The two most successful species on the planet are humans and bacteria.
Both have flourished for exactly the same reason, collaboration.
Elisabet Sahtouris, the evolutionary biologist, describes how it took bacteria one billion years to ‘collectively realise’ that it was more intelligent and energy-efficient to collaborate rather than kill each other. Their collaboration took the form of sharing, in an open-source kind of way, some of their cytoplasmic DNA with their single-celled neighbours. This DNA was gathered in a ‘library’ and protected within a cell by a membrane, which evolved into the cell nucleus. Nucleation was the first great leap forward in evolutionary biology.
It then took these single-celled, nucleated bacteria another billion years to ‘collectively realise’, for a second time, that it was smarter and more energy-efficient to collaborate than to kill each other. This second form of collaboration involved mergers rather than acquisitions. Single-celled bacteria merged with each other, giving rise to multicellular organisms. This was the second great leap forward in evolutionary biology.
Eventually, about a billion years ago, multicellular organisms started to differentiate, and the cells in their body became specialised. Rudimentary nervous systems and basic body plans emerged in aquatic animals like sponges 800 million years ago. From there, animal life continued to diversify. About 500 million years ago, we saw the emergence of vertebrates in the form of jawless fish with skulls and backbones. Such animals moved from water to land about 350 million years ago as limbs and lungs evolved. Warm-blooded mammals appeared 200 million years ago.
Then 65 million years ago, and a million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, tree-dwelling primates with grasping hands, forward-facing eyes and larger brains appeared. It was just six million years ago when early bipedal hominids emerged. Early hominids, with even bigger brains, walked the planet about 2.5 million years ago. But it wasn’t until 300,000 years ago that our Homo sapiens ancestors entered the fray.
Human beings are incredibly successful, compared to all other mammals, because we are social animals and better at collaboration than other species.
Now here’s the interesting thing: bacteria and humans collaborate with each other. In fact, 90% of all the cells in the human body are bacterial, which means we are only really 10% human. Similarly, 99% of all the DNA in the human body is bacterial or viral DNA. Humans are not one discrete organism executing a program. We are a walking, talking ecosystem, and we only function because trillions of bacteria are, mostly, working with us rather than against us.
We are, by our very nature, an ambulatory collaboration.
If we want to more deeply understand who we really are, we should study the three types of collaborative relationships that occur in nature, and organisations.
- Parasitism. This is where one party benefits and the other is actively harmed. Plenty of corporate partnerships, and supplier contracts, are parasitic dressed up in partnership language.
- Commensalism. This is where one party benefits and the other is unaffected or only minimally helped or harmed. This is how most ‘strategic partnerships’ and supplier relationships function: a press release, a logo on a slide, a fee for service, an upside that unequally favours one party, nothing structurally shared, no common outcomes, no mutual benefit.
- Mutualism, or symbiosis. This is where both parties genuinely benefit, at a metabolic, genetic, or behavioural level, and the relationship makes both fitter than they would be alone. In humans, we have gut bacteria that help us digest food we couldn’t otherwise break down. Symbiosis is potentially incredibly powerful, organisationally, precisely because it requires real interdependence, not just co-existence.
Most corporate ‘collaborations’ never rise above commensalism. They cost little, change little, and deliver little. Genuine symbiosis, the kind that changes both parties at a structural level, is vanishingly rare because it demands something most organisations, and most leaders, have yet to develop and that’s the ability and willingness to be changed by the relationship, not merely to use it.
But symbiotic relationships are possible. The Human Genome Project is an example of a growing research trend for competing labs, on different continents, to share pre-publication data, in pursuit of a common goal, rather than racing each other to publish or patent. Symbiosis is possible; it’s just not yet a leadership habit.
In an AI-accelerating world, organisations that can operate as boundary-spanning leaders across an entire partner ecosystem, including, uncomfortably, their competitors, will be the winners of the future. Technology itself will become table stakes. What will separate the leaders who thrive from the leaders who don’t will be the ability to build and hold genuinely symbiotic relationships across organisational, sectoral, and even competitive boundaries, at exactly the moment self-interest tempts everyone to defect.
Successful symbiosis is not a strategy problem; it’s a developmental one.
Holding complex, interdependent relationships together under pressure, resisting the pull back toward self-interest, when it would be so much easier to defect, requires a level of ego maturity that most leadership populations simply haven’t yet grown into.
The Future of AI, and HI, is Collaborative, Symbiotic Mutualism
It’s clear that the future of intelligence, both human (HI) and artificial (AI), is symbiotic mutualism.
For example, most organisations we talk to have already realised they need to be ‘LLM agnostic’ and use different AI systems for different tasks. We are now way past brute-force AI scaling, with its monolithic models trained on increasingly larger data sets. We’re rapidly moving into the world of collective intelligence, knowing which model to use, delegating tasks such as planning and execution, and combining domain-specific strengths while routing around individual weaknesses. As Sakana AI, the Japanese lab behind the new Fugu orchestration model, puts it: “the most powerful AI systems of the future will not be isolated monoliths, but collaborative ecosystems.”
Bacteria worked this out a very long time ago, and humans are just beginning to understand the same lesson.
This orchestration is no longer just a technical optimisation; it’s a geopolitical and operational imperative.
The question worth taking into your next leadership team meeting isn’t ‘who should we partner with?’
But a tougher question: are we mature enough to build and sustain a symbiotic relationship?
Or are we just going to continue building commensal relationships, call them partnerships, and miss the opportunity to genuinely transform the future.