IMPLEMENTATION BRIEF: Grab Your Brain Back From the Baboons

This is Implementation support for the
MANAGER-EDGE MEMO: Baboons Stole Your Brain, And They’re Eating Your Company Alive.

FIRST, DO NOT SKIP THIS….BEFORE YOU BEGIN!!!: If you haven’t read the original memo explaining Dunbar’s baboon research, do that now otherwise this won’t make sense.
Start here →

If after you read the free post on Dunbar’s baboon research, you felt that uncomfortable feeling— “WTF, my company is actually made up of competing tribes”—this is the part where we fix it—not with more insights to think about, but with work.

This is the actual work of diagnosing where your tribes are stuck. The work of healing the conflict between the tribes. The work of proactively designing an organization to perform on purpose; transcending the 150-person biological limit without triggering automatic competition.

Fair warning: This will challenge everything you think you know about organizational structure, leadership, and culture.

But if you actually do it, you’ll unlock productivity
(our clients report a 3 to 10x improvement).

Let’s begin.

Before you proceed, get the scoreboard up. How will you know how these methods will impact your current issues? Some ideas:

• Reduction in cross-team friction

• Conflict time reduction

• Email volume changes

• Rework rates

• Cross-team meeting time reduced

• Escalations to exec reduced

• Decision cycle time shortened

• Budget disputes reduced

(CEO + 1 or 2 trusted operators, or 3-5 front'-line managers) This is important to know where to focus your efforts. To help you, I developed a diagnostic tool to give you some ideas of where to start. Use this to pick the first tribal nightmare to attack:

I ask 700 CEOs annually in my workshops how much time their organization wasted on dysfunctional behavior - “baboon” politics, CYA, blaming, avoiding, etc. No matter which industry, conflict between factions impact speed of strategic execution by 20-80% (average 50%).

That’s a LOT of performance waste.

In areas where the conflicts from the “baboon fragmentation” occur, several methods of high impact emerged when we applied anthropological ethnographic methods in client situations.

One method I categorize as bridge-teams.

If you want to experiment with these in implementation, I have them in the Toolkit Vault here that explains what they are and how to use them. Use this when you see two tribes locked in baboon politics.:

Architecting a company based on the way our species has evolved presents challenges. It’s a lost art not taught in our MBA curriculums or corporate training programs. To help you do it, and reawaken the possibililties, I’ve added a Toolkit item on how to Architect Tribal Performance below.