Unlocking Our Potential: Embracing Fluid Structures and Eccentricity for Future Success

"If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, perhaps the question we should ask is: how did we get stuck?"

I bring two major insights I've had so far from reading the excellent book "The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

For those who enjoyed Harari's books and inquiries about human history and what it teaches us about current and future challenges, this book broadens, expands, and includes a non-linear, non-Eurocentric narrative. It's the result of 10 years of research by these two authors, an archaeologist and an anthropologist, who integrated narratives, wisdom, and evidence from sources we're not accustomed to accessing.

The advancement of technology and investment in universities, states, and territories beyond Europe now allow us to access new narratives, find new evidence that enhances our understanding of our species' history, and break away from the linear evolutionary narrative we learned in university.

They also help us escape the duality of narratives about our origins: one based on Rousseau, where humans lived in a primordial state of innocence in small and egalitarian groups until the Agricultural Revolution arrived, evolving into cities and states that eradicated this innocence and brought about all that is bad - patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions, and annoying bureaucrats. The other is based on Hobbes, where humans originated as selfish creatures, inherently non-innocent, leading solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives, practically everyone at war with everyone. In this view, the repressive mechanisms of cities and states brought progress to a new condition, providing something in common for us to organize civilly in large groups and end the barbarism.

But, let's come back here to the insights for organizations, communities, and their movements of transformation and romantic betrayals.

Insight 1: Organizations and communities can create different social-cultural arrangements and patterns, multiple hierarchical designs, and distinct management models for each context. We humans are capable of coexisting with different simultaneous models to deal with various simultaneous contexts.

"Archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last ice age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like Nambikwara. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states."

My understanding for our context is that we have the available potential, as a species, to create and adapt to different organizational models that can coexist simultaneously to address the various complex and challenging contexts we face. In fact, we need this potential now!

Within the same company or field, we can coexist with both more hierarchical and more horizontal models, with accelerated execution and reflective paced approaches, operating in structured areas or teams that form and dissolve to deliver specific projects, depending on the context, need, and strategic goal.

The challenge is that we were educated in a linear/mechanical/industrial model that accustomed us to reductionism, making us believe there is one correct model (and other models are wrong) that we need to find and submit to, believing it will handle everything.

Even worse, we were taught that suggesting changes or alternatives to the "correct model" is disobedience, betrayal, and risks excluding us from the organization.

In the complex, connected, interdependent, unpredictable world we live in, if we don't reclaim the wisdom of adaptive coexistence with multiple simultaneous organizational models, we greatly endanger the longevity of our organizations.

If we pay close attention, we'll realize this wisdom still exists, vibrant and alive. People in our organizations are constantly creating and recreating alternative models to deal with the non-standardized nature of life. However, as leaders and managers, instead of listening and embracing this wisdom, we've been more interested in stifling it in favor of maintaining or discovering the "new correct standard," often judging all other alternatives as wrong.

In our organizations, how can we create spaces and prototypes for different ways of dealing and operating for each distinct context? How can we reclaim and nurture the wisdom our species cultivated for millennia and turn it into value, longevity, and progress in service of life on our planet?

"Through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, perhaps the question we should ask is: how did we get stuck? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition?"

Insight 2: Organizations should embrace people's differences and eccentricities as a potential reserve of wisdom to navigate unpredictable situations.

A second discovery from David's studies was that all human communities and groups coexisted with the peculiarities and eccentricities of individuals within our species. The difference wasn't whether or not there were eccentric people in communities, but how they dealt with these eccentricities.

Many primitive communities assigned specific roles for the more eccentric individuals. Some who were only slightly peculiar would become leaders. The more eccentric might become prophets or spiritual leaders. Regardless, the point is that they learned to create a space for them, as a sort of intellectual reserve to handle very unexpected situations.

When a highly impactful transformation of context occurred within the community or society, it was often the eccentric individuals who could assume leadership or a role of awareness to deal with the unforeseen. They were the ones with answers and new ideas for alternative arrangements.

I've been reflecting on how organizations today have massified their competencies and leadership models to the extent that they standardize behavior and worldview to the point of excluding diversity, eccentricity, and quirkiness, losing the adaptive capital and wisdom required to navigate the unexpected.

And as the unexpected becomes increasingly common, we need to reclaim this reserve of eccentric capital and wisdom.

"What really struck him (Radin) about the ‘primitive’ societies he was most familiar with was their tolerance of eccentricity. (...) There is every reason to believe that sceptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them. (...) It’s often people who are just slightly odd who become leaders; the truly odd can become spiritual figures, but, even more, they can and often do serve as a kind of reserve of potential talent and insight that can be called on in the event of a crisis or unprecedented turn of affairs. (...) It was among this penumbra that everyone looked for a charismatic leader appropriate to the occasion. As a result, a person who might otherwise have spent his life as something analogous to the village idiot would suddenly be found to have remarkable powers of foresight and persuasion."

What are your thoughts on these two insights?

Do they resonate with anything you're experiencing in your contexts today?

Does it make sense to consider creating and coexisting with different models and making room to sustain eccentricities and divergences that might be essential to navigate the unexpected in the near future?

Article originally written in Portuguese and translated into English in partnership with Chat GPT (book quotes were manually verified by me).