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Step two: Be More Finch

Evolutionary strategy – why you need to give it some thought

I once watched a friend dealing with the aftermath of a bro-on-bro altercation at the top of a kid’s slide at the McDonald’s in Croydon. When compelled by his mum to explain why one brother was crying in a heap at the foot of the slide, the other looked quizzically at his hands as if it were their fault. He then exclaimed that he had simply been unable to help himself.

Unwittingly, the kid had nailed a scientifically watertight excuse for his bad behaviour: evolutionary compunctions beyond his control had (literally) forced his hand.

Now, unless they’re geneticists, it’s highly unlikely that the work of Charles Darwin has been used by any red-faced parent to explain their warring offspring’s behaviour to other parents. It’s even less likely that a CEO will draw parallels to the Origin of Species while gnashing his or her teeth about the failure of one trading division to collaborate with another. Or that Darwin will cross the mind of any democratically elected political leader as they frown over the inevitable cliques and factions that have built up in the cabinet office.

Maybe our Charlie should spring to mind more readily, though. If you’re looking to build a high-performing collective, free from the scourge of office politics and thinly veiled rivalries, considering evolutionary strategy might be a wise move. Here’s why…

How evolutionary strategy drives conflict

Darwin described sibling rivalry as a battle for a special kind of resource: parental attention.

This glittering prize has spawned an evolutionary call to arms, with siblings competing to find a niche in the family that will divert parental investment to one individual at the expense of the others. Success in this increases the chances of that child surviving to become an adult – a stage where, among many other benefits, the advantages possessed by older siblings are evened out. Which is much to be desired if you’re the one writhing in pain on the floor of a fast food joint while everyone else is chomping on a chicken nugget Happy Meal.

Frank J. Sulloway is a research scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a PhD in the history of science from Harvard and, among other achievements, he’s the author of Born to Rebel. In his book, Sulloway argues that a statistically significant chunk of the world’s most radical thinkers, in all fields of human endeavour, are latter born. Darwin was the third child of six, Voltaire was the youngest of three, and Benjamin Franklin was number 15 to be dropped off by the stork.

So many latter-born folk have spectacularly shaped the world by turning everything we thought we knew as a species on its head. They have broken down the doors of the well-heeled homes of orthodox thinking, overturned all the bookshelves and left without a note of apology. Or money to pay for the damage. Their radicalism seems to be a direct outcome of spending their formative years trying to differentiate themselves from older siblings.

Sound far-fetched?

Sulloway incorporates Darwin into his argument: in nature, any source of continued conflict – competition for parental affection, for instance – will promote adaptations that increase the potential to come out on top. Darwin called this the principle of divergence. In nature, diversity is an evolutionary strategy that allows species to compete for food and territory.

Sulloway riffs on Darwin’s (famous) finches as a manifestation of this principle. In the geographically isolated Galapagos there are 13 species of finch that have evolved to live in different ecological niches on the same small group of islands. The differences in size and shape of beak or claw reduces competition for the same food in an ecosystem containing limited resources. In a process called adaptive radiation, some finches evolved characteristics to enable them to feast on insects, others eat seeds or leaves, and two adaptations of the finch to eat cacti – a spiky illustration of the economy of nature!

Now, humans are certainly not finches. BUT.

Sulloway asserts that children undergo adaptive radiation to counteract the effects of the family pecking order. You could think of this as an accelerated form of adaptation, given that Darwin’s finches would have evolved over multiple generations. However, it does not disprove what Sulloway is saying, that human beings possess an open genetic program that allows adaptations to occur in the development of an individual life. Which is just as well. When your big bro has eaten your lunch, snatched your pocket money and is hogging the parental limelight, a kid’s got to adapt!

A latter born – at a disadvantage to the firstborn in size, strength and cognitive ability – may develop a more subtle counter strategy: a differentiated personality. Acquiring different abilities and broader interests increases the likelihood that a parent will see something worth focusing resources on. It was arguably this quest to occupy a unique family niche in their formative years that propelled individuals like Darwin, Galileo, Voltaire et al. to reshape the world to their thinking – they were socking it to their brothers and sisters!

Within the warm embrace of each family bosom lies a heated competitive force driving us to sharpen our instincts for conflict – but also to adapt and grow in unique ways.

How could this not influence our actions after we flee the familial home? These three factors – the need for parental attention, our place in the pecking order and the need to diversify to survive – have powerfully shaped who we are. It might be that in the extended family of any human endeavour, the urge to compete has held back our ability to collaborate. A bit like a dominant firstborn lording it over younger siblings.

How evolutionary strategy affects our professional lives

In commercial organisations, the need to differentiate is well understood. A market leader is unlikely to remain top dog if it’s unable to communicate to its customers how it differs from challenger brands. Likewise, a challenger brand will struggle if all it does is seek to emulate those at the top of its sector.

Our education system is similarly geared – a major focus is to give children a competitive edge for when they arrive in the job market. But if everybody is being pushed towards the same goal, being a straight-A student may not be enough to make you stand out.

Which is why in the opening salvo in the battle to find employment (the post-graduation CV), you will often find exceptionally florid descriptions of extra-curricular activities, designed to communicate that the candidate is an ambitious, cut and thrust go-getter, vitally different to every other applicant.

Later, having been lucky enough to land that first job, your average recruit will likely start work thinking of themselves primarily as a competitor, perhaps even a predator, stalking personal success, and not as a collaborator. Most new recruits, if asked if they are a team player, will make the intellectually right choice and answer in the affirmative. But their instincts might scream otherwise.

In an attempt to prove this, I undertook an anonymous survey of values using 211 people from three media businesses I’m involved with. Questions required participants to remember back to their first day in the job. When asked if they came into the role thinking of themselves as a team player, 77.5% claimed a very firm, ‘Yes, all of the time’. A further 20% said, ‘Yes, but only some of the time’ – a revealingly flexible approach to teamwork which may suggest that these people only play ball when it’s personally advantageous to do so (a behaviour definitely driven by evolutionary strategy).

Only 2.55% admitted an outright, ‘No, none of the time’.

Obviously this latter minority were honest, brutally so, but how about the majority?

When asked if, on that first day, they also imagined themselves getting promoted at some point in the near future, 79% of respondents (i.e., more than those who claimed to be team players) said ‘yes’. I thought the juxtaposition was interesting – getting promoted means you become elevated above your colleagues, which jars against the success of a team (a situation that demands everyone accept equal reward and recognition). Even more intriguing: 48% said they imagined themselves working their way up to the top – in other words, elevating themselves above everybody else in the building. Again, this grates if you claim to be team orientated.

It raises the question of whether or not it’s possible to be truly collaborative if you also seek personal glory.

It might be easy to pick a few holes in the survey – it may be that people in media are not as nice as those in, say, healthcare – but these answers are indicative of how hard you have to work in order to better channel this perpetual drive to compete. It’s harder still to point it in a direction that is beneficial to the entire business and not just a select few individuals.

For me, the failure to manage this drive is the first step towards a flawed – or worse, toxic – internal culture, riven with conflict.

How you can use evolutionary strategy to reduce conflict

Darwin’s finches point the way forward: these tiny birds found a way to live in harmony by diversifying. The net effect was that they avoided competing for the same food resources. In professional life, people compete against each other, too – not for food, but recognition and reward. The parallels between organisational life and the family dynamic are striking; the struggle for attention and the need for a person to find a niche to divert investment in their direction spring to mind. It’s evident that any organisation can be a Darwinian minefield, but one way of avoiding standing on any booby traps is to be more finch!

In practice, if you are a project manager tasked with building a team from scratch to deliver a particular project, you should think of your project as the Galapagos, and the people required to deliver it as the finches. You might then think about how to break down that project into individual layers or workstreams.

Consider what kind of temperament, qualities and expertise each goal requires and, subsequently, what type of finches you need.

Who are your cactus eaters and who are your leaf eaters?

I was prompted to think of Darwin’s finches and how their behaviour might help me while trying to put together a team to crack a tough client brief. After posting an internal request, I got a deluge of responses for one particular role, which happened to be the glamourous, high-profile role in my line of work: the creative lead. There were no responses for the others.

By being more finch, it may be possible to manage our innate propensity to compete with each other and ensure that our endeavour, whatever its goal, is not an extension of the evolutionary family dynamic or the education system.

How might you become more finchlike in practical terms?

How to build a collaborative team and reduce conflict through values outing

My answer to this begins with something I refer to as values outing, a process which is wrapped up in a common word in corporate life: culture!

Business gurus, experts and C-suite executives are so hot for organisational culture it’s almost unseemly. My definition of it doesn’t differ much from any other commentator’s: it’s the way in which the people within an enterprise collectively act to achieve a vision.

It follows that the way they act can be shaped by a set of values – these are the ingredients. Much has also been said about the first step to actively shape good culture: which is to take a values-first approach to your recruitment and onboarding policy; a signpost to all that there is a defined, identifiable culture and, by extension, behaviours that are less tolerated. Following on from recruitment, you’ll find equal amounts of expert opinion telling you that all decisions taken every day inside an organisation have to be genuinely guided by values.

I’ve followed all the advice to the extreme. As far as recruitment goes, I’ve relegated a candidate’s qualifications, past experience and abilities to a secondary position. And then I’ve gone further still: instead of recruiting people who would be a good fit with our published organisational values (which is where most advice points), I think there’s more value in getting candidates to reveal their own core values.

As we saw with my little values survey earlier, it’s difficult to pin people down on this. But if you can get people to truthfully out their real self, then you can make a better judgement call on their fit. This improves your chances of building a diverse team which features individuals with complementary beliefs and behaviours, as opposed to mere repeats of the values published on your website.

What’s interesting about this is that everyone instinctively feels at a gut level when something goes against their core values. A deep inner feeling tells you when a behaviour cuts against the grain. Yet if you were asked to clearly articulate your values, you might struggle. I’ve unfairly surprised many an interviewee by requesting them to share theirs, off-the-cuff and totally unprepared. Generally, people initially freeform over a range of superlatives, verbs and adjectives. Some of these will be completely aspirational (or totally untrue). Others will be words that the interviewee thinks you want to hear. Some will, of course, be absolute core beliefs – at least the ones that are socially acceptable.

In the values survey mentioned earlier, 96% of people answered ‘yes’ when asked if they possessed their own set of personal values. However, 78% of them had never committed them to writing, and just 4% could claim that they lived up to their values all of the time. Respondents were also asked to quickly, and without too much thought, list their top five values – an easy task for all who claimed they have their own personal framework. Later on, they were asked to repeat the exercise, but this time give their answer a lot more thought without recourse to their earlier inputs. Almost 50% changed one or more of the values the second time around.

I don’t mention this as a criticism, or to suggest everyone is dishonest. I offer it only to support the notion that, for a lot of people, personal values are seldom thought about and are not hard-and-fast rules. Further, if they are thought about at all, it’s mostly in aspirational terms. There simply aren’t that many people who have crystallised their values framework and are able to express it – either to themselves or those around them.

Whereas, if you ask someone to go away and give serious thought to outing their values framework, what they come back with will be their own personal behavioural blueprint for the future: a barometer they could use to set them on the road to achieving a vision of their ideal self. Such a blueprint is therefore an exceptionally powerful tool, not just for any individual wishing to change their life, but for anyone charged with building a collaborative team or improving the culture of any human endeavour.

And if that includes not allowing conflict to play such a huge part in your life, then so much the better!

How to do a values-outing exercise

Values outing is easy to do – I simply ask anyone wishing to join one of our teams to repurpose their CV and all they have achieved, not just academically or career wise but in their wider community, around a set of four or five personal values of their choosing.

Why four to five? Because this is the average number of values claimed by companies in the FTSE 100. A fascinating 2016 survey of the value of values in British business, undertaken by the consultancy firm Maitland, revealed that 84 of the FTSE 100 published a values framework on their websites and therefore recognised their importance. However, when I looked, none of them displayed how their values were enacted. In other words, there were no specific examples of past, existing or planned future behaviours. This means their influence on internal culture is impaired; there’s no blueprint to help shape good internal culture.

The report featured a foreword by the then director general of the Institute of Directors, Simon Walker. While he acknowledged the importance of values as a major differentiating factor, he asked how many CEOs could honestly say the values they so lovingly crafted were fully understood and implemented within their organisation. Indulging in a bit of values outing may be one way of addressing their dilemma.

Give it a go yourself: don’t worry, even if you forget to WhatsApp your mum on her birthday every year, you’ll definitely be able to identify a set of personal values. Try and distil everything that you believe to be true, or would like to be true about yourself, into a handful of identifiable and easily communicable qualities.

Take your time about it – you should think of your framework as something wholly immutable that will guide your behaviour in the future. A bit like a set of New Year’s resolutions that will last a lifetime. It’s a big commitment which needs some serious thought – you wouldn’t want to enshrine your values now and return later only to wonder which loser wrote them.

Equally, most people are so unused to thinking about themselves in aspirational terms that it’s embarrassing to contemplate at first. When I originally attempted my values-outing exercise, I kept cringing at the thought of leaving it open on my desktop. I could only imagine the increasing levels of ridicule that might be heaped upon me if it was, in turn, discovered by my wife, my kids, then my colleagues and, much worse, certain friends with a particularly cruel sense of humour.

Don’t let such thoughts put you off. This is an entirely valid and personal exercise that could change your life – although I did delete ‘world changer’ from my framework. I didn’t want that claim to be seen by anyone who’s witnessed me snoring in my pants.

Finally, take the acid test to see if your past behaviour lives up to your set of freshly minted personal values. Grab your CV and review all your achievements, experience and ideas against them. Importantly, try to show how you have lived your values by reworking, rewriting and categorising the structure of your CV using each value as a heading. It’s OK to omit some details of your past if they don’t stack up with your shiny new core principles. One use of this exercise is to create a road map to self-actualisation; that moment when your ideal self becomes your true self.

How to use values outing to positively shape your culture

Hopefully you can begin to see how values outing might be applied. The reason I do this exercise is to identify indicators of behaviour that mark out those we are looking for: we want people who will be a good fit in a specific collaborative and conflict-reducing culture. You may be seeking another type of culture. The exercise is flexible, as long as you have a strong viewpoint on which values will maintain the culture you have in mind.

Watch out for qualities that you believe to be strong components of the kind of culture you’re looking to achieve. In my case, this includes variations on key themes such as collaboration, team player, teamwork, solidarity or inclusive. Or anyone picking words that riff around fairness, justice, equality, conscientiousness or socially conscious. Integrity is another – be careful of that one, though, almost everyone aspires to it. Certainly those in public service, finance, real estate, politics, security, education, manufacturing, medicine, law and a huge chunk of all global corporations. In fact, the Maitland report found that 35 of the FTSE 100 claimed integrity as a value – so much for differentiation!

Steve Marinker, a partner in Maitland, described the difficulty of articulating authentic and distinctive values, with firms worrying that they might sound trite and unconvincing the more common they are. Which is why, if you have asked someone to out their values and are reviewing their framework, the next step is to maximise the possibility that the candidate is actually authentic and a genuine fit for your culture.

It’s possible to get a firmer handle on this by cross referencing a person’s claims against complementary attributes. If someone really has a sense of justice, then they should claim other values that ultimately reflect this. A challenger, campaigner or a brave person, for instance, might be someone who will speak up against unfairness when they encounter it.

Note that conflict is still inherent in these qualities. In all this talk of collaboration and inclusiveness, I don’t want you to lose sight of the fact that we are not talking about eliminating conflict altogether. We will always have a world view to disagree with, it’s just that we need to learn to manage conflict more effectively to reduce its insidious effects – a values-outing exercise helps with this.

I recently asked Lily Watson, a hopeful young applicant in the last stage of the interview process, if there were any values she ascribed to. Like many others, initially, she had no firm answer. But after giving it some thought she referred to a discussion she had with a group of friends about what it was that drew them all together. The answer was kindness. She brought it vividly to life by explaining how they, as a collective of young and broke millennials trying to make their way in London, pooled resources. They shared food, sofas to sleep on, clothes for interviews – some of them even met doing voluntary work. I was struck by the power of kindness as a binding force.

When does that quality ever get spoken of in business?

It certainly doesn’t exist as a value in the FTSE 100. Though the quality is actually common in life, it’s uncommon in a values framework. It was a real head-turner for me. (Lily got the job.)

Undoubtedly, more kindness in business would make the world a better place. It might mean less plastic in our seas. Perhaps the number of zero-hour contracts would be reduced to zero and our young people would not need to pool resources to find work. Possibly, had kindness been enshrined at Volkswagen, the well-documented culture of fear that led to their 2015 emissions scandal3 may not have existed.

In the wake of the scandal, Volkswagen conducted a huge consultation with their workforce, asking for help in reshaping their values framework. Of the six values that emerged at the end of 2017, two stood out when viewed against their past behaviour; ‘courage’ and ‘genuine’. The former is certainly key to overcoming a culture of fear; the latter seems to lament the organisation’s failure to be what it should have been – and aspire to something better in the future. This smacks of Rogerian self-actualisation, which is, of course, the end goal of the values-outing exercise.

How values outing could change the world

I happen to believe that flawed organisational culture is the primary source of all conflict everywhere in the world. Pick any subject!

Wars arise from disputes between opposing leadership, government or ideological organisations. Global warming arises from the conflicting challenge faced by big business organisations, obliged both to return a profit to shareholders and preserve the environment for the benefit of the organisations’ customers. The latter has too frequently lost out to the former.

Famine not only arises from bad geography, bad weather and bad luck, but from the conflicting interests of big business, governments, charities and NGOs, world banks, international trade and economic bodies, investor groups, patent owners, unions of producers, unions of farmers, etc. Organisations all.

However, it’s my hope that we can collectively reduce the debilitating effects of conflict in the world by positively improving the culture in each of our individual spheres of influence – a micro approach to a macro problem.

Whether you manage a small team or a global organisation, whether you are part of a group or running one, whatever endeavour you are involved in, personally or professionally, by outing, understanding and living by a personal values framework, we can reach a place of greater harmony and collaboration.

A bit like those little birds Darwin discovered in the Galapagos: be more finch.

3 Volkswagen went out of its way to invent tech that told the world its cars were clean, while they were really emitting pollutants at 40 times the legal limit.