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Wombats, Mange & How to Break the Cycle of Recurring Problems
Description
Why do some problems keep coming back, even after you thought you'd fixed them? It's like scratching the wrong itch.
This episode came from noticing a place where biomimicry could quietly change the way Pia works, thanks to a wombat called Chardonnay.
She’s treated wombats with mange in the wild. Every few days, hiking in, pouring medicine onto the animal, hiking back out. Weeks of this. Sometimes months later, the mange is back. And the cycle begins again.
Because the mites don’t just live on the wombat. They survive in the burrow.
Treat the host, ignore the habitat, and reinfection undoes everything.
One day, driving home from the mountains, it hit her. She’d been doing the exact same thing with clients. Training teams, watching them transform, then coming back months later to find old behaviours back in place. Not because the training failed. Because the conditions pulled them back.
That’s the pattern behind so many recurring problems: we intervene where the problem shows up, while leaving the conditions that keep recreating it untouched.
This episode sits inside that pattern. The places where we keep scratching the wrong itch.
This isn’t motivation or mindset. It’s a design flaw.
Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.
Biology: Sarcoptic mange mites survive both on wombats and within their burrows, enabling reinfection even after the host is treated.
Principle: Intervening at the point of impact is insufficient if the conditions that regenerate the problem remain unchanged.
Application: Shifting focus from individual behaviour change to redesigning the surrounding system or “habitat” to prevent recurring failure.
Note on the wombat work:
The fieldwork described in this episode is done with the Blue Mountains Wombat Conservation Group, a volunteer-run organisation treating sarcoptic mange in wild wombats.
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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.