Learning from Blue Tits Phenomenon

In early twentieth century, across Britain, garden birds’ blue titmice and red robins learnt to sip cream from open milk bottles delivered by milkman. This lasted for a while, and in 1930’s bottlers decided to put aluminum foil on top of milk bottle. By 1950's, entire estimated population of one million Blue Titmice learnt to pierce the aluminum foil on milk bottle while red robins could not. Occasionally an individual robin learnt how to pierce the milk bottle, but the skill never spread to the entire population as it did with blue tits.

Researchers have examined this behavior and found extraordinary mechanism of learning in flock, diffusion of the learned knowledge and the tribe following the new learnings

According to Allan Wilson’s, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley for an entire species to exploit the opportunities in its environment. Three conditions are necessary.

a) The members of the species must flock together rather than sit individually in isolated territories.

b) Few individuals must have the potential to invent new behaviors—new skills.

c) The species must have an established process for transmitting a skill from the individual to the entire community, not genetically but through direct communication.

Red Robins are very territorial and if you find them in a garden, they all are sitting in different areas, own territory. They will defend their area very aggressively if another robin tries to live there. Blue tits live in pairs till they teach their newborn to fly and feed, and then become part of flock of 8-10 birds, moving from one place to another, playing and searching for food.

Red robins communicate a lot between themselves. The difference between the two birds could not be attributed to their ability to communicate. Blue tits and robins communicate in similar ways, but the difference could only be explained in the way blue tits pass on their skills from one individual bird to the species as a whole.

Dr Lucy Aplin did extensive research on this, and her research titled Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds | Nature, demonstrates that from only two trained great tits (Parus major) birds in each sub-population, the information spread rapidly through social network ties, to reach an average of 75% of individuals, with a total of 414 knowledgeable individuals performing 57,909 solutions over all replicates. More details of her research are here Social networks and culture in birds - YouTube. Innovators (in the experiment set) learnt and passed on learnings to larger population.

Blue Tits were creating a culture through Learned Behavior and Social learning. The cultural intelligence hypothesis also assumes that social learning is more efficient than individual learning, and that social learning, and thus culture, may affect evolution.

With the decrease of doorstop deliveries and changed preferences such as skimmed milk, blue tits phenomenon has practically died out years ago. In business world, there are learnings from Blue Titmice phenomenon, on creating your tribe and have sustain advantage over other species aka competition.

1. Remove individual territories and islands of power and create flock that move together
2. Identify and promote risk takers in your team, who will experiment, go in untrodden paths, and will create new wins and traditions
3. Make sure learnings, from Innovators in the team, is systematically passed on to the larger teams. Innovators should have the tenacity to take the tribe along and not hold on knowledge to themselves but pass on.
4. Emphasis on group’s social learning from each other along with individual learning paths. Create a culture of sharing the lessons learned to ensure institutional learning.?Skunk works is an example of this phenomenon of institutional learning

While the learnings are clear - do share your views on how easy or difficult it is to implement such a culture in your organization.?

References:

Facebook 1958: Britain was being overrun by tits. No milk bottle was safe.

Milk Thieves - YouTube

Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds | Nature

Blue tits lose their bottle as milk thieves | The Independent | The Independent

Milk bottle-raiding birds pass on thieving ways to their flock (theconversation.com)

Social networks and culture in birds - YouTube

Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis | Science

Social learning and evolution: the cultural intelligence hypothesis - PMC (nih.gov)

The Skunk Works? Legacy | Lockheed Martin