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Evolutionary Psychology’s journey to the Boardroom
Let’s assume for a moment that our human behaviour is governed by the interaction between the environment and our physical selves, and that this has been shaped by evolutionary forces. By this we mean that our mental lives are played out in a physical body that has been shaped by evolutionary forces through the millennia.
And, if we are willing to accept the hyperbole of the media and our politicians, the current environment is a doom laden recession, with layer upon layer of data and evidence of failure, threat, loss, greed, and eye-watering debt.
From the Pleistocene Savannah to the Boardroom…
This is exactly where the Pleistocene meets the Boardroom (and every cognisant individual living in the modern industrial and commercial world). Evidence of human evolution show that humans evolved into their present form during this period. – from about 2.5 million years ago to about 12 thousand BP). What we now term as ‘Modern Humans’ have been around for about 100,000 years, with the shift to more stable and complex societies some twelve thousand years ago. The proposition here is that the two million years of human evolution during the Pleistocene Epoch, which includes our behaviours and ways of thinking, has a direct impact on human behaviour in the present. Consequently, we can see and feel the impact of this evolutionary legacy on our mental state and behaviour, as individuals and organizations. Our observations and experience of our modern environment, the business world, has a direct impact on our emotional state and our behaviour inherited from our evolutionary past.
Let us take a brief look at the nature of these impacts - for us as individuals and as a society – and consider the extent to which they ring true.
The Personal Impact
We are surrounded by a host of conscious, symbolic understandings of what recession means to us as individuals, our families and the groups to which we belong. This has an impact on our emotional state which could be described as ‘fear’; in evolutionary terms, associated with our hard wiring, it focuses the mind on survival. In behavioural terms this will show itself in a variety of ways. As individuals, we will put off making decisions, will tend to share responsibility for decisions that need to be made, form and favour internal cliques, distance ourselves from suppliers and delivery networks, focus on the operational rather than the strategic, avoid risk and stay on ‘known’ ground, and apply previously used methods to new problems.
The Group Impact
Membership and belonging become increasingly critical as we face the unknown. We are hard wired to find our security and safety from within the group to which we belong. Our well developed ability to recognise and adopt the collective group emotion and behaviour reduces our ability to make independent decisions, challenges to the leadership become more regular, and we associate ourselves politically with those who seem to be most like minded. Culturally, positive and optimistic narrative is reduced, pessimistic and negative accounts become a feature. All those outside our group start to be seen as a threat, and we need to believe that we are doing ‘less badly’ than they are.
Summary
In short, the lessons of the Pleistocene epoch, that have become part of the way we operate now, are translated into the activities of leadership teams. I do not doubt that many readers will see the evidence of this all around us; exaggerated in the media, observed amongst colleagues, and observable in the businesses to which we are close.
We would be very interested to know the extent to which you accept or reject the notion of this innate response and its potential impact on our businesses during the economic climate.
Furthermore, if you would like to explore this idea further and are interested in the responses to the following questions then please email us at
- How we might quarantine the negative emotional and behavioural responses at both individual and organizational levels
- What the key collective and individual actions are that enable us to reframe our stereotypic behaviours and emotional responses
