The Challenge—Managing the Human Animal in the 21st Century

• How is it that despite the work of Richard Beckhard and like-minded practitioner-scholars that brought such great sophistication to the practice, change management continues to be so difficult to achieve satisfactorily?

• Why is the art of managing people such a challenge for us when we seem so much more advanced in our understanding of people than we were only a few generations ago?

• How is it that our supply of good leaders is so thin when our education systems deliver us so much more talent than they used to?

• Why do disasters caused by human error keep occurring, even though our technological safeguards are ever more sophisticated?

• What makes people continue to be so parochial and tribal when business is becoming more global and networked?

• How is that even when we know what is right and rational and in everyone's collective shared interests, people persist in selfish, shortsighted, and irrational behaviors?

The bulk of this book is rightly concerned with the momentous challenges and changes we face at the dawn of a new century. My offering will only deviate from this theme in one respect—it sets against the whirlwind of change blowing through global business culture the idea that many features of human existence remain unaltered, and it is these that make us subject to the shortcomings I have just listed. For what stays the same is human nature. If we persist in trying to squeeze the human foot into the badly designed organizational shoe, we'll continue to hobble, stumble, and complain our way into the future. So let's look at the obvious alternative—how can we shape the shoe to fit the foot? The enormous challenges we face are also choices. What strategies can we enact to accommodate what we know about the human animal?

It has been my mission for the past six years or so to introduce to business the powerful new ideas of evolutionary psychology.^[1] This is the collective name for the rapid advances in understanding brought to us by scholars revisiting, testing, and extending Charles Darwin's revolutionary insight of 150 years ago. It is true to say this presents nothing less than the most radical challenge to our ways of thinking about human existence and society since the time of Plato.