Aping Leadership from Gorillas

The case of the endangered gorilla is illustrative of problems facing many underdeveloped nations in transitioning towards a free market economy and advanced economies in moving towards a post-carbon world.

The silver-backed gorillas are according to Wikipedia, the largest living primates who apparently share 98-99% of their DNA with humans. One thing that they share with humans is that they also tend to associate grey hair with gravitas. Along with gravitas comes respect, authority and yes, leadership of the pack.

This evolutionary adaptation served its purpose for thousands of years. When faced with a predator, all that a band of gorillas had to do was stand behind the alpha male designated by the lightly shaded fur on its back, to protect the young and the vulnerable from predation. This survival technique has not been so successful though in recent times as poachers hunt them with machine guns rather than with claws and fangs.

The case of the endangered gorilla is illustrative of problems facing many underdeveloped nations in transitioning towards a free market economy and advanced economies in moving towards a post-carbon world.

In both cases, societies are faced with upheavals in the basic institutional fabric that blankets their activities. Low transactions costs associated with impersonal contracting as a result of the rule of law took several centuries to mature in the West. Many developing countries struggle to develop similar institutions given their unique cultural and social make-up.

The same problem in essence persists in the West as it tries to make a transition into a post-carbon economy in which environmental damages are costed and internalised within the same market transactions that create them. The core of the problem lies in unlearning the centuries of tradition that have created so much success in the past.

The rules of adaptive efficiency that markets enforce, of rewarding success and punishing failure immediately and ruthlessly, have to be applied to transitional and long-term strategies for dealing with environmental damage. What prevents public policy makers in many jurisdictions from making any headway is the risk averse method of "business usual" or treating the problem using existing technologies and resources, when in fact creativity and innovation are required.

This was the core argument made by Paul Porteous in a talk that I attended last Tuesday co-sponsored by the ANZ School of Government and the South Australian Public Sector Performance Commission at the Adelaide Town Hall. Paul Porteous is Visiting Faculty at Harvard Kennedy School and a former Fellow at Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. 

Drawing from his experience as a consultant dealing with both domestic and foreign policy, Paul was able to distill the role of leaders in making decisions that affect the course of their constituents in unfamiliar environments.

The key role of leaders in the public sector in dealing with complex and wicked problems is to draw different actors together in order to focus on unlearning old values, assumptions and technologies and discovering new ones with which to deal with these problems. Unfortunately, the risk averse environment in which most public servants have to labour under prevents such kind of collaborative experimentation from happening.