Jurassic Park but for Komodo Dragons

In December 2020, a 46‐year‐old man called Elias Agas was rushed to hospital after being seriously injured at a construction site on Rinca Island in Indonesia. Rinca is part of Komodo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site home to the world's only population of Komodo dragons. The Indonesian government referred to the project Agas was working on as a “premium tourism spot”; or to put it another way, a place that tourists will be able to visit to see Komodo dragons.

In case you're unfamiliar with them, Komodo dragons are wild lizards that can grow up to 3 metres in length. They have razor‐sharp teeth that allow them to administer a venomous bite that lowers blood pressure, causes massive bleeding, prevents blood clotting, and induces shock. In other words, a very dangerous animal indeed, as Agas discovered.

The project – which I'll refer to as Komodo Park – has been dubbed “Jurassic Park for Komodo dragons”, after the famous book and movie by Michael Crichton. On the face of it, that sounds unfair. After all, Jurassic Park is a fictional account of a private business that brings dinosaurs back to life, where things go disastrously wrong. Komodo Park is a government initiative to build a visitor centre for an endangered species.

Until I tell you that a promotional video for Komodo Park uses imagery that closely resembles the movie version of Jurassic Park and the actual theme music from the movie.¹ In other words, a fictional story designed to warn of the risks of turning dangerous animals into theme park attractions is being used as an inspiration for the real thing. The only difference is that they're not resurrecting an extinct species; they're using an endangered one.

Those responsible for the development of Komodo Park – which was still under construction at the time of writing – would do well to familiarise themselves with one of Jurassic Park's most famous quotes. It's where scientist Doctor Ian Malcolm, an expert in Chaos Theory, played by Jeff Goldblum, who has been invited to the park to give his blessing, says, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”

That quote and the thinking behind Komodo Park provide the perfect illustration of Rule Number Seven:

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

While the Rule is very simple, it is also crucial because, as we saw in Chapter 5, our Judge brain is capable of coming up with excuses for decisions the Gator brain has already taken. If we don't, in the words of Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, stop to consider whether we should do something, it's likely we'll already have reached for a ready‐made excuse that we could do it.

It is also worth noting that the Rule has broad application since it is not just relevant to our decision‐making as we seek to impose rules on our employees; it applies equally to theirs when they decide how or whether to comply with them.

On the one hand, we need to think carefully about whether and, if so, how we should impose rules on our employees. Just because we have legal rights doesn't mean it's right for us to do so. On the other hand, they need to think about how they interpret rules. Sometimes, the rules permit them to do things they know aren't right.

Compliance Meets Ethics

The rule points to natural tension between compliance and ethics in both cases. I'm often asked why many organisations have functions that combine both disciplines. After all, there's a clear distinction between the intrinsic nature of “ethics” – principles that we uphold because we believe them to be right – and the extrinsic nature of “compliance”, rules imposed on the firm from outside. My answer is that the two are interrelated because many regulations are designed to deliver ethical outcomes.

It's also essential for employees not to distinguish between “things we do because we're told to” and “things we do because we think they're important”. Otherwise, we risk giving them the impression that we don't think regulations are essential. That matters because of the way we can all – myself included – find ourselves justifying our decision‐making when we're either breaking a rule or doing something unethical.

The two main justifications we often turn to are as follows:

1. If we want to justify doing something that breaks a rule, we tend to do so by referencing ethics.
2. Conversely, if we want to justify something unethical, we tend to do so by reference to compliance.

Before I explain what I mean by this, please note the word “tend” in both justifications. I'm not saying this happens all the time. I'm just saying it happens a lot. With that in mind, here's a simple example of how we might use ethics to justify noncompliance. If the speed limit is 70 and we want to drive at 90 – in other words, we're trying to justify a compliance breach – then we might seek to explain it by referencing the fact it was the middle of the night and there was no other traffic. In simple terms, the “spirit of the law” wasn't being broken because we weren't putting any other road users in danger.

Or, we might try to explain it by reference to why we needed to get to our destination; perhaps we were racing to the airport to catch a plane, or we had an urgent medical appointment. Both are “the ends justify the means” excuses that seek to explain why the rules shouldn't apply in this specific situation. Alternatively, from “the dog ate my homework” school of excuses, we might opt for something like “the speed limit wasn't obvious on that stretch of road, so I didn't realise I was speeding”. It's a clear attempt to paint breaking the limit as ethical because we didn't know we were doing it. Implicitly, if we had known, we wouldn't have been speeding!

Then, there's the opposite: using compliance to justify unethical behaviour. If the speed limit is 70, but we know that the weather conditions mean it is dangerous to drive more than 50, then we might justify driving 60 by reference to the limit. From an ethical perspective, we understand that we shouldn't be driving at that speed, but we also know that the rules clearly permit us to do so. This is also known as a “where does it say that I can't do that?” type of excuse when people point to the law when confronted by their own unethical behaviour.

COM‐B: how Capability, Opportunity, Motivation drives Behaviour

To help us to think about this further, I'm going to take this opportunity to introduce you to a simple behavioural model that I often use with clients. The model is called COM‐B and is designed to be a simple overview of what drives behaviour. Although it is intended for use in driving behavioural change, we can also use it to analyse why people are engaging in particular behaviours. In other words, it's a design tool and a diagnostic tool.

Professor Susan Michie and her colleagues at University College, London developed COM‐B.² If you are interested in this area, I recommend looking at their Behavioural Change Wheel, a more complex framework that builds on COM‐B.

The idea behind COM‐B is that there are three main components to any Behaviour (B). For a behaviour to occur, an individual needs to feel:

• they are psychologically and physically able to do so – in other words, they have the Capability (C);
• they have the social and physical opportunity to engage in the behaviour – Opportunity (O);
• they want or need to carry out the behaviour – Motivation (M).

The elements are interdependent; Capability and Opportunity feed into Motivation, which drives Behaviour. For example, if we want to run the Tokyo marathon, we need to be physically and mentally prepared (C), have an allocated place (O), and be motivated to run the race (M). On the day, we also obviously need to be in Tokyo at the start at our allotted time (O).

We may find that being allocated a place makes us more likely to feel motivated, even if we know that we are not yet physically or mentally prepared. Equally, even without the allocated place, the fact we are physically and mentally ready can motivate us. However, turning up for the start of the race without an entry – in other words, a critical element of O is missing – cannot be compensated for by the fact we would be able to physically run the race.

Applying COM‐B to the Rule lets us see that “can” in “because you can” is a function of both Capability and Opportunity, whereas “should” in “you should” is a function of Motivation.

I'll end this rule with another story. It's incredibly well known – which, as you'll see, is deeply ironic given the story's subject – but even if you know it, I think it helps to underpin another aspect of this rule.

The Streisand Effect

Readers of a certain age will be familiar with the multimillion record‐selling singer Barbra Streisand. Younger readers, who may not know her music, are more likely to have heard of her thanks to something called the Streisand Effect. It's the name given to a behavioural dynamic she helped to make famous.

In 2003, Streisand sued a photographer called Kenneth Adelman for $50 million for violation of privacy. Adelman took a series of photographs of the Pacific coastline from a helicopter for the California Coastal Records Project to document coastal erosion. Streisand, whose Malibu beach house was visible in one of the photos, went to court to get it taken down. Not only did she lose her case, but in taking legal action, she inadvertently drew attention to the very thing she was trying to hide.

Before the lawsuit, the image showing a somewhat blurry photo of Streisand's house had been downloaded just six times. Two of those times were by Streisand's lawyers. Thanks mainly to the publicity generated, it has been viewed millions of times. It's also given us the term the “Streisand Effect”. We use it to describe when efforts to keep something secret – usually via the courts – have precisely the opposite effect.

Of course, Streisand was perfectly entitled to sue Adelman. But that didn't mean she was right to do so. In his ruling,³ the judge noted that “occasional overflights are among those ordinary incidents of community life of which [Barbra Streisand] is a part”. He also pointed out that Streisand had previously opened her home to reporters and photographers, so she hadn't always prioritised her own privacy. I would imagine that, with hindsight, Streisand wouldn't have gone ahead with her court case.

That story brings us to the end of the Six Rules. In Part IV, we'll explore RADAR, a BeSci framework that can help you to think about where you might best be able to deploy behavioural interventions.