Managing Leadership^®

A key element of the many ideas drawn from science for application in management theories – and, in particular, in more recent notions of individual and organizational leadership – is the concept of evolution. As in so many other such borrowings, of course, the whole matter is roughly handled, and the results ultimately produce yet more disappointment and disaffection with the very thought of management theorizing.

It is a truism, for example, that evolution does not equate to progress. Nevertheless, the sense that it should is so powerful that it can be quite difficult to resist. But our impression that it eventually seems to reliably produce more complexity over time does not necessarily imply that this represents progress.

Similarly, our assumption that this trend has culminated in so advanced a species as ourselves does not prove the assertion. It may have produced us, but it very likely has not “culminated” in us. Nor does it engage in the implied effort to create ever more “advanced” beings or, even, to solve problems.

Evolution does not advance – it adapts. If the environment does not change, then evolutionary change can appear to be competitive, as existing species struggle within and among themselves to better exploit it. If it does change, then it may produce adaptations that specifically exploit those changes. In neither event is it necessarily the case that these adaptations are more complex, or even that they represent the available mutations that happened to be most adaptive.

“Superior” mutations may die out because, as a result of one accident or another coincidence, they simply, despite their nominal superiority, fail transmission to following generations. Or, they may be wiped out by a new environmental transformation, for which they are not suited.

Surely, we see situations analogous to almost all of those we’ve noted above in business and in the world of organizations more generally. But are there really lessons to be learned in this for us? What might they be?

If there is no determinative instinct or teleological drive in evolution, what do you suppose is the insight it nevertheless offers for how to better practice management, or organizational design? Maybe the answer is in how we view the whole subject. Perhaps we should stop asking why successful adaptations are made, and ask instead why particular mutations survive.

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Today’s tip: We have noted here before the tendency of those who see themselves as the intellectually elite class to brook no argument from their inferiors – indeed, they can be so miffed at the failure of the rest of us to accede to their arguments, their eloquence, or their very stature, as to resort to ascribing our resistance to psychological problems. Here’s just one current example of this (speaking, as we have in today’s post, of the environment), which goes on to explain how we can be cured through government regulation and specially targeted tax policies inspired by behavioral therapy concepts.

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