Non-Systemic Organization

Methods of agriculture and gardening are probably built into our genetic memory. For example, the idea of making a "bed" for the plants and grouping the same kind of plant all into one place is somehow encoded in our brain and body the same way a squirrel knows to stash nuts in a tree. The reason people do that is to make the harvest less labor intensive. People tend to devise systems around a specific version of "efficiency"--usually labor efficiency.

Nature doesn't do that, obviously. If there's any single principle to cite, it'd probably be energy utilization. It seems like nature just makes use of all available energy--if there's a niche where a plant can live, it will grow. Some gardeners and farmers follow that scheme to the degree they can. It makes the plants more resistant to pests. However, even in those schemes, quite a bit of area will be left fallow compared to a natural meadow for example, so only a fraction of the sunlight will be utilized.

Nature also builds on what we'd think of as "failures". A tiny tree that only lives two seasons improves the soil. An ancient beech tree that collapses and wipes out four other trees improves the soil and makes more niches for animals to live. The apparent chaos makes more complexity and room for life in a smaller area.

The way people plan, and carry out plans is built on language. Language, as pointed out in many posts on my blog, is a form of lossy compression--really driven by the same concepts of efficiency that shape our genetic memory of gardening. A "failure" for a human is really lost time. For us, there's really no grand scheme, we rarely have a feel for the whole, and our place in it. A farmer who depended on a crop that failed, for example, would be destroyed. Failure would mean his own loss of property, or maybe even life.

An engineered system, like a farm field or a garden bed or a whole farm, tends to be worse at converting solar energy into plants or animals than nature is over the same area. Engineered systems--really most types of "systems" are based on word-consciousness. Other modes of consciousness aren't so amenable to a system, or organizing people who aren't in that same mode of thinking.