Hardwired Humans. Andrew O'Keeffe
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Our strategy is to invest everything in the raising of a few offspring—we focus our reproductive energy on just a few children. Some animals adopt a strategy at the other extreme. A mother turtle, for example, swims up to the beach during the night, digs a shallow hole and lays her eggs. She covers her eggs with sand, and that’s her mothering duty done! The hatchlings have all the information they need to survive and the species plays the numbers game where enough hatchlings—around one in a thousand—hopefully survive through to adulthood to reproduce.
We humans don’t play the numbers game. Human parents, particularly mothers, invest heavily in raising an infant to reproductive age. After birth, a human baby’s brain takes another year to complete its physical growth and quite a few years before the youngster could hope to survive on their own. The human mother has the capacity to give birth to only a handful of children over her lifespan. With this incredible investment in an offspring, it’s not surprising that the bond between parents and offspring, and between direct family members, are for life.
There is something special about families and our primary sense of identify that comes with being part of a family. In April 1846, the Donner party consisting of 87 men, women and children set off from Illinois en route inland to California on the west coast of the uSA. unfortunately for the group they reached the Sierra Nevada mountains later than expected and became trapped by an October snow storm and camped to face the winter. Come spring, 40 of the party had died due to the atrocious conditions. But curiously, a high proportion of people who survived were members of family units and a high proportion who died were young men travelling alone. Only three of the 15 single men survived and the only woman who died was travelling in a small group of four.
We’re just not loners and family holds a special place. James Bain spent 35 years in a Florida gaol wrongly sentenced for a crime he didn’t commit. When he was freed in December 2009 he was asked on the steps of the court house how he got through so many years in prison. He answered with his engaging smile, ‘By maintaining myself and to get home to my mum.’ When asked what he planned to do now he was out, he said, ‘I’m going home with my family. I’m going to see my mum. That’s the most important thing in my life right now.’
We are not surprised by this human response. It is a key part of what it means to be human and an instinct we share with chimpanzees.
Taronga chimpanzees
Through my work using zoos as a base, I have become friendly with a number of wonderful primate keepers. Louise Grossfeldt is head of primates at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo and her colleague, Allan Schmidt, is a senior member of her team. They generously share their stories of their chimp community to assist leaders gain insight into the natural condition for social animals.
The chimpanzee community at Taronga is one of the best zoo-based communities in the world, mainly due to the size and complexity of the group that reflects the wild condition of chimps. There are 19 individuals in the chimp community at Taronga. The 19 chimps represent six families. There are three adult males, and the multi-male, multi-family nature of chimpanzee communities is a key part of the social complexity, coalitions and politics in the life of a chimp.
In November 2009 the chimps at Taronga were temporarily relocated while their exhibit underwent a major refurbishment. The relocation was as sensitive as an office move, planned with as much thought as we would expect our office move to be managed. Louise and her team planned the move around family groups. The politics amongst the male chimps also featured prominently in the keepers’ planning. Adult males are almost always rivals for the top job, and the relationships between males is observably more intense and more dynamic than between the females.
The first group moved the 200 metres to the temporary exhibit was the alpha male, Lubutu, and his family along with the two oldest females. Lubutu was comfortably established in his new territory when on the third day the second of the adult males arrived.
Chimbuka, this second male, was still unconscious and in the care of the vets when Lubutu spotted him. All hell broke loose. Lubutu went into a wild display, hair hackled so he looked twice his size, screaming and banging on walls and screens. A fully-grown adult chimp with around five times the strength of a human male creates an awesome display. Arrivals of females over the previous two days had not created such a response from Lubutu.
After his health check Chimbuka was left to wake up in the den. When he did wake Chimbuka freaked out. In the wild, male chimps never leave their territory so being moved to a strange location would indeed be instinctively frightening. The keepers opened an access raceway so the females might greet and comfort him.
But the females were reluctant to go to him, presumably frightened by Chimbuka’s frenzied display and presumably torn by the decision confronting them—on the one hand, if they left him alone his mood might deteriorate and he might become more dangerous, yet if they went to him they might be attacked. The group of seven females plus juveniles and infants wavered at the edge of the raceway some ten metres away. They oscillated, teetering on going forward and then shrinking back. Individual chimps, not moving themselves, encourage others to go forward. No one moved. The group was frozen.
From the back of the pack comes Bessie, Chimbuka’s 60-year-old grandmother. She wants to get to her grandson. Bessie is frail, stooped and moves awkwardly. She is blocked by the band of petrified observers. Like Moses, she parts a path and makes her way through the group. Finally, she gets to the front of the pack. She crosses the precipice and reaches her grandson. She pauses just before him as if saying, ‘Come here, Sweetie’ and gives him a big hug. The reassuring effect is instant—Chimbuka quickly calms down. The other females now gather round and reassure him. There are some things only a mother or grandmother can provide.
Family as the organisation building block
Given that we humans moved from villages into offices and factories only 250 years ago (and for many countries outside the Western world, many years fewer than that) we bring the basic construct with us to work—our need to bond intimately with a few people. These people become our ‘as if ‘ family and we want that group to be close-knit and functional. Many of us even describe our teams as being ‘just like family’.
Given the critical role of family for the human condition, it is not surprising that our organisations are, or at least should be, built upon family-sized work groups of around seven people. This was the natural size of family in primitive days—mum and dad, perhaps a grandparent and a few children. The range in this group is five to nine, or seven plus or minus the standard deviation of two.
‘Seven’ is significant for the human brain. The working memory of the brain has, on average, the capacity to handle seven items. After seven, plus or minus two, we tend to make mistakes. Seven digits of a telephone number are quite easy to remember, while eight is challenging for the average human. up to seven is the number of people that work in a syndicate team at a conference—eight is quite dysfunctional due to the increased mathematical combinations. In a study by physicist Peter Kline of Medical university of Vienna analysing the size of a committee that is the most dysfunctional, the number that stood out as the worst was the committee size of eight.
Seven or so people as a group is the size that can best create a sense of intimacy. The Economist magazine asked Facebook to test whether the technology of social networking revealed any trend of people’s intimate contacts. In the research conducted by Dr Cameron Marlow, the ‘in-house sociologist’ at Facebook, The Economist reported:
… What also struck Dr Marlow … was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he or she frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more ‘active’ or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.
Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or ‘wall’. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six …
The analysis concluded that despite the capacity of