How Large Teams Fail

Looking at the human brain in 1500 words.

It's funny to say that leadership in the 21st century is vastly different than any other time. Regardless of the period, the basic principles of human motivation are rooted in prehistoric time. To understand how leadership works in the here and now, we must first reach back in time to understand how humans developed and how our brains process information. In short, the essence of who we are boils down to a process rooted binomial choice.

Imagine a prehistoric world.  The beginning of our developing brain reaches back between 500 million years.  Historically speaking, the reptilian brain is the oldest part of our brain located at the center, just above the brain stem.  Our cerebellum, the reptilian brain, exists on unconscious thought only. Our most basic instincts still revolve around it.  As Mark Bowden puts it, the reptilian brain “makes snap judgements about everybody around it. And everybody around you uses that part of their brain to make snap judgments about you.” Mark is a communication expert who studies, in part, how our reptilian brain processes information.  According to Mark, the reptilian brain processes minimal information into 4 categories and decides whether to approach or retreat based on that information. 

As Mark Bowden puts it, the reptilian brain “makes snap judgements about everybody around it. And everybody around you uses that part of their brain to make snap judgments about you.”

The process begins with an unconscious response when given small, selective bits of data about our surroundings. Of course, the modern terms for this process is the “fight or flight” response or the “approach or retreat” response.  In short, the process places unknown animal encounters into one of four categories: friend, foe, potential mate, or indifferent.  It scans for split second, unconscious signals. Based on those inputs it would select a category and trigger action. 

Most importantly, the reptilian brain is responsible for recording unpleasant stimuli and altering behavior to avoid future pain. Every time you’ve burnt yourself or cut yourself against something sharp, your reptile brain processes that pain and alters your behavior to avoid it in the future.  Many studies account how our “gut feelings,” (i.e. the reptilian brain) process exterior stimuli into these four categories and will collaborate, or not, with others.  It has no capacity for language and is the basis for every decision.

After time, approximately 100-250 million years, the brain developed more complicated and conscious feelings. Granted, the world is still primitive and we are primates.  As apes, we reacted in our environment emotionally and with little regard to conscious or logical thought.  We mimicked each other based on our sense perception driven by brain chemistry.  We threw rocks and sticks; we pet each other and ate bugs. We fought for dominance within our tribes and defended our tribes against external threats; it was a good time.  We had many of the same feelings controlled by many of the same brain chemicals in different quantities: serotonin, glutamate, dopamine, endorphins, and adrenaline. 

Through extensive study, we’ve come to understand that our unique brain chemistry has helped humans become the dominant species. We also know that though our brain chemistries are unique, we are 98% the same as our primate ancestors. Our baser instincts and emotions are tempered by logical thought and evolution, but still present and still the sole driver of all decisions.  Also, we evolved into hierarchical beings.  We began to develop communities and tribes.  We recognized that evolutionary traits turned into natural abilities.  We then sought communal purpose through those abilities. 

We also know that though our brain chemistries are unique, we are 98% the same as our primate ancestors. Our baser instincts and emotions are tempered by logical thought and evolution, but still present and still the sole driver of all decisions.

As we’ve evolved over the last 25 million years, we’ve become more socially and culturally aware of each other. During this period, we developed the most recent part of our brain, the neocortex.  This translates to developing language and communicating vital information leading to smarter group decisions for survival.  The introduction of pair-bonding and greater social acuity has driven our evolutionary progress towards larger societies and cultures.  We’ve developed religion, philosophy, science, communication, tools, etc.  

Moving forward, homo-sapiens were a hunter-gather species on the western plains of Africa 70,000 years ago. We migrated with resources. We shared our DNA with other homo-erectus species such as Neanderthals, although we did not find them sexually attractive. 10,000 years ago, we stopped migrating and developed farming.

At this point forward, the brain is as we know it today.  It consists of three basic areas, the cerebellum (center), cerebrum (middle), and neo-cortex(front).  However, the most interesting is how it operates within our current environment. 

The brain chooses a category, creates a feeling, and rationalizes that feeling through the neo-cortex.  That isn’t to say that we don’t still perceive exterior threats; we do.  However, the threats manifest differently.  As early primates, those threats manifested as life threatening; other animals, environmental change, weather, lack shelter and food, and so forth. It was a dangerous environment compared to today’s standard to say the least.

The brain chooses a category, creates a feeling, and rationalizes that feeling through the neo-cortex.  That isn’t to say that we don’t still perceive exterior threats; we do.  However, the threats manifest differently.

Threats today may feel the same, stimulated externally through senses affecting our chemical brains driving short and long-term emotional responses.  However, they are .ost likely things like losing a job, divorce, social embarrassment or social punishment by law, financial ruin, etc.  So here we are, evolved species with unique brain chemistries that promote, to an extent, exterior social conformity within an environment. 

This now leads to Yuval Noah Harari and Robert Dunbar.  Yuval Harari is an Iranian anthropologist who studies human evolution over the last few million years.  He's published two books and had a TED talk about how humans have become the dominant species on earth.  It is no mistake that our ability to cooperate in such large numbers gives us a huge advantage over primates and other species.  In fact, according to Harari, we are the only species that has the capability to act both “flexibly and in very large numbers.”  As an example, species such as insects function in large numbers. However, they lack flexibility; a worker ant is always a worker ant and will never ascend to be queen. 

There are also species that can function with great flexibility, say a chimpanzee, but struggle to cooperate in large numbers. As Harari puts it, one on one or even 10 to 10, chimpanzees have a greater ability to survive on a desert island as opposed to humans.  However, 100 to 100 or even 1000 to 1000, humans will adapt better.

Robin Dunbar is a social scientist and studies relationships between people on a macro scale. His research shows that people struggle to maintain cognitive relationships with roughly more than 150 other people. This is for two reasons.  The first reason is a simple lack of time to invest in relationships and the second is a general limited cognitive ability. 

According to Dunbar, the quality of our relationships correlates to the time we spend with others; think of it as tiers on a cake or ripples in a pond.  There are about 5 people we all know very intimately (top tier), 15 we know less well (second tier), 50 even less so (third tier), and finally about 150 (base tier).  This happens until we can only think of relationships abstractly. More so, no other species think of relationships abstractly or otherwise. We can imagine people in very large numbers but cannot consciously maintain those relationships. And as the quality of those relationships directly correlates to the amount of time we spend with those people, it’s safe to say that the top tier has a much stronger relationship than the bottom.

We are an evolved species driven mostly by unconscious thought who rationalize our unconscious decisions with logical thought.  We can maintain emotional relationships up to about 150 people and can simultaneously work with complete strangers in much larger groups with very loose or no emotional ties. 

In fact, that is the world we’ve created for ourselves.  We’ve come to the age where most people work relatively securely with little emotional ties to their coworkers.  We trade the emotional security for social security. However, it begs the question how healthy this is for individuals.

This is, historically speaking, completely unprecedented.  Our long-term, chemically driven, emotional brains thrive on small scale tight-knit relationships sharing information for survival. Our modern world is a complex often anonymous and isolated environment where sharing information can be a threat in and of itself.

This is, historically speaking, completely unprecedented.  Our long-term, chemically driven, emotional brains thrive on small scale tight-knit relationships sharing information for survival.

This is critical information when developing teams.  Teams must share trust.  Teams must share information for accomplishing objectives toward a goal.  For those conditions to exist, team members have some investment in each other. Once more, the prehistoric, unconscious process still exists. It still puts animals into 4 categories. And it is more likely to process information at “threatening” or indifferent given very large crowds.