omniharmonicMycelial Networks
Mycelial networks are the vast underground fungal systems that connect the root systems of trees and plants in forest ecosystems, facilitating the exchange of nutrients, water, and chemical information across the living community. Often called the “wood wide web,” these networks enable trees that appear separate above ground to function as a deeply interconnected superorganism. Mother trees nurture saplings through the mycelial web. Struggling trees receive resources from their neighbors. The forest operates as a whole, with the mycelial network serving as its distributed nervous system, transmitting signals and allocating resources without any centralized command structure.
The concept of mycelial sensing extends this ecological reality into a framework for human organizational design. Just as mycelial networks make visible the hidden connections that sustain a forest, the process of mycelial sensing in human networks involves the intuitive, relational navigation of how different initiatives, organizations, and communities relate to one another within a larger ecological context. It is the practice of discovering complementarities and adjacencies, identifying unique differentiation, and facilitating the flow of information and resources through a network, not through centralized direction but through distributed awareness and trust. This stands in direct contrast to the dominant organizational paradigm of modernity, which concentrates decision-making authority within enclosed hierarchical structures that function as parasites upon the networks they inevitably depend on.
In practice, mycelial sensing describes the ongoing process unfolding within bioregional organizing and place-based networks, where multiple organizations are learning to see themselves as nodes within a shared ecology rather than isolated entities competing for resources. Formalizing these networks, making visible the relationships that constitute the living tissue of communities, enables better information flow, coordinated resource attraction, and the emergence of collective intelligence that exceeds what any individual organization could achieve alone. This connects to emergent strategy through its trust in self-organization, and to commons governance through its recognition that coordination emerges from shared protocols and mutual adjustment rather than hierarchical control. The mycelial network is both metaphor and model: it demonstrates that the fundamental pattern of life is networked, distributed, and relational, and that conscious human organization can learn to mirror this pattern.