Africa Edition #1
I’m in Kenya and have been on safari for the past week with my wife, son and two nieces.
We’ve had a blast watching, close-up, the so-called Big Five (elephant, lion, buffalo, leopard and rhino) and the Ugly Five (hyena, vulture, wildebeest, warthog and maribou stork). We’ve also seen cheetahs hunting (and eating their kill) and scores of other animal and bird species.
Here’s what some of them taught me about strategic thinking and leadership.
Differentiated attention
Some of the most entertaining animals on safari were vervet monkeys. They have cute black faces, fluffy white-grey fur and are both acrobatic and remarkably human.
In fact, a lot of their social behaviour, including play, mimics ours (or does ours mimic theirs?).
Both sexes have dominance hierarchies, but they’re completely different. Male status is based on age, tenure in the group, fighting ability and who your friends are. For females, it’s a matriarchal system handed down from generation to generation.
What this means is that each monkey is adept at reading a huge range of social cues that signal status. Grooming is sought after by the highest status monkeys - if Monkey A gets groomed for five minutes, and Monkey B for just one, or not at all, it’s a feather in Monkey A’s cap.
My two nieces, who are of the social media generation immediately noticed that this is precisely how 'likes’ work, and how the level of engagement, and latency, with ‘high status’ individuals is what’s prized in social networks.
It got me thinking, though, that monkey grooming is akin to paying attention to customers: most organisations give more to some than to others. But, the best organisations make this differentiation deliberate, not incidental.
Question: How do you give differentiated attention to your ‘best customers’?
Nurture vs nature
Here’s another vervet monkey - human parallel. Vervets have an annual breeding cycle and birth roughly once a year. This means that each infant is invested in heavily, and it also means that a mother will, at any given time, have a newborn, a one-year-old, a two-year-old, and so on.
This means that juvenile females care for the one and two-year-olds while ‘mum’ cares for the newborn. This practice is called ‘allomothering’ and it provides two benefits:
Mothers that use allomothers can shorten their interbirth periods so that they can have more offspring;
Allomothers gain experience and have better success with their own offspring.
But, what’s truly fascinating is that the status competition described above also plays out with allomothers: the pre-menstrual females compete to allomother the offspring of the highest-status females.
Now, what’s the relevance of this to organisational life, I hear you ask?
Well, I have long noticed that the most successful organisations are those which pair high-talent early-career people with high-achieving senior people. The benefit is exactly the same as in the vervet populations:
Senior people have talented people to delegate to, shortening the time from ideation to realisation;
The early-career people gain experience and have better success, not just with their own work performance, but in acting as mentors and delegators themselves later on.
Question: How can you create cross-generational talent matching in your organisation?
Indicative animals
Let’s move from vervets to warthogs. Yes, think ‘Pumba’ in The Lion King. They’re wild hogs with bizarre tusks, the purpose of which I’ll come to in a moment.
Wildlife guides here refer to warthogs as ‘indicative animals’, meaning their behaviour presages the behaviour of others, or signals something important in the environment. Two aspects of warthog behaviour are interesting:
They startle easily. Because their young are such juicy morsels for a plethora of large carnivores, when warthogs are placid, guides realise there are NO big cats around. Their tails are like antennae: when vertical, they’re alarmed. So, guides use pumbas as signs of where predators are (and aren’t).
They starve last. When drought comes, elephants suffer first (as they rely on huge quantities (150kg each, per day!) of lush greenery), zebras next (as their dental work permits them to graze on extremely short grass -have you ever seen a skinny zebra?)), while the warthogs last the distance as, with their tusks, they can dig up grass roots. So, when warthogs are skinny, it’s evident that drought conditions are dire.
Question: Who are the ‘indicative people’ you use to signal a coming danger or tipping point?
My safari is done (for now), but I remain in Kenya another week, as strategic advisor to the UN’s Environment Programme. So, next Friday’s 5MSM will be another Africa Edition, likely looking at the behaviour of humans, not animals.
Have a great time observing the ‘wildlife’ around you and see you next Friday.
Andrew