” to acquire in 2025 and forward is the ability to “go meta”, to think about thinking, to learn how to learn, and to become adaptive to change. This, in my little reflection here, is where the slime mold meets Steve Jobs: our environment is in a constant state of change, the near future is unpredictable, and the best way to navigate this uncertainty is to expand in all directions, to remain flexible about the way we connect our dots, and in doing so, allow for the emergence of new paths and possibilities.