What can nature teach us about digital leadership?

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One of the challenges facing any leader, especially in digital roles, is whether to optimise teams for efficiency or agility. The two aspects of team performance rarely being good bedfellows. Some recent research suggests that crows may have the solution to this tricky balance at the heart of operational effectiveness.

My own experience has convinced me that small, stable teams are by far the most effective structure for efficient, fast delivery. Throw in highly capable people with direct responsibility for the outcomes (not blindly delivering what others say is needed) and you have the foundations for success in the majority of situations.

I’m in good company, Jeff Bezos' "two pizza teams” has become a famous and highly memorable call for small team sizes. Furthermore a direct link between team stability and operational efficiency has been demonstrated in numerous academic studies and promoted by industry leaders such as Chris Fry.

Small teams, that have been together for some time, have a tendency to build strong relationships and harmonise ways of working to play to each other's strengths. Ultimately this results in the team benefitting from the evolutionary principle of least effort, becoming increasingly efficient as the team find easier and faster ways of completing familiar tasks.

But small and stable isn’t the whole story.

Small and stable teams also have their drawbacks.

Small, stable teams are great at doing what they do; but what makes these teams strong is also their weakness. The longer small teams are together the more engrained their ways of working become, the more their thinking and opinions align and, as a result, the more embedded their associated blind spots and the more challenging they find change. Our human tendency for confirmation bias makes this a very difficult pitfall to avoid or to spot from within the team.

This small drawback is okay; right up until the time when its not okay. That time usually becomes evident when this previously high performing team suddenly and inexplicably start to struggle to deliver.

A common response is to look for something that has changed in the team or something that has broken (for example a breakdown in the team's dynamics). On most occasions the underlying problem is neither of these. Frequently the issue is that the team are applying their previously successful practices to a new problem or situation and their specific, deeply engrained techniques and behaviours simply don’t work well in this new situation.

Crows understand this.

In a recent piece of research, the University of St Andrews tracked New Caledonian Crows and found that they operated within a small group of near relatives. This makes evolutionary sense, as such small and stable groups form communities that are highly efficient and effective, maximising the chances of survival.

Interestingly, when presented with a new problem, that couldn’t easily be solved by the small group of crows in question, they brought in a fresh perspective; they allowed crows from outside their group to join them to help solve the problem. This short term opening up of the small, stable group to a wider community not only helped the initial group solve the problem at hand (so to speak) but also helped spread the new found skills around the wider crow community.

So what can we learn from crows and how can this help us become better at delivering rapid digital programmes at scale?


I remain convinced that small, stable teams drive operational effectiveness and should form the foundation of our approach to delivery. We need to also recognise that the agility of the whole organisation is a function of adaption within these small teams. Adaption that can be driven through frequent, short term cross-team working; preferably with a focus on a specific problem to solve. Just as crows do. If well managed, the new ideas and techniques that come from this type of interaction equip the whole organisation’s ability to adapt and ultimately deliver more effectively and faster.

So don’t stone the crows; they have much to teach us. It leaves me wondering what other answers nature has to offer to some of our more complex leadership challenges.

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