Pinned like Insects
We used to think humans could do pretty much anything we put our minds and resources towards — even put a man on the moon. Now we’re not so sure. Yes, we aced the vaccine challenge, but we utterly failed to prevent or manage the kind of contagion biologists have predicted for more than a decade. Meanwhile, we’ve watched climate change overtake us for five decades with little interest, and even cities that willingly pledged ambitious carbon goals grow frustrated bringing them about. Why are we stretched to the breaking point by crisis, blindsided by problems we could easily foretell and prevent?
It isn’t just a matter of will or better systems. Good intentions and clever technologies are not enough to create the transformation we require, because the structures and processes we live within are not designed to adapt to change. They are designed to prevent it.
We jump through energy and creativity-draining hoops all day — meaningless tasks, people we don’t like. Data at predetermined metrics pinpoint the most effective operating procedures, to be enshrined as standards of replicability — best practices that suppress deviation or eliminate them, as workers compete do x for paycheck and promotion y. 60% of our waking hours is spent at work, yet nobody wants to live this way. Two-thirds of employees were disengaged and a quarter of them hated their jobs before the pandemic. Workers are stretched to breaking and tried and true “best practices” have put many well-meaning organizations out of business.
We’ve systematically taken all the natural adaptivity out of organizations and turned them into collections of hierarchically standardized, unhappy worn out parts, optimized for efficient production.
The problem is not human nature. The problem is a broken way of life.
We’ve created a system where we are pinned like insects to a board. Our structures are inhuman, and we just can’t adapt in this straitjacket.
I’m an evolutionary biologist and biological anthropologist. I study social evolution — how individual behaviors, choices, and associations affect structure and change in populations. My doctoral work was on Ethiopian baboons. I loved the research, but the rigidity and politics of scientific academics were confining. I’m an artist and philosopher at heart, and it was hard to be whole. Well, I thought. If I’m going to fit in a machine, I may as well get paid for it — so I took a job as a genetic engineer at a biotech, developing a novel diagnostic technology. It was fun to solve the problem, but a lot of what I saw looked like baboon politics — dominance, deception, information and resource hoarding, and lots of indiscriminate screwing.
It isn’t all that surprising, since we are 98% chimpanzee. Our shared ancestor lived only 5 million years ago — that’s the blink of an eye in evolutionary time, not much more than two kinds of opossum. We are, in fact, apes. That’s lovely: all of our cousins are clever and caring (and manipulative AF). But somewhere in that 2% difference, something significant happened. We are not just bald apes with big heads and a funny way of getting around. Try imagining everyone at the airport as a chimpanzee. Watch in amazement as they order their Starbucks and board their planes in neat little lines, emerging with fingers and ears intact. Chimps could never pull that off. That 2% had quite an effect.
That transformative thing is social structure. People succeed by working together, collaborating on tasks no chimpanzee could contemplate. We share, take on different jobs, even help raise other people’s children. Humans have converged on an antlike way of life, and in many ways, we have more in common with the ants and honeybees than with our powerfully individualistic ape brethren.
Colonies of social insects like ants, termites, or honeybees can contain hundreds of thousands — if not tens of millions — of genetically distinct individuals, living and working in tightly synchronized amoeba-like societies. Everyone has a job to do, and none can’t survive alone for long. They fundamentally depend on one other to survive. Some honeypot ant workers grow so full of nectar they can’t move — they hang from the ceiling, storing food for the colony. Other workers take care of them while satisfying the group’s more active requirements. Similarly, termite soldiers defend their colonies from ant attacks with giant trap-jaws so big they can’t even feed themselves. No matter — other workers do it for them. In both societies, a single swollen queen labors in the birthing chambers, churning out the colony’s eggs. Caretakers feed and groom her, whisking eggs to the nursery. If it takes a village, it’s a superorganism.
Any single individual in these societies is not too impressive, but together their diversity and flexibility allow new capabilities to emerge. A single fire ant will drown in water, but by linking their water-repellent bodies together, a team of them can float for days.
These networked societies don’t rely on a single leader or hierarchy of command. Ants and honeybees don’t tell each other what to do — there is no org chart, or meetings, no predictions or targets. Instead of managing from the top down, they rely on flat, bottom-up networks that sense and respond to real-time conditions. They make lots of small, imperfect decisions, and course correct constantly. These colonies are intelligent, agile, resilient, innovative — everything we’d like our global organizations to be.
Their success rests on a few broad patterns — collective intelligence, distributed leadership, reciprocity, and unique ways of regenerating value in the larger systems they are part of. Working this way feels natural to us as well, because we are superorganisms too! We are the only superorganism ape. Each of us has our own talents and perspectives, personality and style, and none of us can survive alone for long. We depend on one another to survive and reproduce in a fundamentally deeper way than most organisms do. People are designed to collaborate and adapt together.
The problem comes from living in structures that run contrary to our nature as living beings and superorganisms. The more we try and constrain dynamic and interconnected things, the greater the frequency and magnitude of disruptive events, and the fewer options for dealing with them. By suppressing deviations from standard (aka diversity), we are eliminating alternate experiments for evolution to select from. The result is increasing fragmentation and fragility — hyper-efficient machines pumping out goods and services while eroding our ability to care, dream, and create and unravelling the larger social, economic, ecological systems we depend on.
Organizations are fundamentally misaligned with living processes. We are not collections of standardized, optimized, swappable parts, and this mechanistic thinking is a life-threatening delusion. All our endeavors are biological, and nothing makes sense except in light of evolution, yet pervasive Illiteracy in living processes reinforces our inability to adapt.
I think we are starved for something more. We are living beings and superorganisms, after all, not parts in a machine or insects pinned to a board. It’s time to re-design organizational structures, processes, and systems so we can adapt. We know the answers in our bones.
This is the second article in a series leading up to publication of my book, The TEEMING Transformation. If you’d like to know more about this “Evolution Revolution” and how you or your organization can be part of it, please join me on May 21 for a free 90 minute introduction to our TEEM Ecosystem. Discover how evolutionary thinking and design can help us radically rethink our systems, processes, and structures, helping rehumanize, revitalize, and regenerate communities, industries, organizations, and other living systems worldwide. See you soon!
