As I’m sure you know, pandas live on bamboo, so they need a strong, opposable grasp to grip and strip bamboo stalks. But they are bears, with a forelimb anatomy inherited from their carnivorous ancestors. They don’t have an opposable thumb. Instead, all five of their digits are committed to and adapted to weight-bearing. And their wrist bones aren’t built for walking, nor for precision grip. Even if, by some fluke of nature, pandas managed to grow a real thumb, like a primate, it wouldn’t fit the rest of their existing phenotype. A project manager would call this an example of path dependency: something that’s limited by what has already happened.

But, of course, pandas do eat, grip, strip and consume massive amounts of bamboo. This is an example of Orgel’s second rule that evolution is cleverer than you are. It has given pandas a workaround. A wrist bone has become enlarged and soft tissue has reorganised around it to become a functional ‘false thumb’. It fits the environmental need to grasp bamboo, even if it doesn’t really fit the panda’s body plan. It’s a workaround, using the materials to hand, which is what evolution tends to do.

Elsewhere in the interview, Mike Doustdar, whose whole career has been at Novo Nordisk, says that he wasn’t appointed to change the company’s culture. That’s very wise. Wholesale change of an established organisational culture is horribly difficult. Even if you’re successful, you’re very likely to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’, accidentally getting rid of what works well. But this leaves Doustdar with a problem. For better and for worse, Novo Nordisk has the culture of a clinically-oriented, patient-oriented pharmaceutical company with a strong heritage. That’s its path dependency, making it difficult for it to become a consumer company overnight. So, to make this work, it’s going to need to work around what it has. Doustdar’s appointment was part of that and so are all the things it’s trying, like oral Wegovy, a new pricing strategy and partnerships with direct-to-consumer companies like Weightwatchers. Analogous to reshaping wrist bones and rearranging tendons, all these things add up to creating a false thumb. It deserves to work and I hope it will.

For me, the real interest in what Novo Nordisk is doing is the generalisable lesson it teaches. Too often, pharma leaders think like engineers or designers, believing they can just construct the best solution to any problem. That’s understandable, but it ignores path dependency and forgets Orgel’s second rule. Evolutionary thinking is often better. In this case, the panda provides the inspiration for a pragmatic solution. In other columns in this series, I’ve drawn inspiration from dragonflies and octopuses (and, yes, that is the correct plural!). The generalisable lesson is that biological systems and business systems are both complex, adaptive systems. That means that not only can one draw clever analogies, one can also pick up and transplant ideas from biology to business. In this case, the idea is evolution, which Daniel Dennet said was the best idea anyone has ever had.

So, the take-home message is this. If, like Novo Nordisk, you’re facing a difficult problem with no obvious solution, consider how evolution solves the problem. Whether it’s the dragonfly’s switch for strategic focus, the octopus’ distributed intelligence for managing local market conditions or the panda’s workaround to fit a changing market, evolution can often inspire something far cleverer than any strategist can design and construct. That’s what comes of four billions years of trial and error.