More lessons from nature

Excerpted from Transcompetition, by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley, McGraw-Hill/Business Week Books, 1998

(c) by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley

Biologists and social scientists have isolated several factors that affect how connected a community feels and behaves. Each has its analog in the working world:

• Group size. Even when animals gather in great numbers, they usually belong most tightly to subgroups -- bigger than the family, but smaller than the herd or flock. This size correlates to human teams -- flexible enough to change greatly, without ceasing to "belong." Organizations can use slogans like "Team GM" or "The marines can use a few good men" if they like, but actual teams know this is nonsense. Big organizations are inevitably flotillas of many teams, groups, subgroups, and subteams, like organisms made of many cells. Identification with the whole is useful and important, but identification with what is small, local, and intimate is almost always stronger. The way to control and shape group behavior may begin with the vision of an individual at the top, but must be implemented at more local levels.
• Demographic distribution. "All young males" is a formula for shortlivedness in any enterprise, whether you are a street gang or Menudo. One could argue that a group of identical units -- clones, say -- is no group at all. Diversity is essential to group success -- diversity of knowledge, in particular. Diversity along racial, sex, age, and cultural lines can be useful and valuable, but primarily in the way in which these differences contribute to knowledge diversity. Some forms of diversity are toxic, however: diversity of core values, where members of a community have diametrically different views of the group's goal, is poison to any community or organization
• Cohesiveness. Cohesiveness is the will to be together, what we have called "desperately seeking teaming." It is one of the more mysterious group attributes which no consultant has found a way to package, and no leader has found a way to mandate. It is a critical requirement the group must provide by itself. Cohesiveness is the result of balanced chemistry and shared values. Noncohering groups come apart because crises drive a wedge between contradictory values. Cohesive groups weather these crises because they have the will to stick together.
• Does your group hold together of itself or does the environment of crisis it finds itself in want to pull it apart at the seams? Do not underestimate the importance of this attribute. People will not commit to being long-term shipmates if they believe the ship may sink at any second.
• Permeability. Can outsiders immigrate into the group, or is there police tape keeping them from drawing close? Many birds will reject their own eggs if they feel they have been contaminated by outside elements. Bull wildebeests drive off straggler males who threaten their hegemony. Management is notorious for creating elite environments rank-and-filers never see. Full-time workers are notorious for keeping part-timers on the outside, looking in.
• When Republic Airlines merged with Northwest in 1986, an unresolved issue was how to blend the two tiers of employees together. Northwest was unwilling to raise Republic workers' salaries to equal its own, and the merger still has problems more than a decade later. A transcompetitive organization is a hospitable one, finding ways to treat newcomers fairly and with dignity -- and avoid the competitive quagmires of first- and second-class citizenship.
• Differentiation of roles. A healthy herd is one in which animals know their roles for defense and nurturance. A herd in crisis forgets its roles; they stagger thirstily across the plain. An organization in its death throes does likewise, order dissolving into an every-member-for-himself retreat.
• Different people in organizations do different things, and that is the source of their value to the group. People enamored with the "flattened" or dehierarchized organizations like the simplicity of their structure. But simplicity of structure (bosses and masses) is no guarantor of cohesiveness. It is very similar to the model in place at sweatshop factories, where everyone is doing the same low-value thing, for an indifferent organization.
• Integration of behavior. Does what everyone does fit together into an effective unit? This factor complements the previous one.
• Information flow. Being social is less about emotion than information. Information is what dogs get when they sniff each other, and what makes a bee's antennae tingle. A connected organization is like sparkling water: its energy forces information to rise through every level. A disconnected one fosters gray-market information in the form of gossip. Gossip is the trunk line of the disconnected organization: who is saying what about who did what to whom. When people obtain information they need to survive entirely through gray channels, that is a sign the organization is not long for this world.
• Time devoted to being social. Lemurs, a lonely species, spend only 20 percent of their time attending to one another. By contrast, pigtailed macaques may spend 80 percent of their time mixing, grooming, playing, and checking one another out.
• Companies whose people do not see one another as people, but as opponents to be beaten, will not be able to tap into their human potential. Disconnected organizations spawn workaholism, a grim breed of estranged loners, running out the clock and avoiding one another.
• Connected ones spawn picnics.

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