Our Evolving Social Software
Teaming Part 1 of 5 - The Origins of Teaming
In the world of organizational leadership and coaching, there’s a handful of topics for which it feels difficult to say something new or interesting. Subjects like ‘Leadership’, ‘Communication’ and anything related to ‘Teams’ feels pretty picked over.
This is why we’ve been noticing a rising interest, not around managing teams, but rather around the skill of teaming. By this, we mean the skills and habits needed by individuals to work effectively with other teammates. This especially includes informal and unconventional teaming relationships.
We think this is a combination of two factors. First, the ways we’re working with our formal teams are changing due to remote work, flatter org charts, and workforce dynamics. Second, we are increasingly being asked to work in ad hoc, informal and unconventional team scenarios.
Today we wanted to set the stage for this series by creating the context about how we got here and how we see this new era of teaming.
Teaming 1.0 - The Rise of Humans
A recent ‘meme’ question making its way around the social media circuit is ‘Who would win between 100 Men and 1 Gorilla?’ We can always trust social media to ask the hard questions. Disappointingly, we won’t be weighing in on the question, but it speaks to a powerful point.
We are, by far, the weakest sibling in our branch of the tree of life: The Great Apes.
We seem to get a reminder of this fact every couple of years when a 100 pound pet chimpanzee removes an arm or two from a human who somehow irritates them. Evolutionary Biologists and Anthropologists tell us that our ancestors left the trees about 2 million years ago and slowly started to trade off physical strength for bigger brains. The reason? Collective strength.
While our Chimp cousins are individually far stronger than us, their average ‘tribe’ size (called a troop) is about 50 vs Ours (pre-civilization) of about 150. This 150 Number has become known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’ based on the findings of Evolutionary Biologist Robin Dunbar. But tribe size only tells part of the story. Our capacity to coordinate as a group was also far better. In fact, it seems that it was this ability that ultimately let us outcompete the other species within the ‘homo’ family, most famously, the Neanderthals.
If you want to go deeper on this topic, we suggest the newest book co-authored by Robin Dunbar, “The Social Brain”.
Teaming 2.0 - The Rise of Institutions.
Humans flourished for tens of thousands of years in these 150-person tribes. In many places, we became the apex predator. Then, about 8-12,000 years ago, something happened to change this. We started attacking each other. Now, attacking each other wasn’t new, but as we started to domesticate both plants and animals, raiding became more rewarding than hunting or gathering. The raiding went from an occasional hassle to a persistent threat.
The settlers had to compete with the raiders, so they figured out how to create bigger tribes. We couldn’t grow bigger brains, so we created new social technology. This is when we begin to see the rise of things like written language, religion, and what we would eventually call government.
In the book ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, ’ Yuval Harari explains how humans leveraged powerful social ‘stories’ that took us from tribes to civilizations. These shared stories included things like religion, laws, money, and nation states. One of these ‘stories’ is the corporation. A useful fiction that allows humans to cooperate at scale to provide commercial services.
While corporations have been around for hundreds of years, the rise of the modern corporation coincided with the post-World War II era. An era where we collectively decided to pivot from local and regional family-run businesses to the power and efficiency of massive hierarchical institutions. This helped to create the modern world, but what made these institutions so efficient also tended to make them inflexible and vulnerable to disruption from smaller, more nimble innovators. This brings us to today and the emergence of:
Teaming 3.0 - The Rise of Networks
In other for organizations to both leverage scale and stay nimble, we’ll need to find new tools and management strategies. We see this as a shift from ‘logical’ systems to ‘intelligent’ ones.
Hierarchies achieve results by leveraging specialized intelligence through process and structure. What happens when everyone at every level has a super-intelligent teammate? We see the new approach as Networks. Networks utilize hierarchical elements but results are achieved through a series of branching and converging pathways based on dynamic decisions. The path can vary widely as long as the goal is achieved.
We see the new era of teaming as much more ‘organic’ and ‘adaptive’. Less about leveraging hierarchies and more about leveraging the type of social cooperation strategies we see in super-organisms like ants and bees. A way of working with others that is flexible, dynamic and adaptive. One that is less driven by carrots and sticks and more driven by mutual attraction and mutual rewards, which we’ll explore more deeply in the weeks ahead.
The Cleaver Team
