The Strandbeest, you, me, and everyone else: lessons in cross-species behaviour

Does your organization move forward as smoothly and reliably as a Strandbeest?

Jun 27, 2025

In 1990, Dutch artist Theo Jansen introduced his first Strandbeest, a pole-and-zip-tie structure powered only by the elements and capable of progressing independently along a beach. In the subsequent thirty years Jansen has evolved his conceptions so that, in addition to being ever more impressive and strangely beautiful, they more and more simulate independent quasi-animal behaviour.

Now, Dr Olaf Hermans, a cognitive scientist who is revealing the way that human relationships function at scale, has pointed out that Strandbeests can help illumine facets of human group behaviour that all too often remain unnoticed or hidden.

So, ‘a species’ created by a human to emulate aspects of human behaviour can now be used to repay the favour by informing us of subtle information about the ways we contribute en masse to communal activities and their outcomes.

The key principle underpinning all of this is perhaps fairly obvious. So obvious, in fact, that it almost always goes unnoticed, unthought about, ignored.

It is that a group of humans, any group of humans, has intention in and of itself. Which is to say, left to their own devices, the members of a group do NOT do nothing. Rather, they will interact with one another.

Left to their own devices, Strandbeests do not do nothing either. They respond to wind conditions, the primary force that dictates their direction and speed of travel.

“Oh”, you may say, “That’s silly. They’re just dumb assemblages and, of course, they’ll be blown about by the wind.”

Not entirely true! A fundamental issue is the fact that wind and other meteorological conditions are immensely variable and unpredictable. As Shakespeare wrote, in an early seventeenth century alert to the solar panel industry …

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d 1

The same is true of wind. Sometimes way, way too much. Sometimes none at all.

So, Theo Jansen latterly set out to give his Strandbeests ‘muscles’: a project that necessitated, first, devising a means to store wind energy and, second, deploy that energy when required. This is done by collecting energy in the form of air under pressure in plastic bottles. Brilliant!

The whole Strandbeest story is fascinating and there’s an excellent overview video of the evolution here.

Here and now, though, let’s come back to what the Strandbeest project might teach us about human group behavior when we recognize that a group of humans, any group of humans, will not do nothing but, rather, will interact in some way.

Actually, there is a qualification to that, isn’t there? It is that, in the past few decades, the in-person interaction may well be delayed while the members of an assembled group initially dive into, so to speak, their phones. However, after a while, they will acknowledge one another - even if only when their phone batteries run down!

The actual level of interaction within a group will of course depend upon the environment they are in, the circumstances that pertain, and the rules - official and unofficial - that might apply.

As we have always known, we can learn a lot about people just by bringing them together to solve a challenge. Decades ago, when I applied to join the Royal Air Force, part of the selection process that I and my fellow would-be daredevil pilots were put through was the challenge, when allocated in teams of six, to get ourselves and some materials safely across a river using only the pieces of wood and oil drums and rope provided.

Would each team bond? Would members of the team perform cooperatively? Would each team member accept the challenge to get everything and everyone across the river as quickly as possible? And, hugely important, would people do it not only efficiently but also with good humour? Critically, how would they react if things did not go smoothly?

Oh boy, there’s a lot to be learned from this sort of exercise!

Strandeests move forward. That’s their purpose. All these tubes and joints and zip-ties and sails, all working in harmony to generate momentum. And now they have the added intelligence of bottled, pressurized-air ‘muscles’ that are able, automatically, to re-orientate the entire assemblage if the wind would otherwise drive it into the sea.

Isn’t that an exact parallel for any human organization?

Purpose: to move forward.
Method: everyone contributing and working cooperatively together.
Responsibility: everyone helping maintain the momentum and avoid obstacles that might be in their path.

And yet, and yet, isn’t there a tendency, these days, that we actively restrict people’s ability to contribute? Doesn’t our reliance upon technologically-underpinned systems mean that, much more often than in the past, we really do risk turning our people into ‘cogs in the machine’?

And surely it is axiomatic that, when people understand that their spontaneous responses are “not required here” or are actively blocked, morale must suffer?

In our twenty-first century businesses and societies, it seems to me, leadership thinking all too often assumes that any group is, so to say, homogeneous and a blank sheet upon which can be compelled whatever activity is required.

The problem with that is that it can all too easily lead to the shutting-down of human agency and human spirit. And then companies have the gall to talk about ‘work-life imbalance’, ‘burnout’ and other such excuses for what are actually entirely understandable reactions to inhumane treatment.

Traditionally, corporate activity often included social inter-connectivity of various kinds: not just the good old water cooler chats but everything from the company sports club to birthday and Christmas parties.

Indeed, sometimes, these extra-curricular activities have proven more resilient than the work themselves. One has only to think, for example, of the brass bands that became such a source of pride to coal mining communities in the United Kingdom … and remain as proud sources of civic pride even after the work-base that gave rise to them has completely gone.

Today’s corporate activity is, of course, far more dispersed, distributed, disconnected … in terms of both the work functions themselves and the local work environments. And meeting on a Zoom call is not the same as a get-together in a public house or coffee shop or other ‘third place’ (i.e. a place other than ‘home’ or ‘work’) 2.

So we need an alternative, don’t we? An alternative to the old social systems? Why? Because not only did they provide a channel for raising alerts about potential obstacles and better ways of doing things, they also fulfilled two other priceless functions:

Top-Down … an informal channel for management to sound out new ideas.
Bottom-Up … a channel to allow people to ‘bellyache’.

Now, admittedly, there are situations when bellyaching is not good. In the run-up to the Second Battle of Alamein in World War 2, General Bernard Montgomery told the British Eighth Army:

I understand there has been a great deal of ‘bellyaching’ out here.
By bellyaching I mean inventing poor excuses for not doing what one has been told to do.
All this is to stop at once.
I will tolerate no bellyaching. 3

I think this is probably fair enough if you’re staring down the gun barrels of a host of folks who definitely do not wish you well, but in rather more normal circumstances it is often healthy and helpful to give people a little space, at least, to bellyache.

So how might that be done?

There’s a system gnomically titled ‘R’, that uses new technology - no Luddites here! - to provide a means to talk to organizations en masse and, indeed, to independently interrogate various initiatives.

Now, Dr Olaf Hermans, whose brainchild ‘R’ is, might reasonably accuse me of over-simplification when I suggest that the great advantage of the system is that it reintroduces to businesses and other groups a means to counter the imposition and over-emphasis that often now exists of Top-Down directives.

There is much more to it than that. However, I contend that the fact that the vital complementary Bottom-Up communication channels, which came into being spontaneously and informally when organizations were literally closer-knit, can be re-invented, so to speak, in a far better and more controllable way than in the past is, itself, a great step forward

Aargh! by David Pinder

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