Campfires
and Waterholes: The Urban Primate’s Guide to The Corporate Jungle
Or:
Why Employees Hate Meetings
It was a
simple question from a client that made no sense.
“Why do
people hate meetings?”
It didn’t
make sense because meetings around here at The Center are kind of fun. Most are
standup affairs – someone stands in your doorway, poses the problem, and you
both bat it around for ten minutes until you reach some mutually-agreed
conclusion. Or at least frame the
problem—which is actually harder.
We have
lunch meetings and break room meetings over coffee, which are usually
interesting and – here’s that word again – fun. Our business is analyzing how
groups make decisions at a subconscious level. We do this by tracking consistent patterns
of behavior over time and, frankly, there’s nothing more entertaining than
human nature.
The only
all-hands-on-deck meeting we hold is the periodic review of our analysis before
it goes into final form for the client.
That’s when we all sit around the big table and try to pick holes in our
own work. If we made a false assumption,
if we missed a variable, if there is more than one way to read the data –
that’s where we ferret it out. Absurdly huge amounts of money may be allocated
based on our research and analysis, so if it is going to fail, it will be at
that table and not once it’s in the hands of the client. Or up and running in France, or China, or
even in Space (NASA was the client.)
Those meetings
can be pretty stressful, but you walk out of them with a feeling of certainty about
your results, which you don’t get in a lot of other occupations. Humans
instinctively avoid uncertainty. One of the purposes of a meeting is to remove
uncertainty. As much as possible.
I’ll get
back to that.
If people
hate – and avoid – meetings, then we’re doing them wrong. And I don’t mean
wrong in the sense of failure to follow the rules in the dozens of books on
meetings to be found in the business section of any bookstore.
They’re
all pretty much the same: focused on the organization and process of how to run
better meetings. But scarcely any fundamental
thinking about why people feel the need to meet in the first place, what social
function they serve, and what their goals should be.
Which we
find surprising, because meetings were invented – and I would argue, perfected --
in prehistoric times.
By apes.
This isn’t
one of those “people share 99% of their DNA with chimpanzees” posts. Those are
written by someone who didn’t really comprehend high school science. All
mammals share most of the same genes because we share the same biochemical and
physiological functions – like breathing. That doesn’t make us chimpanzees any
more than sharing genes with a banana makes us a fruit.
But humans
did split from the ape tree somewhere
around four to six million years ago. And we did inherit an array of attributes
and behaviors from our ape progenitors.
Humans, like
apes, are social primates – that means we need
to be with others of our type. That means we are also a hierarchical species. Put
a group of strangers in a room and within minutes they’ll sort themselves into
a hierarchy. Humans and apes both understand reciprocity - trading goods and
services to form alliances or have the favor returned – literally an example of
“You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”
Both
species are born with the ability to understand basic economics – that value is
not fixed but determined by how scarce it is and how much the other person
wants it. We both punish members of our group who cheat – even if it means a
loss for ourselves. We both use reciprocity to form alliances within the group
and, ultimately, move up in the hierarchy.
It’s not that animals are “just like us.” That’s getting it backwards. They
were here first. We inherited some evolutionary behaviors from them.
On top of
this we layer our human traits. We’re storytellers. We can’t deal with
unrelated facts. We are driven to establish relationships between fragments of
information even when none exist. So we weave them into stories. Then we need
to have those stories validated by other people.
Hello,
Facebook.
It is as a
collective species that humans are truly unique. The key aspect that so distinguishes
us from other animals and allows us to create large complex social
organizations—is that we can create, hold, and share beliefs about things that
do not exist or cannot be empirically demonstrated. Apes don’t do that. They
will trade a token for a piece of fruit, but you can never convince an ape to
give you the token now under a promise of unlimited fruit in the future.
But we can
do that with people. We have the storytelling skills to convince others to
believe in our visions of things that don’t actually exist yet. And we can
convince them that we can, and should, develop whatever it takes to bring those
visions into being.
All this
adds up to one thing: human beings were, literally, born to hold meetings.
We’ve been
doing it since before recorded time. Over forty thousand years ago, our
earliest human ancestors combined cave painting, music, the animation effect of
flickering firelight, sound effects, and a storyteller to create the first
multi-media presentation in the caves of Lascaux.
Yes, our
ancient ancestors developed the first PowerPoint presentation. And it wasn’t
much different from the way we present today – someone points to words and
pictures on the wall and explains what they mean.
It’s not
much different because it doesn’t have to be. Our technology evolves, but the
way we perceive and process information does not. Our tools may be more
sophisticated – we project our pictures rather than paint them - but the
principle behind them remains the same. We still use multi-media presentations
for the same reason our Ice Age ancestors did, because they transmit complex
information efficiently by engaging all the senses —the same way our brain
processes information in the “real” world.
There have
been no evolutionary physical changes in human beings for at least 120,000
years, but the environment in which we live and work has changed dramatically.
So we’re working at the dawn of the 21st century with a brain that processes
information in the same way as those of our distant ancestors.
When we
say, “It’s a jungle out there,” we’re speaking a literal truth. We maneuver our
way through the modern corporation using mental models that evolved on the
savannas and jungles of ancient Africa. And we do a pretty good job of it - if
we don’t overthink it.
Which is
the problem with many business meetings today, and the problem with the books
written about how to conduct a meeting. They are all about business, without
understanding that all meetings are – first and foremost – social events for
the purpose of creating and validating a shared future vision and bringing it
into being.
It's not that hard. Throughout
recorded history, human beings only gather together in two clearly defined sets of
circumstances.
The
first is the Campfire:
The campfire is probably humanity’s oldest information-sharing environment. It
was a place of security where members of the tribe could come together, turn their backs on the darkness, and share food and
stories about who they were, how they got there, and what was expected of
them. Campfires were, and are still, a
place of shared values, mutual reinforcement, and nourishment—both for the body
and soul. Omens, news, inventions, discoveries, and significant events were shared and interpreted in terms that could be understood by
the group.
You can
recognize campfire sites around your workplace either by food – people
instinctively bring food to a campfire – or by signs warning “No Food or Drink Allowed.”
The signs are there because people were bringing food intuitively – that’s what
you do for a social gathering. They didn’t think it was a party. They discussed
business. But they discussed it as a social group trying to understand and solve
a common problem. Campfires are high-trust environments. Which means that, regardless
of the structure of the organization, at that moment, in that environment, the
hierarchy is essentially flat.
The
“No Food or Drink” signage is prompted by the same sort of thinking that limits
the personal items in your cubicle because it doesn’t look “businesslike.” People
are social beings. What some people consider “small talk” is, in fact,
monitoring the social environment for changes or dysfunctions in in the system.
It is building alliances. It is about discovering shared values. It is about
mutual reassurance. It is the platform for cooperation without which business cannot be
conducted.
The lure
of the campfire exerts a strong attraction even today. When communication requires a strong element
of trust, we instinctively seek out the key cultural markers of a campfire
environment: light, warmth, drink, and food.
The family dinner table, the first date in a nice restaurant, the groups
of retirees who gather at McDonald’s to discuss the news every morning, the
coffee bars full of young professionals—all these are classic campfire
environments. And they are all doing the same thing – managing change, making
sense of the world around them in a way that minimizes uncertainty, and
reaffirms their role in the hierarchy. Once they have agreed on “what it all
means,” they can go about their business with stability--some assurance that
they know where they stand.
Campfire meetings
create the social foundation that makes getting the work done possible.
Here’s one
example. I know of a medium-sized manufacturing company with three research engineers.
They worked in a corner of an open-plan office. Their desks were set facing the
walls in an “L” shape – one engineer on one side and two on the other. The
walls became bulletin boards. They set up a round table behind them where they
could lay out their work and meet whenever need be. That was their entire engineering
department.
And they
talked all day long – they were only feet from each other. They discussed what
they were doing, they helped each other, one or another would roll their chairs
over to a colleagues’ desk and search his computer together. They joked,
laughed, commented, and talked about their families. There was always something
going on in that corner.
Until
their supervisor decided to break them up because – and this is a quote – “you
guys are having too much fun back here.”
Production
plummeted. One engineer found another job. A couple of months later a second
joined him. The manager had broken up an extremely productive high-functioning
social unit because it didn’t fit the profile of what he thought a “business”
environment should look like. To monitor their progress, he now had to summon “proper”
meetings in his office – and these formal meetings were lengthy because the
engineers were no longer in constant communication with each other, so they had
to bring each other up to date before they could address the issues of the
meeting.
All because the manager
didn’t realize that, in their old configuration, engineering had been conducting
a real-time campfire meeting all day, every day.
That meant
there was no reason to call a meeting to be certain that everyone was “on the
same page.” They were writing the "page” together as they worked. All he would
have needed to do to find out the status of any project would be to walk over
to their corner and ask “How are you guys doing?”
Better
yet, he should have moved his desk over and joined them.
The
second traditional meeting place is the Waterhole:
Human
beings are drawn to campfire environments because they signal security. We are driven to waterholes by necessity. As
a result, waterholes are high-stress environments.
This is
where hierarchy rules. The dreaded Monday morning meeting – with the boss at
the head of the table and the written agenda – is a classic waterhole scenario.
We dread them because we must operate under the eyes of creatures much higher
on the corporate food chain – creatures that have the power to affect our
lives. They are rife with uncertainty – which humans are intuitively
programmed to avoid.
How
stressful are waterhole meetings? They are so stressful that the only thing
worse than sitting through them is not
being asked to attend. It’s taken as
a sign that the other predators have deemed you unnecessary and your career is
now dead.
Survival
at a waterhole depends entirely on understanding your own particular jungle
hierarchy. In the natural jungle, animals change position on the waterline every time a superior species arrives - leopards move for lions, lions and leopards move for buffalo, buffalo and the big cats move for elephants, and antelope and gazelles move for everybody. In the corporate jungle, priorities shift depending on who is speaking, and everyone shifts if it is the CEO. Hierarchy rules. In the natural jungle, the
waterhole is usually littered with the bones of the unwary, the slow, the
unprepared, and the brash. In the human jungle, often we don’t even leave the
bones.
Every
meeting can’t be a campfire; every meeting shouldn’t be a waterhole. There are
specific ways we can use the social dynamic to our advantage without turning our
meetings into a party, but we won’t find them in any of the books about how to
conduct a meeting. At least I haven’t so far.
The first
thing to realize is that the social dynamics of meetings are millennia-old. They
have continued in an unbroken cycle since we first became human. Business bestsellers
notwithstanding, anything people have been doing over millennia isn’t going to
change tomorrow. You have to adapt to these embedded patterns.
A simple
rule of thumb for determining which type of meeting will work best in your
office environment: When trust is high, precision can be low. When trust is low, precision
must be high.
- When trust is
high, precision can be low. Campfires are high-trust
environments. Participants
share values, motivations, and goals. They know each other’s capabilities.
No one thinks twice about asking for help or advice. They set clear
expectations of what should be accomplished, and the confidence to allow
others the freedom to determine how it might actually get accomplished.
- When trust is
low, precision must be high. That’s why waterholes have
printed agendas and strict hierarchies. They’re low-trust environments. There
are multiple levels of power in the room as well as multiple agendas –
such as those of management and other departments - that may conflict with yours. That itself causes uncertainty,
which people intuitively avoid. One unintended outcome: people are
hesitant to ask questions or ask for help – in that environment it’s a
sign of weakness.
If your
company has too many waterhole meetings, you might want to cast a fresh eye on
your work environment. Companies with the highest-performing employees manage
to strike a balance between these extremes by removing as much uncertainty as
possible. Set clear goals and guidelines, but allow reasonable individual
autonomy in how the goals can be met. That’s when the campfires kick in.
