Dogs, Board Members and Catastrophe Theory

Ever wondered what frightened or angry dogs, board members and Catastrophe theory have in common well read on!

This is a short extract from the "People" section of my new book "Boards" (More info @ https://bit.ly/2uzzyH2) and also available on Amazon https://amzn.to/38rB3pl

On the subject of tipping points and whether you are prone to a little catastrophe or not there is a powerful illustration of Catastrophe theory in action which has high relevance for boards.

The connection came to me when reading the late great mathematician Professor Sir Christopher Zeeman's legendary paper “Catastrophe Theory”. Chris, the founder of Warwick’s Maths department, wasn’t the first to study catastrophe theory or to coin the phrase, that honour goes to Rene Thom. However, Chris did a huge amount to advance the subject and to make it more accessible.

Put simply, Catastrophe theory is the study of small perturbations which lead to a catastrophic event or shift. A popular example of this is the "Bags of flour on a model bridge" experiment where individual small bags of flour are placed on the bridge until eventually the last one placed on it causes the bridge to collapse.

As we go through one of Chris’s most famous examples of catastrophe theory from the animal world, imagine that the board is the dog and the human is the executive. The punchline being that it you are an executive never, ever get your board frightened and angry at the same time. Worse still never allow the situation to build where all of the the Board and the executives frightened and angry at the same time.

“I shall begin by considering a model of aggression in the dog. Konrad Z. Lorenz has pointed out that aggressive behaviour is influenced by two conflicting drivers, rage and fear and he has proposed that in the dog these factors can be measured with some reliability. A dog’s rage is correlated with the degree to which its mouth is open or its teeth are bared; its fear is reflected by how much its ears are flattened back. By employing facial expression as an indicator of eh dog’s emotional state we can attempt to learn how the dog’s behaviour varies as a function of its mood.

If only one of the conflicting emotional factors is present, the response of the dog is relatively easy to predict. If he dog is enraged but not afraid, then some aggressive action, such as attacking, can be expected. When the dog is frightened but is not provoked to anger, aggression becomes improbable and the dog will most likely flee. Prediction is also straightforward if neither stimulus is present, then the dog is likely to express some neutral kind of behaviour unrelated to aggression or submission.

What if the dog is made to feel both rage and fear simultaneously? The two controlling factors are then in direct conflict. Simple models that cannot accommodate discontinuity might predict that the two stimuli would cancel each other, leading again to neutral behaviour. That prediction merely reveals the shortcomings of such simplistic models, since in reality neutrality is in fact the least likely behaviour. When a dog is both angry and frightened, the probabilities of both extreme modes of behaviour are high; the dog may attack or flee but it will not remain indifferent. It is the strength of the model derived from catastrophe theory that it can account for this bi-modal distribution of probabilities. Moreover the model provides a basis for predicting, under particular circumstances, which behaviour the dog will choose. “

Professor Sir Christopher Zeeman The University of Warwick

The chart below sums this up

So, what’s the equivalent of bared teeth and flattened ears for board members, how can you avoid such catastrophic tipping points and what can you do when you start to see the teeth being bared of the ears flattening. Face, voice and body language tend give it away and most times it is obvious when the anger or fear becomes significant. However, as it is much better to spot it before it becomes serious what might be the early signs?

A furrowed brow, a tightening jaw, intense eye contact, light reddening of the face or the person looking around the table to see if others are feeling the same discomfort are good signs. Changes in posture, especially leaning forward and more formal and less obviously friendly language are also useful signals. As are someone starting to tap the table, shake their leg, scratch their face or head repeatedly or clench their hands or laugh sarcastically. All of these are signs of tension and anger rising.

For early signs of fear instead of reddening they may start to pale. Errors in speech or in hearing can also be evident and varying speech tone or breathlessness are also clues. Twitching and avoiding eye contact are other signals. They may also be looking for reassurance from others that everything is alright despite their anxieties. It might be that they also seem to be repeating themselves. The strategic toilet break is another good sign.

A wise Chair's instincts and experience and knowledge of other round the board table will help them develop their own predictive powers of knowing when a tipping or catastrophe point is imminent.

As to what you might do if they don't, well that's covered in the Managing Conflict section

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