... of Power and Leadership in Nature

What can nature tell us about the exercise of power? All too often, power-grabbing and other attempts at domination are justified under the pretext that ‘it’s all natural.’ In fact, nature is frequently called upon to justify nearly anything. This may be the best argument for engaging in biomimicry: let’s learn from nature as it is, rather than an imagined version of it.

Early in 2025, I spent time with my friend, Future Value Global co-advisor, and biomimicry expert Michaela Emch to reflect on the natural world. In this short insights review, we put together insights on the exercise of power. Power, in essence, is the capacity to manifest one’s will in the world, particularly through the actions of others. Researchers John French and Bertram Raven developed a widely recognized framework that categorizes power into five key forms, attached to the following modalities:
- reward,
- punishment (known as ‘coercive’),
- expertise,
- charisma (known as ‘referent’),
- legitimacy

Can we track those different forms of power in animal societies, defining different default forms of what we might call ‘leadership styles’? How do they relate to the various challenges faced by different groups of animals as they hunt and forage, defend themselves, nurture their young, or make decisions on moving to new grounds. How do environmental pressures, such as scarcity, influence them? 

This article explores power dynamics in bonobos, orcas, crows, African painted dogs, and wolves, analyzing what we might call their dominant leadership styles and the impact of external pressures. We chose those five species because they present collaborative behaviour, and therefore need some sort of power exerted. Power has bad press, but some mode of coordination is required for any team work. We also deliberately picked those animals because they resemble human societies in the way that they operate. And so, we hope that we might learn something about ourselves by looking at them. 

Reward Power – Bonobos

Bonobos (Pan paniscus) live in complex social groups where cooperation is essential for survival. Unlike their close relatives, chimpanzees, bonobos are a more peaceful species. They might opportunistically hunt small prey, but they’re mainly foraging herbivores, focused on building strong social bonds inside the group. 

By contrast with more hierarchical primates, bonobos leverage social bonds rather than aggression to maintain stability. Power in bonobo society is largely exercised to maintain group cohesion, resolve disputes, and manage food-sharing dynamics. Grooming, social alliances, and access to food resources are central aspects of their social structure. Let’s note here that the literature we found uses the general term grooming, but popular views of bonobos tend to paint them as commonly engaging not only in mutual hairdressing, but sex. Which may be what ‘grooming’ refers to. 

The dominant form of power at play in bonobo society is reward power. High-status individuals maintain influence through generosity, particularly in food-sharing and 'grooming'. Research has shown that bonobos willingly share resources, including food, with both familiar individuals and strangers. More specifically, bonobos use grooming and food-sharing as social currency. Higher-ranking individuals who frequently groom others or share food tend to receive more social support in return. While there is no rigid ‘exchange rate’ for rewards, individuals who consistently offer more benefits tend to enjoy stronger alliances and greater influence. 

During times of scarcity, cooperative behaviors increase. Low-ranking bonobos receive more grooming and shared resources to maintain alliances. This suggests that environmental stressors amplify cooperative strategies, reinforcing social cohesion in challenging conditions.

Punishment Power – Orcas

Orcas (Orcinus orca) are apex predators that navigate vast oceanic environments, and hunt in coordinated pods. Maintaining social cohesion and ensuring effective teamwork is essential, particularly when coordinating attacks on prey such as seals or fish.

Orcas enforce this order primarily through punishment power. Older female orcas, often matriarchs, regulate group dynamics, ensuring cooperation and adherence to social norms. When an individual deviates from expected behaviors, such as disrupting hunting coordination, they face social exclusion or direct aggression. This punishment can take various forms. Some orcas are temporarily excluded from hunting groups, while others experience physical reprimands, such as nips or pushes from dominant members. Punishment is often mob-driven, where multiple pod members collectively reinforce discipline, ensuring strict adherence to social structure.

Scarcity, such as declining fish stocks, intensifies social enforcement. Matriarchs impose stricter control over hunting strategies, and deviations from coordinated tactics result in harsher consequences. These more rigid hierarchies ensure efficiency in resource acquisition during difficult periods.

Expertise Power – Crows

Crows (Corvus spp.) are highly intelligent birds that thrive in diverse environments. They are opportunistic foragers, using their problem-solving skills to locate food in a wide range of both natural and urban settings. Studies on New Caledonian crows highlight their ability to craft and modify tools, demonstrating advanced cognitive function.

Because crows frequently move between locations, the ability to learn and adapt is crucial. Expert power plays a central role in crow societies. Knowledgeable individuals, particularly those skilled in tool use and foraging strategies, have the capacity to influence group behavior. Experienced crows often ‘teach’ younger or less knowledgeable individuals, guiding them toward effective foraging strategies. While the young in other species learn by imitation, in the case of crows, expert adults pro-actively demonstrate to the young in the group how to perform a certain behavior. This form of active instruction ensures higher learning efficiency and the retention of complex skills such as tool-making.

While these experts do not receive direct ‘payment,’ their influence grants them social status and cooperation from others, who often defer to their judgment in decision-making. For instance, in New Caledonian crow groups, individuals with superior tool-use skills gain preferential access to resources, and their techniques are more likely to be adopted by others, reinforcing their status as leaders within the group.

When crows face resource scarcity, reliance on experts intensifies. When food becomes harder to find due to drought or habitat changes, crows increasingly follow the foraging strategies of experienced individuals. This dynamic ensures that the group benefits from accumulated knowledge, increasing survival rates.

Research suggests that crows exhibit increased creativity and proactive problem-solving in situations of resource scarcity, or when facing other types of difficulties. They innovate new tool-use techniques when faced with novel challenges and adopt novel foraging strategies in harsher environments. Additionally, crows actively test different methods when traditional strategies fail, as seen in urban populations adapting to human-made environments. This ability to experiment and innovate enhances their survival and reinforces the importance of expertise power within crow societies.

Charisma Power – African Painted Dogs

African painted dogs (Lycaon pictus) are highly social carnivores that live in cooperative packs dominated by an alpha pair. While adults are formidable predators, pups face significant mortality risks from lions, hyenas, and disease, with fewer than 40% surviving to adulthood. Given their low reproductive rate—typically a single dominant pair breeds per pack—and the energetic demands of communal pup-rearing, the survival of offspring is a collective priority. Additionally, painted dogs inhabit vast and often unpredictable landscapes, where seasonal shifts in prey availability require flexible and well-timed group coordination.

In painted dog societies, leadership is not enforced through aggression but rather expressed through charismatic cooperation and social synchronization. The dominant pair, especially the alpha female, leads with a blend of experience, confidence, and strong affiliative bonds. Yet decision-making often involves subtle, non-coercive cues—most notably, a ritualized “sneeze vote” observed before group movements. Studies suggest that the number of sneezes exchanged among pack members correlates with consensus to initiate a hunt or change location. This form of collective decision-making highlights a model of leadership grounded in distributed influence and social attunement.

Pack cohesion is maintained through a rich repertoire of vocalizations, tactile behaviors, and cooperative care. The dominant individuals do not assert their status through force, but by ensuring group stability and nurturing the young—often sharing food through regurgitation and adjusting the pack’s pace to accommodate pups and injured members. Leadership emerges through consistency, attentiveness, and emotional intelligence, rather than through displays of dominance.

During times of ecological stress, such as prey scarcity or territorial conflict, the pack's reliance on experienced leaders increases. The alpha pair—especially older individuals—draw on past hunting successes and learned terrain navigation to guide the group effectively. Their ability to coordinate hunts with precision and to mediate social tensions under pressure enhances overall pack resilience. Leadership in Lycaon pictus thus rests not only on competence, but on an ability to harmonize group needs, sustain trust, and foster a cooperative culture.

Legitimacy Power – Wolves

Wolves (Canis lupus) are territorial, pack-oriented carnivores that rely on cooperation for hunting and resource distribution. Leadership is essential for maintaining group order and ensuring successful hunting expeditions.

Wolves exhibit legitimacy power, where leadership is based on social roles and hierarchical structures. The alpha pair leads the pack, organizing hunts, maintaining order, and directing food distribution. This authority is reinforced through submissive behaviors from subordinates.

Dominance within the pack manifests through clear social roles. Research indicates that linear dominance hierarchies naturally emerge, where each wolf recognizes its place within the pack structure. This system minimizes conflict and maximizes efficiency, particularly during cooperative hunts.

When prey is scarce, legitimacy power is enforced more strictly. Alpha pairs exert greater control over food distribution, ensuring survival of the strongest members. Studies show that hierarchical enforcement becomes more rigid under resource-limited conditions, reinforcing leadership stability.

Conclusion

The exercise of power in animal societies takes many forms, each tailored to the species’ ecological and social contexts. Bonobos foster cooperation through reward power, orcas maintain discipline via punishment, crows leverage intelligence through expertise, African painted dogs rely on social attunement through charisma, and wolves uphold legitimacy-based leadership.

The five species we considered have a preferred leadership mode, but it is not exclusive: other forms of power complement it, with some variation among individuals and groups. It seems that scarcity exacerbates the default type of leadership at play in any animal society, either amplifying cooperative behaviors or reinforcing hierarchies. 

Two areas clearly dominate the realms where power applies: 

• Accessing food - whether it’s hunting for wolves, orcas, African painted dogs and to some extent bonobos, or coordinating access to resources through foraging, scaveniging, stealing, or even migrating to more bountiful regions, in crows, African painted dogs and bonobos. 
• Defense, and particuarly coordinating a team of individuals to protect the young – this applies to all five species, but particularly to African painted dogs.  

Other areas would call for greater exploration: for instance, how power manifests when animals make decisions to migrate to a new field, when it comes to sharing the spoils, transferring knowledge, or accessing various sources of pleasure. 

As we conclude, three questions remain open however, inviting us to reflect in turn on the way we operate as humans. 

• Continuity. The species we picked are not only social, but display a sense of mutual belonging. All of them display grieving behaviour. In addition, those species have few young, and some have long incubation periods. Protecting and training the young is a not-insignificant part of what the group looks after, and where power is exerted. What would be worth exploring further is, how power is passed to the next generation and how the young are trained: whether anything like nurseries exist, who’s in charge of running them, and whether that appears to be a position or power in the group or not. 

• Coordination beyond the group. We know that in certain environments, such as forests of savannahs, there are mixed species alarm systems to alert when a predator comes. However, to what extent can we notice more advanced forms of communication, so that species relate to each other. Another way to ask this question is: can we track the exercise of power beyond small groups, with members of the same species over a larger territory, or even across species – a feature that is clearly present among humans? This brings us to the threshold of questions about governance. 
• Consciousness. More centrally, can we say that those animal groups have not only power and leadership systems, but something we could call governance? By which we mean in this context, some sort of consciously developed and agreed upon model for the exercise of collective power? To further explore this question, we may look at the following questions. First, to what extent can we find outlier groups that operate in radically different ways, i.e. orcas that groom instead of punishing. Second, to what extent groups or species have collective memory of models that worked, and evolve their default exercise of power – again, leading to possible variations. Third, we might look at whether they gain inspiration from the way other animal societies operate – as we do in this piece – and adopt something like a biomimicry lens to organise themselves?