The developmental model - Tribes to Chiefdoms

The tribe has hundreds of people, often fixed settlements, consist of kin-based clans, still 1 ethnicity and language, have egalitarian or "big-man" government, informal and often difficult conflict resolution problems (e.g., much of New Guinea, Amazonia). (Diamond, 1997)

•Tribes are often led by “Big Men”, with little formalized power, but much influence.
•Chiefdoms are controlled by inherited social classes: Chief and nobles
(Ember, C and Ember, M 1999)

Simon - Stage Two: Found and Frame ("How are we going to pull this off?")
Greiner: Collectivity Crisis: Need for delegation with control Solution: Provision of clear direction

Tribes seem to be a human grouping with much appeal, but little understanding in the OD community. In the past 10 years, a number of books have been written (I will deal with these in a future blog) touting a tribal orientation to running a business, leadership and organizational behavior.


A Wikipedia entry speaks to the epigenetic underpinnings of tribes:

According to a study by Robin Dunbar at the University of Liverpool, primate brain size is determined by social group size. Dunbar’s conclusion was that the human brain can only really understand a maximum of 150 individuals as fully developed, complex people. Malcolm Gladwell expanded on this conclusion sociologically in his book, The Tipping Point. According to these studies, then, “tribalism” is in some sense an inescapable fact of human neurology, simply because the human brain is not adapted to working with large populations. Beyond 150, the human brain must resort to some combination of hierarchical schemes, stereotypes, and other simplified models in order to understand so many people. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribalism, 2010)


It is at this point in the development of organizations that the essential issues of complexity emerge:

•How groups organize themselves to be able to not just survive, but grow – specialization in roles and the ability to compensate a person for their specialized contributions.

•Figuring out how people must work toward common goals over time, not just in the moment.

•Resolving conflicts and maintaining cooperation to get things done.

•Establishing identity beyond the family or clan unit.

•Leadership that provides a compelling enough vision so that there is “buy in”

It makes sense to me that the seeds of chiefdoms, that is, an organization of people with a leader that is not based solely on influence, but by designation of the group, begins in the tribe. The initial “Big Man” with the vision, charisma, and ability to direct others to achieve larger goals, becomes the first in the line of Chiefs. This designation seems to imbue the individual (and their family) with power and privilege.

Looking at the above descriptions, the developmental step from a tribal organizational structure to a more complex one may be the most critical. The combination of factors that must come together to not only sustain a larger group of people with more than adequate resources, but to direct them to bigger, more abstract, goals seems remarkable.

Diamond, J. (March 1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Company.
Ember, C and Ember, M (1999) Cultural Anthropology (9th ed) Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, N.J.
Greiner, L.E. (1972) “Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow,”

Harvard Business Review 50

Simon, J.J. (2001) 5 Life Stages of Nonprofit Organization, Wilder Foundation.

The developmental model - Bands to Tribes

In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond reviews levels of societal organization:

"The band has 5 to 80 people, are usually related by blood, typically nomadic, have 1 language and ethnicity, have egalitarian government with informal leadership, no bureaucracy, no formal structures for conflict resolution, no economic specialization (e.g., Bushmen, pygmies)."

In prior blogs, I identified factors that characterize the earliest stage of organization development as well as what is need to move to a more complex organizational structure. Simon's Stage One: Imagine and Inspire ("Can the dream be realized?") and Griener's Entrepreneurial stage - Survival being the focus with "needing leadership" the solution to the challenge of moving the business to the next level.

At this stage of organization development we are looking at human groups no larger than an extended family or clan.The environment needs only to support the basic needs of the small group in order to maintain this level of complexity. Typically, an environment that is rich enough to support more than a group this size (usually through technology such as agriculture) results in a larger population.

Skill specialization is not required in a band society; however, it seems that the group needs members that can support the next level of development – people who can be successful at providing resources and infrastructure. If no one in the group can grow food in large enough quantities, create tools or heal the sick, then development is difficult.

A group that does not have enough cohesion and common interests to cooperate with each other would have little chance to develop.

A good example of this can be found in Colin Turnbull’s book The Mountain People.

At the band level, leadership is usually “informal”, that is, the older members of the band are looked to for guidance. Decisions are often made on a consensus basis, there are no written rules with no specialized roles for enforcement of rules or laws.

In order to move to a more complex organization stage (tribe), an individual must emerge to encourage bands to work together for a common purpose ( Simon’s "Imagine and Inspire"). This person needs to have sufficient skills to assign tasks and roles in order to meet the goals of the group, as well as have the personal authority to maintain respect of the group. Intra and inter band cooperation needs to be sufficient to complete tasks needed to reach the goals identified.

When I look at small groups, no matter what the context (business, political, gangs), all of the above applies. Humans are wired to operate in this fashion, epigenetically. As OD practitioners, using the above as guidance helps us not only to identify what the "normal" behavior would be, but what may be needed if the organization wishes to develop.

Diamond, J. (March 1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Company.

Turnbull, Colin M. The Mountain People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

Jared Diamond - an unwitting epigeneticist?

Jared Diamond’s Collapse – How societies choose to fail or succeed (2005) lists five factors that he considers central to the ability of human groups to survive over time:

• Inadvertent environmental damage: Based on the fragility of the environment or misuse of environmental resources, the group degrades the environment they live in to such an extent that it is unable to support them.
• Climate change: The climate, in the form of temperature and the amount of rainfall, either supports the ability of human groups to provide resources (food, water and shelter) needed to survive and/or thrive. Extended droughts and cold spells have been shown to adversely effect large scale societies such as the Anasazi people of the American southwest to such an extent that their entire culture collapsed.
• Hostile neighbors: Chronic conflicts with adjoining groups (many times combined with the above factors) weaken the group’s ability to survive. These conflicts may lead to the group’s being conquered by the hostile neighbor.
• Decreased support by friendly neighbors: Very few societies have access to all the resources needed to survive and grow. Trade with other groups provides these, and without it, societies fail.
• Society’s responses to its problems: The choices the group makes to cope with the above conditions ultimately determines their success or failure over time. Diamond covers both in his book. Paradoxically, he points out that clinging to the decisions that made the group viable previously, often led to their downfall.

(Diamond, 2005)

I see these factors as central to identifying the crises that groups face. The ways that human organizations handle their environmental resources and their relationships with others directly determine their success or failure. At each stage of development, the decisions the group makes to respond to these factors seem critical to survival as well as organizing at higher levels of complexity.

Diamond never uses the term epigenetic, however, his descriptions of the factors which influence the human groups he explores and the decisions they make in the face of their environmental challenges are examples of the epigenetic process in action. I urge followers of this blog to read Collapse, and Diamond's earlier work, Guns, Germs and Steel.

Diamond, Jared (2005) Collapse – How societies choose to fail or succeed. Penguin, New York, NY

More developmental thoughts

Since the last post, I have been struggling with creating a matrix to describe the stages of development of organizations, and the developmental tasks needed to increase in organizational complexity. In thinking through the creation of a unified model that includes Greiner’s business oriented crises, Simon’s idea – based development of non profits, and the self organizing anthropological stages that groups go through, I realized that there are only a few variables:

Environment – this really represents the resources available to the group:
o Are the existing resources (food, money, technology, infrastructure) able to support the move to increasing complexity?
o Will the environment (weather, natural resources, macro - economics) be stable enough to support?

Population –
o Are there enough people, with the needed skills in the needed proportions, to support the next level of organization?
o Does the population see itself as having enough common interests (language, history, ethnicity, economic interests, common enemies) to organize in a larger context?

Leadership –
o Are there person/persons with the vision and charisma to organize the population around the idea of the next organizational stage?
o Does the leadership have the organizational skills to pull it off?

Cooperation/conflict –
o Is the culture of the group able to cooperate sufficiently to re-organize?

In this model, all of the above need to be in place in order for the move to next level of complexity to happen. If you look at Greiner’s model (see the previous post), he poses crisis points which a business faces in moving to more complex levels.

In the epigenetic model, this is expanded to the environment as a whole, and the ability of the group to utilize the “favorable” conditions with the appropriate leadership.

The developmental model (stage 2)

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Organizations go through life-cycles much like people go through infancy, child-hood and early-teenage phases. Each phase in an organization's life cycle can be tracked based on the needs of the group in that phase; learning to survive, reacting to environmental challenges; maturing and gaining a sense of “self”.

As people mature, they (hopefully) understand more about the world and themselves and develop an approach to cope with the challenges in life and work. They learn to plan and to use a certain amount of discipline to carry through on those plans. To survive, organizations need to do this as well. Features of new organizations are usually markedly different from older and larger organizations. As seen in the diagram below, the life cycle model portrays groups going through four stages: Entrepreneurial, Collectivity, Formalization and Elaboration.
These are described in the table below:(click on the table to enlarge)

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The boxes in the above diagram are intended to show the issues that the organization needs to deal with in order to progress to the next stage. These could be seen as somewhat “epigenetic”, however, the intrinsic “predetermined unfolding” quality that marks Erickson's model is lacking. The diagram does show a development from small to large as the organization progresses.

This model, developed by L. E. Greiner at the Harvard Business school (1972), is totally business oriented. It looks at the management, organization structure and leadership styles he thought was needed at each stage of increasing complexity.

A more dynamic graphic of the same model, with "crisis points" identified at each stage of growth, shows what Greiner thinks is the resolution of each.(click on the graphic to enlarge)

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In the 5 Life Stages of Nonprofit Organizations ( 2001), Judith Sharken Simon, provides another perspective on life cycles of nonprofit organizations. She identifies:

1. Stage One: Imagine and Inspire ("Can the dream be realized?")

2. Stage Two: Found and Frame ("How are we going to pull this off?")

3. Stage Three: Ground and Grow ("How can we build this to be viable?")

4. Stage Four: Produce and Sustain ("How can the momentum be sustained?")

5. Stage Five: Review and Renew ("What do we need to redesign?")

(Simon, 2001)

Simon points out that the focuses of nonprofits are not simply product/service oriented, but idea based. The power of concept and guiding philosophy of an organization is accounted for in this model.

Taking these types of business based developmental models and applying the epigenetic principles to them, as well as expanding the concepts to human organizations in the larger sense, will be the focus of the next blog post.

Greiner, L.E. (1972) “Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow,”

Harvard Business Review 50

Simon, J.J. (2001) 5 Life Stages of Nonprofit Organization, Wilder Foundation.

The developmental model (stage 1)

In previous posts, I covered the genetic basis for human organizations, and showed how groups self organize in a developmental manner. In this post, I will start the process of looking at the actual framework that will portray how human groups address, or not, the challenges that allows them to organize at higher levels of complexity.

A base dynamic for human organizations seems to be some form of “conflict vs. cooperation”. At each level of organizational complexity this seems to plays out. Can a band cooperate within itself in order to survive (hunt and gather) effectively? Can a city-state trade with others and grow their socio-economic needs peacefully or choose to expand through war?

Using this as a starting point, I am developing a model similar to Erickson's.

In Erickson's epigenetic model, a pattern seems to emerge. At each level of development, the individual struggles with how to be “whole” and in satisfying relationship with others vs. feeling “dis-integrated” and out of harmony with the outside environment.

In work are the analogous headers to these Ericksonian ones:
Stage (age)
Psychosocial crisis (at each age)
Significant relations (at each age)
Psychosocial modalities (at each age)
Psychosocial virtues (at each age)
Mal-adaptations & malignancies (at each age)

The Functionalist school of Cultural Anthropology used this model, based on individual and group needs:

Basic Needs (Individual)
Direct Responses (Organized, i.e., Collective)

Instrumental Needs
Responses to Instrumental Needs

Symbolic and Integrative Needs
Systems of Thought and Faith

Perhaps, an organizational model may something look like this:

Size (Band, Tribe, etc)

Organizational hurdle (at that stage)
Relationships/Leadership required (at that stage)

Developmental Issues (conflict, cooperation)

Presenting Problem of the group
Potential solutions

Existing Organizational Development theory does not address development in an epigenetic manner, even though the field of Cultural Anthropology points to this. If one takes the assumptions I have put forward in “putting the Development in Organizational Development” (see previous blog) as a starting point, and agrees that the stages of development are something like what I have described (Bands, tribes, etc), then the “crises” that human groups face in organizing in increasing complexity can be effectively mapped. What these are related to, the struggles they represent and the “symptoms” that each stage exhibits would be the focus to developing this framework.

Technology = Environment

Actually, this should say: ADOPTED technology equals environment.

I’ve just spent the last two days in Washington, DC (the OTHER Washington, those of us from Seattle like to say), spending a great deal of time at the Natural History and Native American Museums. In both, I saw ample evidence, anthropologically speaking, about the effect that environment has on human organizations and development, and how human groups use technology to adapt and alter their environment.

In the epigenetic model, genetics and environment “dance” with each other to move the organism toward a developmental outcome. By recognizing the functional equivalency of technology to environment on the developmental process, OD practitioners will be better able to diagnose and design responses to organizational issues.

In the Natural History museum, there is a display on how tool use altered human evolution: by adopting fire as a tool to cook food, humans altered and increased the availability of nutrients in their food by making it more digestible and actually altering the chemical structure of the food. By using stone hammers to break open leg bones of large animals (even those left as picked over carcasses by predators), early humans accessed the marrow fat that even large carnivores could not get to.

By using tools (technology) and passing this use along as part of their culture (more on this in future posts), early humans altered their genetic makeup over time. The individuals who benefitted from the better nutrition were able to (we assume) grow stronger, live longer and reproduce in greater numbers.

Here is the point: when we look at organizations, are we evaluating the technology that group is using as part of their environmental resources? Are we looking at the technology that may have “spawned” the group in the first place (think Microsoft or any other business, government or institution that depends on tools to do their work)? Are there technologies that, if adopted, alter their way of doing work, thereby changing their culture?