The Flocking Company

The United Kingdom has a longstanding milk distribution system in which milkmen in small trucks bring the milk in bottles to the door of each country house. At the beginning of this century, these milk bottles had no top. Birds had easy access to the cream which settled in the top of the bottle. Two different species of British garden birds, the titmice and the red robins, learned to siphon up cream from the bottles and tap this new, rich food source.

This innovation, in itself, was already quite an achievement. But it also had evolutionary effect. The cream was much richer than the usual food resources of these birds, and the two species underwent some adaptation of their digestive systems to cope with the unusual nutrients. This internal adaptation almost certainly took place through Darwinian selection.

Then, between the two world wars, the UK distribution closed access to the food source by placing aluminum seals on the bottles.

By the early 1950s, the entire titmouse population of the UK (about a million birds) had learned how to pierce the aluminum seals. Regaining access to this rich food source provided an important victory for the titmouse family as a whole; it gave them an advantage in the battle for survival. Conversely, the red robins family as a whole, never regained access to the cream. Occasionally, an individual robin learns how to pierce the seals of the milk bottles, but the knowledge never passes to the rest of the species.

In short, the titmice went through an extraordinarily successful institutional learning process. The red robins failed, even though individual robins had been as innovative as individual titmice. Moreover, the difference could not be attributed to their ability to communicate. As songbirds, both the titmice and the red robins had the same wide range of means of communication: color, behavior, movements, and song. The explanation, said Professor Allan Wilson - a zoologist/biochemist based at the University of California at Berkley – could be found only in the social propagation process: the way titmice spread their skill from one individual to members of the species as a whole.

In spring, the titmice live in couples until they have reared their young. By early summer, when the young titmice are flying and feeding on their own, the birds are moving from garden to garden in flocks of eight to ten individuals. These flocks seem remain intact, moving together around the countryside, and the period of mobility lasts for two to tree months.

Red robins, by contrast, are territorial birds. A male robin will not allow another male to enter its territory. When threatened, the robin sends a warning, as if to say, “Keep the hell out of here!” In general, red robins tend to communicate with each other in an antagonistic manner.

Birds that flock, said Professor Wilson, seem to learn faster. They increase their chances to survive and evolve more quickly.

Some companies facilitate flocking of their management teams; other companies have stronger territorial tendencies. They classify members by their specialty, skill, or mandate – production engineers in one “function,” marketers in another. Then they appoint a management team of people from various functions and give each a specific written statement, spelling out in detail exactly what their assignment should be. Each member is carefully instructed to avoid encroaching on the others’ territories; marketing people do not oversee production, and production people steer clear of marketing concerns. Finance managers concern themselves with measurement and money handling, and do not permit themselves to get involved in process concerns, while process managers ignore the imperatives of finance, except where they are given direct orders. Each red robin is allocated his or her territory in the corporate garden. We should therefore not be surprised, when these teams communicate as antagonistically as red robins, at squabbling at the boundaries of their territories. The amount of institutional learning is limited.

Any organization with several hundred people is bound to have at least a couple of innovators. There are always people curious enough to poke their way into new discoveries, like the titmice finding their cream. However, keeping a few innovators on hands is not enough, in itself, for institutional learning. The organization must leave space for them, so that they do not feel squelched and their innovations have time to develop.

As with the titmouse’s innovation, when it learned to siphon cream from English milk bottles, a well-designed program of development can have evolutionary effect. The innovation spreads rapidly through the organization, without being commanded to spread. Somehow, people just seem to know what to do. They gain and spread the knowledge because they have been given structures that encourage flocking.

Each employee has an ultimate potential, and as a self-perpetuating work community it is in the company’s interests to help the individual reach that potential. Thus, people move from job to job, within the enterprise – in part so they accumulate the maximum experience available during a working life and in part so that, through “flocking,” the organization gains from their experiences.

Most innovative companies are run by teams. This is because teams have a higher capacity to learn than individuals. In fact, in most companies with a certain degree of complexity, most decisions are made by teams. The capacity for a management team’s learning is influenced by the way team is defined. It should include all the people who together have the power to act on their common interest. Ideally, a management team at any level of the company should include all people who are necessary for the implementation of that team’s decisions. They should be able to work together on common problems, each with his or her individual contribution and technical specialty. This should be an ideal “flock.”

As in bird species, the resulting social transmission will be different in a territorial company. Both the territorial and the flocking company may employ equally innovative individuals, but the chances that the innovative ideas will become company policy are much reduced in the territorial company.

Some cultures are like songbirds: they can learn to flock more easily because they have institutional learning bred into them, whereas other companies are more like mollusks. But human organizations have resources for evolution. And even if they are not participated in designing a company from its birth, many managers will find themselves in a position with influence on some part of the business. From there, they can begin to remodel the company’s structures and policies in a way that facilitates flocking and improves the company’s ability to learn.

Innovation and flocking require organizational space – freedom from control, from direction, and from punishment from failures. Experiments must take place with relative safety. Conversation must be free and candid, without fear of reprisal. Employee movements must be largely self-determined; no one can “command” a bird to flock in a certain direction, because the travel pattern of the flock emerges from its own movement. To behave with ecological concern often requires a leap of faith: that you will be better protected by harmony and flocking than by territoriality and force of will. The cost of maintaining a company without flocking and innovation, where every adaptation had to be ordered from the highest levels of the hierarchy, was too big.