Mycelium and the Grammar of Leadership
The I:We Ratio
Here is a challenge: over the coming weeks, months, or years in your workplace, begin tracking how often you hear “I” versus “we” in your leadership’s vocabulary. Ignore context, simply pay attention to the frequency as a single metric; call it the I:We ratio. I wager that your team’s success, the health of the business you’re part of, and your own satisfaction will correlate strongly with this ratio (I > We you will be less fulfilled and successful, We > I you will be moreso).
The frequency of these pronouns reflect where a leader locates agency, how they view responsibility, and how deeply they see themselves embedded in the collective. “I” declares ownership; “we” signals shared effort.
This isn’t just intuition, research shows that leaders who use more “we” language outperform those who rely on “I”. For example, a study of business leaders found that greater use of “we-referencing” language was positively associated with improved financial performance [Fladerer et al., 2021]. Another field study demonstrated that leaders’ use of “we” pronouns encouraged more speaking up and collaboration in diverse teams [Weiss et al., 2017].
We talk about mycelium as reflecting a structural language. The language of leadership is structural. It shapes how communication flows, how decisions are understood, and how the emotional climate takes form. In complex fields, like the nonlinear, multi-dimensional problem spaces of mycelium R&D, “I” versus “we” is acutely operational. An “I-first” vocabulary concentrates agency in one node or structural component, creating fragility dependent on a single mind. A “we-first” vocabulary distributes agency across the network, building resilience, collective capacity, and adaptive intelligence.
The I:We ratio can be a diagnostic feature for leadership quality that aligns uncannily with what fungi have always known: that distributed, collective systems outperform centralized ones when the terrain is complex. By examining three principles of fungal physicality—assimilative growth, decentralization, and clonal expansion—we can see why “we” is good organismal design (for both the fungal colony and the human structure designing with it).
The Mycelial ‘We’
If we turn to fungi for guidance on navigating complexity, three principles of their growth stand out: decentralization, clonal identity, and assimilative expansion. These are key structural organizing principles that allow mycelial networks to solve problems in wildly variable environments. And in each case, their logic parallels the difference between an “I-first” and “we-first” stance.
Decentralization is the most striking. A fungal colony has no command center. There is no single coordinating structure possessing and coordinating the full picture. Each growing point interprets local information (nutrients, barriers, moisture, neighboring hyphae) and acts accordingly. David Moore’s Neighbour-Sensing Model illustrates how simple, local rules can generate remarkably complex architectures [Meskauskas et al., 2004]. Work on mycelial networks further illustrates that decentralized rule-following allows fungi to build efficient, adaptive transport systems without centralized oversight [Fricker, 2017; Bebber et al., 2007]. Fungal problem-solving is distributed, no single hyphae or organ carries the load.
This is precisely the dynamic encouraged by we-talk. A leader who defaults to “we” encourages distributed agency, enabling teams to make local decisions with confidence. A leader who defaults to “I” pulls the locus of interpretation inward, bottlenecking the system. Fungal decentralization is the biological analogue of a low I:We ratio; intelligence emerging from many nodes rather than concentrating in one.
Clonal growth deepens the analogy. Many fungi, most famously Armillaria spp., exist as vast clonal individuals extending over hectares. These forest-spanning networks can be genetically uniform, expressing the same organism through thousands of clonal iterations of the same individual, all interacting with their discrete local problems while maintaining cohesivity with the larger whole [Smith et al., 1992]. In such systems, what looks like a crowd is actually one individual expressed across many places, and many agencies, at once.
When a leader weights toward “we,” they reinforce a shared sense of organismhood; one organism with many expressions. The team becomes a clonal network of capability rather than a cluster of isolated individuals. Haslam, Reicher, and Platow describe this as “identity leadership,” showing that leaders who speak in collective terms strengthen group cohesion and performance [Haslam et al., 2020]. In fungi and in human teams, unity of identity enables unity of action.
Assimilative growth describes how fungi grow by absorbing nutrients, converting them into biomass, and extending its reach. Moore’s 21st Century Guidebook to Fungi emphasizes that tip growth depends on metabolic assimilation behind the apex [Moore et al., 2011]. Kendrick’s The Fifth Kingdom expands on this, describing assimilative growth as the fungal ability to utilize diverse carbon sources and translate them into new tissue. Fungi are, in a literal sense, what their body assimilates, where the structure of their environment quite literally becomes their bodily structure.
Teams grow the same way; they assimilate information, insight, and experience from a shared problem space. A leader who uses “I” often hoards context or interpretation. A leader who uses “we” distributes context, enabling collective assimilation. Mycelium does not rely on one hypha or organ to do all the sensing, digesting, and distribution; it distributes that function across its entire body, where its body spans a multitude of independent agencies.
Taken together, these fungal principles form a coherent narrative:
Decentralized systems navigate complexity better than centralized ones.
Organisms with shared identity coordinate more effectively.
Networks that assimilate collectively grow more robustly.
This is why mycelium succeeds in ambiguous, high-dimensional environments, and why teams working in similarly complex spaces (such as mycelium R&D) require leaders whose language activates the collective rather than the individual.
In fungal terms, an “I-first” leader behaves like a malformed mycelium with one hypertrophic hypha trying to do everything. A “we-first” leader behaves like a healthy colony: distributed, adaptive, metabolically integrated, and capable of exploring the landscape with many sensing points instead of one.
Mycelium as a Lesson in Distributed Agency
If decentralization, clonal identity, and assimilative growth explain how fungi navigate complex environments, then the same principles help explain why human teams working in mycelium R&D struggle to function effectively under an “I-first” leadership paradigm. This field uniquely demands a structure of thought and communication that mirrors the organism being studied.
Mycelium R&D operates in a high-dimensional problem space; dozens of parameters interact in nonlinear ways. Small perturbations cascade, local changes alter global outcomes, rare phenotypes emerge unpredictably. No single person, no matter how experienced, can hold the entire constraint landscape in their mind. Functionally, the biology resists heroic cognition.
In practice, this means the only workable model for scientific and process progress is a distributed interpretive system where insight, context, and decision-making are spread across many individuals. The moment knowledge becomes centralized in one person’s head, the team loses degrees of freedom and the R&D program begins to replicate the vulnerabilities of a centralized organism: slow response, misinterpretation, and elevated risk of failure under complexity load.
Teams that rely on “we” language reinforce distributed authorship. They normalize shared responsibility for understanding the organism and the system. They create the psychological and structural conditions in which many people can safely contribute partial understanding, localized insight, and experimental intuition. They shift the communication architecture from a heroic topology (“all information routes through me”) to a mycelial topology (“information is exchanged across many nodes”). In a mycelium R&D environment, this is the difference between intellectual bottlenecking or resilience.
Teams that rely on “I” language tend to collapse into fragmented interpretive silos. Individuals withhold uncertainty, experiments become less exploratory, and subtle organismal signals get misread because the interpretive burden rests on one mind. These are the human analogues of over-centralized fungal networks: brittle systems that cannot tolerate noise, drift, or ambiguity. By contrast, “we-first” teams behave more like robust colonies. They assimilate information collectively, cross-validate observations, and act on distributed sensing. They are more likely to interpret rare phenotypes correctly, recognize when a system is drifting across its global phenotype, and generate the recursive experimental cycles that complex fungi require, exhibiting the adaptive intelligence and resilience of healthy mycelia.
Mycelial Leadership
Mycelium teaches that complexity rewards coordinated multiplicity over centralization. A fungal colony succeeds because no single hypha is expected to carry the whole picture; agency is distributed across the network. The organism thrives by letting structure emerge from collective activity by being, fundamentally, a we.
Teams working in mycelium R&D succeed for the same reason. Biological complexity punishes ego-centered architectures and favors systems built around shared authorship and distributed intelligence. In this context, the I:We ratio becomes a structural indicator that reveals whether leadership is creating an organization capable of behaving like the organism it studies; adaptive, integrated, and resilient in the face of nonlinear conditions.
A leader who indexes on “we” is not performing modesty, they are modeling the architecture required for complex discovery. They cultivate a culture where knowledge is assimilated collectively and agency is spread across many nodes. In doing so, they build an organization well suited to the intricate terrain of mycelium that can explore, interpret, and solve problems at scales no single mind can reach.
References
Fladerer, M.P., Haslam, S.A., Steffens, N.K. et al. The Value of Speaking for “Us”: the Relationship Between CEOs’ Use of I- and We-Referencing Language and Subsequent Organizational Performance. J Bus Psychol 36, 299–313 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-019-09677-0
Weiss, Mona & Kolbe, Michaela & Grote, Gudela & Spahn, Donat & Grande, Bastian. (2017). We can do it! Inclusive leader language promotes voice behavior in multi-professional teams. The Leadership Quarterly. 29. 10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.09.002.
Meskauskas A, Fricker MD, Moore D. Simulating colonial growth of fungi with the Neighbour-Sensing model of hyphal growth. Mycol Res. 2004 Nov;108(Pt 11):1241-56. doi: 10.1017/s0953756204001261. PMID: 15587058.
Fricker MD (2017). “The mycelium as a network.” Microbiology Spectrum 5(3): FUNK-0033-2017. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28524023/
Bebber DP, Hynes J, Darrah PR, Boddy L, Fricker MD (2007). “Biological solutions to transport network design.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 274: 2307–2315. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17623638/
Smith, M. L., Bruhn, J. N., & Anderson, J. B. (1992). The fungus Armillaria bulbosa is among the largest and oldest living organisms. Nature 356, 428–431. https://www.nature.com/articles/356428a0
Haslam, S.A., Reicher, S.D., & Platow, M.J. (2020). The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351108232
Moore, D., Nauta, M. M., Evans, S. E., & Rotheroe, M. (2011). Chapter 4.1: Hyphal growth – the hyphal mode of growth. In 21st Century Guidebook to Fungi (PLATINUM Edition). Retrieved from https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_Century_Guidebook_to_Fungi_PLATINUM/Ch04_01.htm
Kendrick, B. (2017). The Fifth Kingdom (4th ed.). Hackett Publishing Company.