The battle between marketing and manufacturing is as old as—well, as old as marketing and manufacturing. The techies of IT departments often seem to have difficulty getting along with the groups they are supposed to support, and vice versa. Everyone is too busy labeling others as outsiders and dismissing them in the process. A final point must be made on the matter of classification before calculus, and it comes in the area of skill development.
Lists are attractive and often memorable. But advanced math and science education largely relies on sophisticated models of processes—complex explanations of cause and effect in different circumstances.
It also advocates probabilistic ways of thinking, in which people are taught to weigh the combined likelihoods of different events together as they make decisions. Many people may come to understand and use these methods—weather forecasters and investment analysts are examples—but even lengthy training cannot fully eliminate our irrational and simplifying biases. Along with a scarcity of food, clothing, and shelter, and the constant threat of natural disaster, the Stone Age was also characterized by an ever-shifting social scene.
From one season to the next, it was not easy to predict who would have food to eat, let alone who would be healthy enough to endure the elements. In other words, the individuals who ruled the clan and controlled the resources were always changing. Survivors were those who were savvy enough to anticipate power shifts and swiftly adjust for them, as well as those who could manipulate them.
They were savvy because they engaged in, and likely showed a skill for, gossip. That has always been true in human society. The people who chat with just the right people at just the right time often put themselves in just the right position. In fact, it is fair to assume that human beings have stayed alive and increased their chances of reproducing because of such artful politicking.
What are the implications for managers? And since the interest in rumors is ingrained into human nature, it makes little sense to try to eliminate such interest by increasing the flood of official communications.
Rather, managers would be smart to keep tabs on the rumor mill. They might even use their own networks to plug into the grapevine. But when it comes to gossip, it may be that managing by wandering about is the most effective way to communicate, as long as it is performed in a climate of trust and openness.
Empathy and Mind Reading. Simply stated, these two skills are the building blocks of gossip. People are much more likely to hear secrets and other information if they appear trustworthy and sympathetic. Likewise, people with a knack for guessing what others are thinking tend to ask better—that is, more probing and leading—questions.
Thus, because empathy and mind reading abet the survival skill of gossip, they too became hardwired into the human brain. At the same time, people are also programmed for friendliness. Sharing food was the basis for the cooperative exchange with relative strangers in the hunter-gatherer clan. Human beings, or at least those who survived, became adept at building peaceful social alliances and carrying out negotiations with win-win outcomes.
We can see barter and trade even among very young children at play. And so it is that friendly exchanges of information and favors remain our preferred way of dealing with nonfamily and a key to building political alliances for social success. The good news for managers on this front is that empathy and friendliness are, in general, positive dynamics to have around the organization.
It pays to empathize with customers, for instance, and we can assume that things like commitment and loyalty grow when employees are friendly to one another. The bad news is that the instinct for empathy very easily leads us to imagine that people are more similar to ourselves, as well as more competent and trustworthy, than they really are. Further, the drive to act friendly can make delivering bad news—about performance, for instance—very difficult.
The employment interview is one situation that exploits the capacities for friendliness and imaginative empathy to its fullest extent. Our natural tendency to sympathize with the person across the table drives us to make excuses for their weaknesses or to read more substance into their work or personal experiences than truly exists. At the same time, our programming for classification—sorting people into in-groups and out-groups—can make us harshly judge those who appear to be in the out-group.
We will even focus on and exaggerate the differences we perceive. Thus, strict controls and lengthy training are needed to make interviews effective procedures for objective judgment, and even then they remain highly vulnerable to empathy and mind-reading biases. Contest and Display. Finally, status in tribal groups was often won in public competitions. Such competitions were not introduced by human beings; indeed, they were dramas commonly played out by primates.
To establish status in early human societies, people especially males frequently set up contests, such as games and battles, with clear winners and losers. Likewise, they displayed their status and mental gifts in elaborate public rituals and artistic displays. The underlying purpose of such practices was to impress others. Successful—that is, high-status—and healthy males were thought to produce strong and intelligent progeny. For survival-driven females, determined not only to reproduce but to nurture their babies once they arrived, such males were…well, irresistible.
For their part, women found contests amongst themselves unnecessary, although they did seek to be more attractive than one another so they could have the prime pick of high-status males. And so the ingrained male desire to do public battle and display virility and competence persists today.
That should not surprise any denizen of the corporate world. Men are forever setting up contests between themselves to see who will be promoted, win a new account, or gain the ear of leaders.
Winners of these contests are frequently given to public displays of chest thumping. And even in organizational settings, which would benefit from cooperation, men frequently choose competition.
The answer is sensitive territory, because it gets into the inborn differences between men and women and what that means for managers. Some heralded the concept of the so-called Mommy Track—a term not coined by Schwartz, by the way—but many feminists excoriated her work.
Suffice it to say, then, that managers should be aware that you can urge men to refrain from one-upmanship, but you may be fighting their programming. In addition, companies might ask themselves if their rules of success were written by men and for men. It might be that the reason most women are not breaking the glass ceiling is because they find those rules abhorrent—or at the very least, against their nature.
When all is said and done, evolutionary psychology paints a rather illuminating picture of human thinking and feeling. We may wish human beings were more rational, but our brains, created for a different time and place, get in the way. But the truth is, today we need rationality more than ever. The world is increasingly complex, and we must make harder, more layered decisions faster and faster.
Of course, people have devised wonderful instruments to help predict and manage uncertainty. On modern trading floors, for example, computer modeling is widely used to estimate risks and probabilities in an unbiased fashion. Traders and managers collectively pore over risk-bearing market positions to limit financial exposure. Reward and punishment systems encourage openness about loss and heavily penalize concealment. Responsibility for different elements of trading deals is divided across functions to prevent an individual from committing fraud.
But even with these controls and safeguards, it is a sure thing that enormous costs are still being incurred through the exercise of human irrationality in these and other complex information-based environments. Evolutionary psychologists contend, however, that our primitive psychorationality, so well adapted to the precarious life of hunter-gatherers, will continue to call the tune whenever it is free to do so.
In the choices businesspeople make, one can expect the hidden agendas of emotion, loss aversion, over-confidence, categorical thinking, and social intuition to continue regularly to prevail. Evolutionary psychology thus suggests how important it is for us to have a clear view of our biased natures so that we can construct a mind-set to guard against their worst consequences.
Along with the workings of the human mind, evolutionary psychology also explores the dynamics of the human group. How does natural selection explain the ways in which people organize? What aspects of social behavior can be explained by our evolved circuitry? To identify our programming for social living, scientists in the field of evolutionary psychology have looked for common features across human societies, past and present, and extrapolated from them what must be biogenetic.
The concept of coevolution is critical to this method of analysis—the idea that cultures and social institutions are adaptations that make compromises between environmental conditions, such as food supply and population density, and the enduring characteristics of human psychology. So, as comparative anthropologists have pointed out, when one looks across the astonishing variety of human societies, one repeatedly encounters common themes, dilemmas, and conflicts.
These common factors are inborn and drive many aspects of social relations today. Organizational Design. Like the primates that came before them, human beings were never loners. Indeed, the family is the centerpiece of all human societies.
But no family would have survived the Stone Age without additional support. Clans on the Savannah Plain appear to have been similar in one key way: they contained up to members, according to Robin Dunbar, professor of psychology at the University of Liverpool. In his research, Dunbar found a linear relationship between the brain size and troup size of social primates.
The larger the brain, the larger the size of the group. Now, it may appear that other species have groups larger than members. We see thousands of moose together, for instance. But these are not clans in the way people configure or experience them. There is no binding connection or social organization among moose.
They simply gather into mating groups—a single male with his many female mates and their offspring. Human beings organize socially. They are held together by the bond of communities, although maintaining such communities is a complex matter. It involves a lot of brain power—remembering people, forging alliances, and keeping promises are all advanced mental tasks.
It may very well be for this reason that we see the persistent strength of small to midsize family businesses throughout history. Family-owned companies account for a great deal of big business, too, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. And in the West, many major companies are underpinned by substantial interlocking family networks. Of course, many companies today employ more than people. And many of these businesses struggle with the tendency of people to break off into cliques, or of functions, departments, or even teams to come into conflict with one another.
In recent years, many companies have sought to deal with this complexity through matrix management. Yet it has proved to be one of the most difficult and least successful organizational forms. The reason? Evolutionary psychologists contend that matrix forms are inherently unstable due to the conflicting pulls toward too many centers of gravity.
People are instinctively drawn toward commitment to one community at a time, usually the one that is closer and more familiar to them. Thus, when a modern businessperson is asked to report both to her regional boss and to a product manager, she is typically drawn to the regional boss because he is physically closer to where the employee works and to what she knows best. The dual loyalties required by matrix management are difficult to sustain in the long term.
It is no surprise, then, that the matrix has worked best where it has been limited in size and duration and where it has been directed toward the common end of a finite project—like a temporary assembly of a section of the hunter-gatherer clan for some major undertaking such as a game drive. Two notable examples are ABB, the multinational based in Sweden, which has become a world-beater by this means, and Virgin, which, especially in its early days, cultivated a climate of subunit entrepreneurship and self-management.
ABB has around 1, units, each with an average of 50 people. Virgin allowed no more than 50 employees at any one site during its early years of phenomenal growth and success. We return again to the relationship between the sexes. The hunter-gatherer world was certainly more fluid than ours is today in that wealth—represented by food, clothing, and shelter—was less predictable.
Still, we can assume that some people regularly did better than others and thereby accrued status. When it came time to make alliances, they were sought out, and when it came time to pick leaders, they were chosen.
Wealth mattered in the social relations of Stone Age people, but probably no more than another status symbol—reproductive quality. Females came to believe that dominant males produced stronger babies more likely to survive the elements. Males sought females who appeared healthy and fertile. By now, you might be wondering, What does this mean for managers? The answer is that the desire to obtain status in organizational settings is human nature.
When we try to eliminate it through de-layering, or more radically in experimental communities such as the kibbutz, the human instinct for status differentiation reasserts itself. Even in small temporary groupings of equals, such as training events that bring together strangers from different companies, the beginnings of hierarchy can be glimpsed immediately in patterns of informal leadership and deferential behavior. What we are seeing is the acting out of roles as ancient as our time on the planet.
The researchers say the finding supports the idea that natural selection molded mechanisms into our ancestors' brains that were specialized for paying attention to humans and other animals. These adaptive traits were then passed on to us. Immersed in a rich, biotic environment, it would have been imperative for our ancestors to monitor both humans and non-human animals.
Predators and prey took many different forms—lions, tigers and bears—and they changed often, so constant eyeballing was critical. While the environment has changed since then, with high-rises emerging where forests once took root and pampered pets taking the place of stalking beasts, our instinct-driven attention has not followed suit.
In the study, groups of undergraduate students from UCSB, watched images displayed on computer monitors. The flashing images alternated between pairs of various outdoor scenes, with the first image showing one scene and the next an alternate version of that scene with one change.
Participants indicated each time whether they detected a change. While cognitive biases can sometimes undermine cooperation and promote conflict, this is not always the case. Optimism, loss aversion, and groupishness can also bring advantages.
After all, the traits of human nature evolved because they helped us make good decisions, not bad ones. While the modern world is very different from the one in which we evolved, social and political life is still heavily dependent on the ancient challenges of strategic decision-making and social interactions, often in a fast moving environment of limited information, uncertainty, and competition, where we must lean heavily on instinct in the absence of foresight.
For example, I examine the role of optimism in the American Revolution, a poorly equipped insurgency on a shoe-string, taking on a Great Britain that was hardened to war and accustomed to victory, and at the time a dominant global superpower. I argue that without a remarkable level of optimism, even overoptimism, George Washington and the colonial army would never have carried the fight through the many years of repeated military set backs, the constant melting away of its volunteer soldiers, or the hardships of Valley Forge.
How might strategic instincts apply to our work at the Oxford Martin School? Human behavior and psychology is often at the heart of barriers to conservation, environmental resource management, and mitigating climate change. To avert these dangers, humans have to set aside self-interest for the greater good, and discard short-term gains for distant or even inter-generational returns.
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