THE BOILING FROG SYNDROME

The popular “Boiling Frog” experiment is often used as a metaphor to express the inability of people, organizations, or government to react to “significant changes occurring gradually” or to events which have become commonplace.

The hypothesis of the experiment is that: If the change in temperature is so subtle and seemingly inconsequential, the frog will not be able to sense the changes as to realize it’s boiling to death. In a way, the Frog’s internal apparatus for sensing threats to survival is geared only to sudden and revolutionary changes, but not to the subtle, incremental, and evolutionary ones.

Using the concept of the boiling frog syndrome, it can be revealed that the strength and efficiency of the strategic and sensing antenna of any business entity, organization, public enterprise, team, group, and community, seeking to innovate and to evolve, must remain very sensitive to all seemingly commonplace events, data, information, reports, news, and trending styles that may appear unpopular, inconsequential, and/or minor at their current face value. Hence the need to always strive to dive beneath the waterline in order to explore and exploit the massive tons of unarticulated challenges facing people, organizations, communities, and territories with some senses of empathy and human face.

As public and private institutions, seeking for sustainable grown and development beyond the start-up and early growth stage, there is urgent need to be sensitive and be contextually relevant to all gradual but inconsequential changes in social, economic, political, religion, traditional, and environmental fronts.

Great metabolic changes (as seen in organisms) involve breaking down of complex molecules to produce energy (analysis), and the consumption of energy to build up complex molecules for growth and development (synthesis). As in organisms, same scenario is also playing out in our public and private institutions where both tangible and intangible assets (and talents) are often collaborated and synchronized to sense, capture, and convert all dimensions of value-creating opportunities (however inconsequential and/or commonplace they may appear) into a system of values and benefits that can be traded to generate commonwealth for the good of all.

The abilities to remain focused and alert to both incremental and monumental changes in the form of threats and opportunities from the external world, and to respond proactively as a responsible government or organization is a key lesson taught by the story of the boiling frog. It is also a wake-up call for small businesses to remain agile, proactive, and entrepreneurially minded at all times, and without overlooking commonplace events that can cause great setback if not attended to immediately.

When applied to real world situations, the “Boiling Frog Syndrome” turns out to be one of the silent killers of ideas and creative thinking of all times. Because leadership attention is often rarely or wrongly given to those so called inconsequential matters in most of our social, economic, political, tribal, and religious settings for example, our leaders, both in the business world, and in public institutions have often failed to empathize, be emotionally sensitive, and relate with many of those salient but silent low-hanging-fruits of developmental opportunities and changes.

As the “Boiling Frog Syndrome” affects individuals, small enterprises, and larger corporations, we can also see it affecting public spaces and landscapes in terms of governance, leadership and politics at a much greater proportion.

The syndrome is making our political leaders who are charged with the mandate and responsibilities of managing our organizational, communal, regional, territorial, and international affairs become overly insensitive to many of those sensitive, silent (but salient) socio-economic, socio-cultural, religion, ethnic, and tribal frictions and plights.

Whenever the leaders are missing out on those significant changes that occur gradually, they seem to be suffering from the same Boiling Frog Syndrome.

To become sensitive to and proactively act on those seemingly commonplace events, circumstances, opportunities, data, information, and rumors presenting themselves in bits and bytes in the marketplace requires that every growth-minded businesses, institutions, agencies, groups, organizations and communities must slow down their frenetic pace, and pay due attention to the subtle, as well as the dramatic changes around and within their business ecosystem.

Today’s small businesses, government institutions and agencies, trade and professional groups, organizations and communities, etc., must learn to break down the walls around their enterprises so as to become more visible, transparent, sensitive and relevant to the plights (needs, wants and challenges) of their customers. They all must learn to remain sensitive and contextually relevant at the center of their customers’ attention, satisfaction, and retention for sustainable patronage and brand loyalty. They must learn to enable and provide end-to-end lasting relationships, last-mile connectivity, and deployment of the convergence of the emerging technologies of today's fourth industrial revolution to generate sustainable business offerings (values and benefits) for their constituents.

The ability to sense these seemingly inconsequential changes in events or processes in their immediate environment as small business owners and owner-managers remains the best entrepreneurial behavior that today’s entrepreneurs need to cultivate.

Many small businesses have long been lost in various cocoons working against their growth and development efforts. Some of those cocoons are cocoons of complacency, dwelling in past failures, being insensitivity to current market trends, romancing business with old policies, running business on outdated models and procedures, wrong policies and strategies, poor operational directions, and misplaced priorities regarding risk-taking and business uncertainties.

It is a fact that today’s businesses, especially engineering and technically-oriented enterprises fail more often because of the sum total of slow, gradual, and seemingly inconsequential events acting upon them in contrast to those sudden and disastrous events and disruptive innovations in the business ecosystem.

 Ayodeji Onabanjo