Natural selection and your organization’s culture

Amid the seismic turmoil and bewilderment of the pandemic, the deep-seated human need to resolve uncertainty is one of the primary motivators driving human behaviors. So, what does that mean for your organizational culture? Natural selection is hard at work.

In evolutionary terms, situational uncertainty as a survival threat. Happily, survival threats engage the most powerful algorithm in the world - natural selection - to respond. You may recall that when the environment of a species undergoes a novel change, natural selection leads to the evolution of strategies that are most efficient competitors within a species, but not necessarily for the species as a whole. 

 In a complex social context - your organization - decisions that are mutually favorable for all parties, like co-operation,  will often not evolve since they can be exploited by alternative individual self-optimizing stratagems. In this case, evolution leads not to a strategy that maximizes mutual payoffs, but evolutionary strategies that cannot be outsmarted by alternatives. 

What are the current stratagems for survival in your organization? If it appears that novel subcultures are propagating within your culture, this can indicate that self-optimizing stratagems rather than mutually favorable ones are at work. If this is true, then the job to be done is to reduce or eliminate the survival value of these alternative self-optimizing stratagems and/or reduce the level of situational uncertainty in the organization by creating coherence through novel and impactful communications.