Feral pigs and the discipline of joyous work

Hi there, John here. I hope you’ve had a great week.

A quick story about the mighty United States Army versus a band of Georgia State feral pigs -

In 2007, the US Army was experiencing an issue with feral pigs at a post in Georgia. At face value, there were not many components in this system: the army post, feral pigs, the local habitat, and local hunters the most pertinent. An obvious intervention presented itself, and so local hunters were offered $40 for every pig tail turned in. At this stage, I imagine the leadership of this army post moving swiftly to the next pressing matter, perhaps retaining a slight curiosity about how many bounties would be paid. 

Now, a lifetime of hollywood cinema has cemented a very specific caricature of the US army leader in my mind, and so I cannot help but see a gruff, battle-hardened, moustached man lose his cigar with a comical flip, his jaw agape, as a petrified private, standing in his office some two years later, informs him that the local feral pig population has increased since the $40 bounty started being paid.

What transpired in rural Georgia is endemic to the modern organisation - making a change within a complex system without sufficient understanding of that complex system. So, what happened? To attract feral pigs to hunting sites, local hunters used feed baits that were more nutritious than the usual feral pig diet. This increased fertility and survivability. Then when feral pigs were located at a hunting site, hunters biassed killing the largest males which were considered ‘trophy-quality’ game, giving females and juveniles a chance to escape. Removing these males had no meaningful negative impact, as remaining males could each stud a high number of breeding sows. The population exploded.

This example, for all its comedic irony and low-stakes impacts, is a good example to understand what is happening every single day in the modern organisation - well intended changes are made without system awareness, creating all sorts of junk for the system of work.

What if they had created space for system awareness?

In the ideal scenario, the leadership at the Georgian base would be system aware before a change was conceived. But let’s say there were no ecologists or keen hunters stationed at the base and so this was not feasible. This is not a barrier to system awareness. Changes to complex systems are informed guesses, not predictions with certain outcomes. And so, acknowledging the $40 bounty as an informed guess, base leadership asks hunters turning in pig tails to share a count of feral pigs at their hunting sites. A flat or increasing number then invites a conversation which creates the opportunity to surface signals - change in nutrition, preference for large males as trophies - providing new insight, indicating the informed guess was off, and inviting a new guess. System awareness becomes part of the implementation. Leadership makes another change. System awareness informs them of impact, and so on, until reaching an acceptable point of stability.

The missing discipline

This loop is a discipline, something that is always happening, in stark contrast to something that has a start and an end. Funnily enough, the modern organisation is prolific in its application of this type of discipline, from the generic ‘continuous improvement’ label within various domains to specific methods such as Lean, Six Sigma, and DevOps. But when it comes to the complex system of the organisation and how it works? The discipline is missing. There is no genuine space to surface and process signals, and so, the discipline never gets started.

Think about your organisation. How often does it consider its changes to the system of work an informed guess and then creates space to surface and process signals, and to iterate? Or does it consider change a process of moving from, moving to, moving on, like the ubiquitous restructure? Does it demand that those proposing change must predict the future?

This is the heart of joyous work. It is the discipline of continuous improvement of your system of work in order to make work more joyous for those within it, and more effective and efficient for those seeking outcomes from it:

Three parts - Space, Trace, Embrace - forming one loop, one discipline. Much of what I have shared so far has been about Space - listening to the signals from your system of work - and from here we are diving into Trace. I am going to be picking a common component of the status quo modern organisation, trace the system junk it contributes to, and trace it back to its root causes. Like we understood the root causes and system implications for a $40 bounty on pig tails, we will do the same for employee self-serve platforms, budgeting processes, email & instant messaging tools, purpose & values, jobs & job descriptions, and a bunch more.

I hope these will prove informative and perhaps cathartic. The first component we will look at is employee self-serve platforms, coming soon.

- John