Tribal Denial: The Trance of Mechanistic Management

It amazes me how many intelligent people are stuck in the trance of thinking that businesses are machines. They drive their teams like jeeps, and wonder why they break down.

It's nice and safe to think that a business can be managed like a vending machine - press a button and get the result. Unfortunately, the kind of results we try to manage are not the kind of results that really can be managed. Nobody goes to work to do double-digit growth.

It's very hard to manage numbers, when what you're really managing is behaviours. You may as well chase ghosts, and chasing ghosts is a dumb thing to do because they can go through walls and you can't.

This comes from the refusal to recognise that we're tribal animals, and that we live, work and operate in tribal groups.

I frequently get verbally lynched when I tell people this. "Nonsense!" they scoff, "my organisation isn't a tribe - what a load of hippy crap. MY organisation is a quango/ministry/startup/prison/whatever. It's not a real tribe."

That's a bit like saying "My people aren't real people". If you have a group of people, you have a tribe. You can take a pride of lions and call it a knitting circle, but they're not going to suddenly take up knitting. They're going to behave like lions, and a tribe will behave like a tribe.

Recently a couple of government ministries said to me, "We've got to stop behaving like a government bureaucracy, and start behaving like a commercial enterprise." This is trance thinking. It's like a pride of lions saying, "we've got to stop behaving like a herd of zebra, and start behaving like a flock of geese." They'd be no better off copying the world's most successful geese than the least successful ones.

Why, then, do business tribes call in expensive consultancies and ask them to implement best practice from the world's leading geese? (Leading geese, mind you. The absolute best.)

It's far more useful to say, "we've got to start behaving like a tribe, because that's what we are."