Business Vitality
| Product Design | Technology Futures
| Services
| About | HomeThe idea of the Jungle is evocative of Victorian-era adventurers in pith helmets, "Dr Livingstone, I presume?", and Johnny Wiessmuller's Tarzan wrestling giant snakes and tigers in the African jungle. The abiding image is of a dark, steamy, and dangerous environment, filled with hostile natives and man-eating beasts at every turn -- the perfect description of today's corporate world.
Jungles really are the nearest thing in nature to today's corporations -- high turnover, dense, fast change, frequent extinctions, and rapid creation of new species. The law of the jungle is seen a ruthless battle for surival and domination. Yet as we shall see, there is also a lot of effort put into co-operation and relationships.
The comparison between jungle and city or office block and termite mound is easy to make and is a nice illustration. But what if there were more to this metaphor? The idea that humans organisations such as companies display the characteristics of living organisms is beginning to take hold. Firm are born, they grow, they compete, they improve over time, they replicate and they die, as well as exhibiting a number of other characteristics that biologists use to define life. It's an easy step to make to suppose that organisations are organisms, fascinating new forms of life that are new to biological science
Jungle management gives a fresh perspective on how organisations and products work, giving an edge in creating new business improvements. It allows managers to learn from nature, unlocking the wealth of nature's billions of years' experience in developing competitive and profitable solutions.
Let's first consider the study of natural systems. The problems that biologists face in trying to understand the natural world are very similar to those facing managers. Foremost amongst these are the problems of predicting "chaotic" systems such as the weather and the stock market.
Also, when you look closely, you realise that the world is full of imperfections. Jungle Management is about recognising and even embracing imperfection, realising that it is inevitable and even desirable. For example, just like most living organisms, most companies to some extent have birth defects and are diseased, blind, mentally ill, malnourished, or parasite-ridden. Their life expectancy is about 40 years. This is not bad news, in fact it is to be expected -- no organism is perfect, and while some people might regard parasites, predation and disease as "bad", biologists regard both parasites and hosts as simply part of a larger system.
Even the language of business is peppered with machine metaphors:
"We must oil the wheels of commerce"
"I feel like a cog in a machine"
"This campaign is running out of steam"
"We need to kickstart sales in South East Asia"
"I want Jenkins in the driving seat on this one"
Despite best efforts to make organisations more machine-like, they have resisted and their organic characteristics persist. And there are many organisations today with problems. Some of them seem intractable using current thinking -- crime, drugs, welfare, unemployment and so on. Other problems arise from organisations weakening their links with other members of their local ecosystems, by treating workers, customers and suppliers badly. Individuals are diverting valuable effort towards overcoming bureaucracy, internal politics and poor management structures. There is a growing feeling that management, despite our best efforts, is failing us in fundamental ways.
Recent years have seen management practices become too hard on people (redundancies, long hours, poor working conditions and pay), but not hard enough on organisations themselves. Organisations are here to serve people, not the other way around -- they can appear to have the upper hand sometimes. Organisations and their employees have a symbiotic relationship.
Most of the problems in your organisation are due to the emphasis on scientific principles of management. People are not machines and neither are organisations. So despite the best efforts of quality teams and process re-engineers, disorder persists. This is supposedly because: we aren't rational; we fear change; we only think for the short term; we are poorly managed; we don't value quality; we are not disciplined enough; we are not sufficiently trained; or we don't understand management. So they say that it's not the theory that's wrong, it's us. But what if these traits were regarded as virtues instead of faults? If you modify your theory, you realise that this is of course what they are. In fact, these natural tendencies are the only thing that really keeps organisations going.
Disorder and imperfection persist for two main reasons. Firstly, systematic management approaches are actively ignored, in a simple trade-off of order for opportunity. Sometimes managers just feel (quite rightly) that they have to do whatever it takes to exploit a competitor's weakness, or hit a specific marketing window. Secondly, systematic management is often felled by things outside its scope or control, such as variable staff performance, variable customer opinion and behaviour, or poor trading conditions.
In fact, disorder and imperfection are present in most of the organisations held up as being excellent performers. This is inevitable, because they have instinctively recognised that tidy, ordered organisations are stagnant and dead in the water.
Are bones, teeth and hair not relevant because they are dead matter? Of course they are, and so are crutches, toothpaste and hairdryers. It is naive to say "Life = Organisms". It is also naive to say that "Life must have DNA". DNA not the only form of information. Many interesting forms in nature are not genetically derived. Everything has a blueprint, it just takes different forms. Products sold by firms are like teeth, seed casings or neuter worker ants. They don't reproduce by themselves, but they enhance the fitness and value of the main organisms.
Many organisations have instinctively adopted biological principles. Visa and Alcoholics Anonymous are decentralised rules-based networks, spreading like fungal growth or airborne seed distribution, colonising new areas. Microsoft's core operating system products literally self-replicate during PC manufacture and are symbionts, enhancing the PC's effectiveness while the licence fees flow back to Microsoft to nourish the corporate entity.
As Andy Grove, Chairman and CEO of Intel, says, "the PC is not a thing. It's an organic phenomenon like a river, it flows. It constantly adapts to underlying technology changes, user demands, even market surprises."
Franchises such as McDonalds have very precisely encoded 'DNA' in the form of their company manuals which allow it to accurately self-replicate across the globe, while still taking local factors into account. The large geographical range of global brands such as Nike, McDonalds and Coca Cola is in the same league as that of those exemplary colonists rats, flies and cockroaches.
And yet none of these organisations would be successful in isolation. They flourish only because the wider ecosystem is flourishing, and in turn they help the ecosystem flourish, generating an ongoing virtuous cycle. Alcoholics Anonymous is the fastest growing spiritual movement in the world because the subset of the global ecosystem that includes alcoholism, the manufacture of alcohol and associated activities such as bars is also flourishing. So with the spread of credit and funds transfer, and the rise of IT.
Biologists readily agree that organisations are alive. They meet all of artificial life guru Doyne Farmer's the definition of life traits: They have patterns in space and time; an ability for self reproduction; information storage of its self representation; functional interactions -- it does stuff; interdependence of parts and the ability to die; stability under peturbations; and the ability to evolve, adapt and learn.
If you want your organisation to flourish, you must understand its organic nature.
Recessions serves the same purpose as a harsh winter. Weak organisations in each industrial species are weeded out, leaving more room for the survivors to grow. Corporate predators ensure that inefficiently run firms do not survive or undergo the necessary restructuring.
It's 3.5 billion years of R&D. Admittedly, some of that time was spent by creatures with poorly developed brains floundering around and going up blind alleys -- but anyone who has been involved in R&D will recognise this as being par for the course. ;)
Most organisations are based on ape sociality and heirarchies -- Bill Clinton does look a bit like a Silverback Gorilla -- but what about the rest of creation? We've already learned lots of mechanical and engineering tricks learned from nature -- spirals, arches, honeycomb, wings, sonar/radar, and cat's eyes -- but what about Nature's lessons for the design of organisations and businesses?
The Seven characteristics which have made living organisms on earth so successful:
Any person in an organisation can also take biothinking principles and apply them to their own career by becoming a JUNGLE MANAGER, whose principles are:
