Bee wise: an interview with Philip Atkinson

A beehive is the ultimate business case study of a complex organisation. This lens of perspective also helps to bring a fresh perspective to some of the most pressing challenges facing leaders today.

In this episode of What Matters, we talk to Philip Atkinson, author of Bee Wise: 12 Leadership Lessons from a Busy Beehive. An organisational coach as well as a beekeeper, Philip lifts the lid on what happens inside a hard-working beehive as we discuss this refreshing metaphor of working life.

To learn more and get a copy of the book go to beewisebook.com or you can find it on Amazon or other online retailers.

Today, I'm joined by Philip Atkinson, the author of Be Wise: 12 Leadership Lessons from a Busy Beehive. Be Wise offers a fresh and engaging perspective on modern leadership, drawing on powerful lessons from the world of beekeeping.

Philip is a beekeeper, leadership team expert, organizational coach, and the founder of his own consultancy, Hive Logic. Philip, thank you for joining me here today.

Philip: Thank you, Nicola. It's nice to be here.

Nicola: I have to say that I was already hooked before I even started to read the book. And that was your press material, which highlighted the fact that bees take on seven different jobs in their short lives, which is something I'd never even thought about. And it's kind of sad, perhaps, to learn that when we see a bee digging away at the pollen inside of a flower, they only fly to gather nectar in the last few days of their lives. It's a fascinating fact for starters, isn't it?

Philip: And there are so many more, Nicola. It's such an interesting topic and an interesting metaphor for the work we do as well.

Tell me, as a beekeeper, what activated your own passion and enthusiasm for bees?

Philip: Thank you. I think everyone has a bee story. It's lovely to hear other people's bee stories. My great-uncle Jack was a beekeeper. And when I was a tiny kid, he'd turn up and leave a jar on the doorstep at home. It just fascinated me - how on earth do you get honey into a jar from bees foraging in a meadow? It blew my mind. I was curious and asked lots of questions, as little kids do. And I've tried to keep that curiosity through all of my adult life and career as well. Being curious and asking questions. And this is where it's led me.

Nicola: Indeed. And can you tell us about the aha moment you had when you saw the parallels between the workings of a large organization and a beehive, and the event that led to this?

Philip: Yes, it's quite funny actually. At first, I was doing two lots of different study at the same time. One was all about work: organizational psychology and change and the work we do. That was my work study. And then, separate to that, my weekend and home study was to become a beekeeper. I thought, great, two new hobbies, two separate things - keeping work and life separate.

Then I was sitting at the bus stop outside my office on a lovely hot summer's day at lunchtime, and the building was actually the same size as a beehive. The same shape - a four-story square building with a small door at the front, with people coming and going out of a very busy main reception, carrying briefcases with experience and ideas. People were coming and going, and there was a real buzz about what was happening.

Inside the office, I noticed it was really complicated. What was happening wasn't obvious at first, but there was a beautiful product being made. And I thought, it's obvious. So here I was, trying to keep two separate hobbies apart, and in fact, it was one and the same. And I've carried on ever since.

Nicola: That's amazing. And would you mind sharing with our audience the event that you discuss at the beginning of the book, where you had to go to an airport in Switzerland? You tell the story, and I think it's just fabulous.

Philip: Thank you, and it is a fun one. Yeah, that's quite right. Early in the morning, I got a phone call. It was from the airport saying, "Philip, come quickly. There's a swarm of bees on the wing of a Boeing 737." I thought, this is fabulous! So, in May, of course, there are lots of bee swarms. My car was already loaded with spare hives, my beekeeping equipment, and my gloves and my hat. I raced to the airport, got security clearance, and drove onto the runway. I parked underneath the wing of a plane, and I was lifted by one of those cherry-picker things to the end of the wingtip, wearing a bee suit and carrying a box.

Now, I'm a bit clumsy at the best of times, and it was quite disconcerting to walk the entire length of the wing. The poor swarm of bees had settled there the night before in the setting sun when it was warm. And when bees swarm, they gather their thoughts and just settle, then set off the next day. But the next day, it was quite a fresh morning, and the poor bees were in the shade, out of the sun. It was my job to scoop them up into a box, put them into a new hive, and give them a new home, then take them away to safety.

The only stressful thing - well, additional stress - was that there were passengers, pilots, security people, and baggage handlers. As I stood on the wing, I looked down through my veil, and they were all wearing yellow high-viz vests and jackets, looking like anxious bees themselves! Anyway, I got the bees into the car - which is a story in itself - then I actually had to get changed and put my work suit on and go to the office. So I really was mixing my two worlds together.

Nicola: That's incredible!

I was interested to read that bees have something to share with us when it comes to the world of work and careers. You call it the importance of building your honeycomb. And I thought this is interesting timing because I was recently approached by a friend whose son is looking for his first job and wants to go into publishing. As a young person today, how on earth do you choose a career that's going to last? Indeed, is that the right way to look at it? Your advice was very timely - to forget the career ladder and build your honeycomb. Can you unpack this for us? What guidance do you have for young people in a world where the landscape for jobs is changing at warp speed?

Philip: It is, and the world has always been changing. I think we acknowledge that jobs for life no longer exist, and those long, linear career paths lasting decades - where you follow a progression of time and tenure - just don't exist anymore. What I encourage everyone to do is to throw themselves into their work 100% and notice what they're good at and notice what they love doing. Of course, those two aren't necessarily the same, but then notice what else is happening around you. Speak to friends, colleagues, and other people. Speak to complete and utter strangers about what jobs they do, and keep an open eye and open ears to what other opportunities might be out there.

All the way through the book, the plea is to encourage everyone to stop, pause, and think just a little bit harder about everything that's going on around them. And I really think that applies to careers as well. Even stop, pause, and think about big issues such as our purpose, perhaps one of the main things in our lives.

Nicola: Tell us a bit more about what bees can teach us about finding our purpose.

Philip: Yeah, the book works all the way through to 12 topics, culminating in purpose, which is a big one. The metaphor for the bees is that when a bee finds a source of pollen - let's say a beautiful apple tree in April - one bee will go, test it, and then come back. Then a second bee will go and do a test. After enough bees are convinced, every bee that is foraging in that hive will go to the same apple tree. They will pollinate a million flowers on one tree before moving on to another tree or another source of pollen.

What I want to encourage people to do is to throw themselves 100% into what they're doing if they believe it's their purpose. If it's in your heart and in your head and you want to do something, just throw yourself in. Life is short. You might do a test like a side hustle, I think is the phrase currently, but then throw yourself in completely. And if it works, you'll be a wonderful success. If it doesn't, you've learned something, and then do another test and move on.

Nicola: Very wise.

There's a chapter in the book on sensing the system and how to avoid being stung. In it, you discuss a beekeeper's relationship with the hive and how using all our senses can help us to become better at work. In your role as a beekeeper, what have you learned from the bees about deep listening and intuition?

Philip: This is a fun chapter. I like this one. When you approach a beehive on a lovely summer's day, don't just wade in and take the lid off and start working inside, taking out the frames and looking for honey. Don't poke around. Before you do anything, just stop and pause and notice what is happening.

And you can hear if they're stressed because the noise goes up an octave. You can smell if they're stressed because they stop making honey and make propolis, which is a very bitter bee glue they use to protect the hive. And you can see if they're stressed because of the agitated way they move. They might be stressed by a storm that's coming. As humans, we can't see or sense a storm, but they can sense the atmospheric pressure.

I use this metaphor to talk about work. For example, if you're walking into a meeting or you want to make a change or you want to reorganize or restructure a department, just notice what is happening first. Sense the system. What are people saying? What are people not saying? What is the tone of conversations? Or what questions are really being asked?

Really, we could all benefit in life from stopping and pausing and sensing. If you do that, you're less likely to get stung, both at work and as a beekeeper.

Nicola: Another area I found very interesting was the issue of decision-making for business leaders. It's becoming so complex, more and more so by the day, and the speed at which decisions have to be made. In the chapter on decision-making, you note that what works well for bees can also work for people. For example, there are lessons from Scout Bees about decision-making by consent. Can you expand on that a bit?

Philip: Yes. First of all, you know, in life, there are multiple decisions to take every single day. But not all decisions require the same decision process, and different severities of decision-making or making a wrong decision, for example, need different frameworks.

In the book, we talk about looking at different frameworks for taking decisions. A simple one is about decision-making by consensus. Does everyone in the leadership team need to agree, for example, or do we take a decision by consent where we delegate and trust maybe two people in a group to work together, evaluate options, and make a decision? So already, there's two different ways of taking a decision.

I don't see with the clients I work with that people take enough thought about how they're going to take a decision before everyone wades in to try and make one.

Now, with the bees, when they decide to move to a new place to swarm, to find a new home, that really is a life-or-death decision for the whole colony, for the whole population. And what the bees do, a bit like I've described when going to the apple tree, is let's say 10 different bees go in 10 different directions and find 10 different new homes.

Then they come back to the hive and do a waggle dance to explain where it is and how good it is. But of course, each bee doesn't know what the other nine options are like. So other bees then go and seek a second opinion. If it's good, then more bees will go, and it will magnify the data.

Then it reaches a point when the whole hive has to take a decision to agree. What they're doing is fact-finding and giving consent to other bees to go and find data. Then they repeat this process until they've eliminated all the other options. Finally, they decide wholeheartedly to go to one place.

It's a lovely process. It works for the bees. You can get 70,000 bees all aligning on a single good decision, but they've done the fact-base and the process of vetting it thoroughly first.

I wish organizations would spend more time understanding the process by which they are taking decisions before they do.

Nicola: That's incredible. You think about efficiencies and doing things more quickly while ensuring it's the right decision.

So you took your passion for bees, everything you'd learned, this very granular life experience, and used that to help inform the consultancy you founded, Hive Logic, where you use leadership lessons from inside the hive to inspire learning and reflection. What sort of feedback have you had from people you've worked with about your unique approach? And do you think that the connection with nature that you weave into your coaching and consultancy helps people learn and grow more effectively than traditional management development approaches?

Philip: I think, you know, we've got an awful lot to learn from all sources of nature. But what we find, really, is that using the metaphor of the bees is just a fun entry into some difficult topics. For example, we actually do some workshops about conflict. By talking about the bees first and how they fight and how the bees address conflict, all of a sudden we get parties who are in conflict with each other talking about the same topic. It's quite a fun process.

So it's just a way of connecting and introducing a topic. We're not saying everyone needs to work like bees, but we're just using it as a metaphor and a theme to introduce some difficult conversations. It's memorable, and people like it. And sometimes we bring honey.

Nicola: You bring honey?

Philip: Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes we bring honey, and we have competitions to see, for example, who can calculate how many bees are in a hive. All sorts of things. It's a lovely approach that opens up some difficult discussions.

Nicola: Yeah, I can see how that would work. Are people really excited and interested to hear all these anecdotal bee examples and stories?

Philip: Well, people do ask a lot of questions about the bees. And actually, I decided to write the book partly as a way of giving people the information so that we can then get back into the main business of the meeting, which is leadership development and all of our skill-building. But yes, it would be easy to talk about the bees all day. We're there to do some serious work as well. At HiveLogic, we sponsor the charity Bees for Development.

Nicola: And anyone purchasing the book will help you raise awareness and make life better for the bees. Closer to home, can you suggest some free and easy things that people can do to help with bee diversity around them?

Philip: Yes, certainly. Thank you for calling out Bees for Development. It's a wonderful organization, and I encourage anyone to Google it and look at the work they do to support families running bee businesses around the world to pay for their kids' education. It's just a lovely charity.

The charity recommends 10 steps that we can take. Just a few of them: The first one is teach children to respect bees and not be frightened by them or swat them. Bees are not going to do us any harm. Let's, as adults and children, not run away and be scared of them. Let's be curious and watch what they're doing.

And just two more: One is biodiversity. Encourage biodiversity in your garden or on your balcony, and that includes weeds. In April, May, and June, when plants are in flower, the bees need as much pollen as possible.

The final thing I'm going to say today is lock up your lawnmower in May. This is a gift for everybody. Celebrate No Mo May and let the bees do all the pollinating for you during that time.

Nicola: Such good advice, yes. And the RHS were quite hot on that this year, weren't they, at the Chelsea Flower Show, the fact that weeds are not the enemy? When it comes to weeds, what sorts of weeds do bees like?

Philip: Dandelions are an absolute classic. There's a lovely rich source of pollen from dandelions that come out, of course, in late April and early May. And they look lovely. Leave them. Leave them! Let the bees pollinate them. Then, if you need to cut your grass later in the season, do so then, but not before.

Nicola: Thank you, Philip. It's been really interesting. If you'd like to get your own copy, Bee Wise is available from BeewiseBook.com. It's also available from online retailers as both a paperback and an e-book. And don't forget that every purchase of the book helps to raise awareness and fund campaigns for Bees for Development, a global charity that supports communities to make and sell honey as a sustainable business.