Planet of the Apes. Us. Or Them?

 If you have ever worked in teams, this one is for you.

In my first organisation, we had two offices, one in Mumbai and the other in Bangalore, which, in turn, had two teams with mutually exclusive responsibilities.  Right away, in the first month, I sensed that Mumbai and Bangalore shared a relationship – if you could use the word ‘share’ without squirming – that was frosty, with each out to prove a point.  Of course, nobody did (prove a point, or anything else for that matter).  Bangalore saw it fit to sneak into Mumbai’s territory and vice versa and the Big Boys in office either slept away or were dumb enough to believe that such competition was healthy or, even worse, encouraged all of this.  There was bad blood all around, and it was not due to the poor oxygen in the cities, stay assured.

Then things changed.  For the worse.  The two Bangalore teams got their mutually exclusive roles removed and each began to poach into the other’s territory – here the managers were decidedly complicit and in a vengeful mood (and probably carried daggers under their belts into meetings).  While these two managers sought refuge in silos filled with their perceptions and understanding (or the lack of it), their underlings thankfully stayed – and continue to be – good friends and would roast these Men-Who-Matter over a mug of splendid beer (they cook better over beer than on a barbeque). 

Among the fascinating (and regrettable) outcomes of having a social primate lineage is the human proclivity to classify people as Us or Them, those in the in-group being Us and others in the out-group, Them.

We believe that
a)    In order to survive as individuals, we must get along with Us – this led to the evolution of the moral sentiments of empathy, cooperation and altruism…..
b)    …..but we have little need for Them, which, in turn, led to the evolution of animosity, disgust and xenophobia and thereon to violence, competitiveness and selfishness.

There is no better illustration of this than the now-classic Beer Game, first developed by Professor John Sterman in the 1970s.  If you would like to read about the game, go ahead, else skip the next two paragraphs…. 

The game is played on a board that portrays the production and distribution of beer. Each team consists of four sectors: Retailer, Wholesaler, Distributor, and Factory arranged in a linear distribution chain. A small team manages each sector. Coins stand for cases of beer. A deck of cards represents customer demand. Each simulated week, customers purchase from the retailer, who ships the beer requested out of inventory. The retailer in turn orders from the wholesaler, who ships the beer requested out of their own inventory. Likewise the wholesaler orders and receives beer from the distributor, who in turn orders and receives beer from the factory, where the beer is brewed. At each stage there are shipping delays and order processing delays. The players' objective is to minimize total team costs. 

As the game settles down, we notice loyalties to one’s small team emerging, often at the cost of the larger team.  People begin to protect their own turf, blame others and consider everyone else to be, well, Them!  The Big Bass (that’s a boss who makes needless sound) then takes some decisions: to fire his direct reports, for instance, when it is clearly not their fault, for they are cogs in a system and conform to the expectations of behaviour.  At the denouement, it is always always the case that teams end up with some egg yolk on their collective nozzle.  The Beer Game remains the Gold Standard in Systems Thinking and has a whole chapter devoted to it in The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge (read the book sometime, will you?  Not easy, for the writing is hardly engaging, but worth it for the lessons.)

Over two decades of running the Beer Game and another superb simulation based on the Prisoners’ Dilemma, I have learnt much more than the participants: there is no substitute to cooperation amongst teams, but people cooperate only when they have exhausted all other choices (how dumb is that?).

Folks will only cooperate if they trust each other.

Trust is born out of communication, action and genuine intent.

....all of which must be in good faith and honest.

In their absence, we get competition of the usually-unhealthy sort.  Negotiations that are pinched with blame, innuendo, gaming and stealth. 

Yet, for most people, this is theory.

Have you seen Development teams and Testing teams hug each other? Or sales folks and delivery teams share a sandwich?  (If you have, take a bow, for that is the Aurora).  Robert Benchley, that brilliant humourist (check him out at by Googling for ‘Robert Benchley quotes’ and it’ll make your day) once said, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.” 

There are more of the first. 

So, to end with a story that I got (from the book ‘Behave’ by Robert Sapolsky)…. 

Have the seen the original 1968 version of Planet of the Apes? Well, if you haven’t, you haven’t…..(missed anything.  It is an awful film – just look at the costumes).  In the film, an astronaut crew crash-lands on a strange planet in the distant future. Although the planet appears desolate at first, the surviving crew members stumble upon a society in which apes have evolved into creatures – chimps and gorillas - with human-like intelligence and speech. The apes have assumed the role of the dominant species and humans are mute creatures wearing animal skins (this bit on the far-fetched tale has been lifted from Wiki). 

Well, so here is the story, told by both the stars in the film, Charlton Heston and Kim Hunter which relates to the months during which the movie was made: at lunchtime, the people who played chimps in the film and those who played gorillas ate in separate groups.  

So, Us versus Them happens on other planets-in-distant-futures too.