The Social Brain

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In this newsletter, I review an authoritative text that takes an often overlooked body of scientific knowledge of human societies and applies it to the real world of large organisations.?

In the development of Drama for Change, my method for impacting organisational culture with a campaign based around a pertinent video drama, I studied the work of Robin Dunbar, the Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University, in-depth and clung to it almost talisman-like to help me see the wood for the trees. So, I must confess I felt a little jealous when I discovered The Social Brain, in which Dunbar collaborates with business experts to apply theory to practice.?

The authors

Robin Dunbar is perhaps best known for the Dunbar Number, and his award-winning research has been foundational to understanding human connection and social dynamics. HR and L&D people may be familiar with his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language.

The Social Brain ?is the result of Tracey Camilleri, director of business leadership programmes at Oxford Sa?d Business School and Samantha Rockey, an expert in learning, team effectiveness, culture and performance in global corporations, getting together with Robin Dunbar to bring their deep understanding of the corporate world in line with his academic research.?

Don't forget you're an animal

The book's core message is simple – much organisational design and management is based on the assumption that we are rational beings and takes little account of our biology. Evidence shows this to be hugely counterproductive, which is a shame when so much is known about the science of human behaviour and how to design for it. Based on his research, the book re-states the Dunbar principles and gives countless examples of how the principles have been followed and contradicted in the corporate world.?

"Our psychology and our behaviour are adapted to managing a very, very small-scale world, and not the metropolises and mega-organisations within which we now live and work. In the tension between who we are and where we now find ourselves lie the dilemmas and stresses that face every human organisation in the contemporary world – and the focus of this book."

The Principles

Let's take a look at some of the Dunbar principles:?

Humans are hardwired for connection, and being part of a social group is critical. Group well-being relies on three key principles: group size, the quality of relationships, which decline as group size increases, and hormonal responses. Positive hormonal responses, like endorphin release, stem from activities such as physical contact, handshakes, and shared experiences. Too much cortisol caused by fear and stress contributes to various negative outcomes.?

Crystalline structures

Our biology limits the number of people we can maintain meaningful relationships with. The famous "Dunbar number" is 150. This is the ideal group size for a community, seen repeatedly across geography and time. For example, it was the mean size of a village in the Domesday Book. Communities around 150 are more stable and retain more coherence and integrity than larger communities. One reason is that we are much more willing to be altruistic towards and offer support to people we know well. In a face-to-face context, it is surprisingly difficult to refuse to be generous to people whom we have known personally for many years.

?But 150 isn't the only important number. Different tasks demand different group sizes. Groups most quickly and effectively make decisions of three to five. Groups of ten to fifteen are ideal for brainstorming. Groups of fifty need structure and directive leadership. Groups of more than 150 need significant logistics, process and structure. Beyond 150, fault lines appear. 'We' becomes 'us' and 'them' and silos quickly emerge. An organisation built in line the Dunbar number system has a strong structure that looks like a crystalline fractal.

?Of course, even in the most ideally structured organisations, the stresses that naturally arise need behavioural mechanisms to mitigate them. These include laughter, singing, dancing, feasting and storytelling. This book is about how to work with the grain of these insights.

The numbers game

The Flight Centre Travel Group offers an example of applying the Dunbar numbers in business. As part of a relentless focus on growth, they tried growing team size, aiming to grow profits in their travel centres. They soon noticed that beyond a team size of six or seven, extra staff did not increase profits – only costs.?

CEO Graham 'Skroo' Turner became interested in evolutionary psychology, structuring the company in a familial, tribal manner with shared principles combined with the freedom for the small groups to determine their own culture and ways of working. Their website says, 'The backbone of Flight Centre's organisational structure is the Stone Age concept of Family, Village, Tribe. Our structure is simple, lean, flat and transparent, with accessible leaders.'?

Flight Centre has strong guiding principles – ownership and empowerment are two foundational elements – and deliberately few layers. This structure has created huge loyalty and connectivity through the forty years or so of the company's history

Against the grain

One way organisations contradict the Dunbar principles is to focus too much on the individual at the group's expense. Corporate inductions are often a case in point, emphasising the organisation rather than the recruit. The stress is on corporate assimilation rather than belonging.?

"It's ironic that companies often spend significant resources on external strategy advice while ignoring one of the most fruitful sources of strategic insights: their own employees."

A sense of belonging

The fact that multiple studies show that the quality and number of close friendships are the best predictor of your chances of surviving for a year after a first heart attack should be enough to demonstrate the primary importance of well-being at work.?

Humans crave a sense of kinship or belonging. This facilitates the psychological safety needed as a backdrop for risk-taking and innovation. It is also the foundation for thriving and well-being. The most productive elements of kinship can be replicated in the workplace by designing for shared traditions, language, rituals and stories – the things we naturally use to create a sense of tribal belonging.

Synchrony

A powerful biological force we can employ is synchrony. The feeling is created with shared experiences. An example from the book of a synchrony-promoting experience I was naturally drawn to is the shared laughter at comedy or empathy at tragedy in a theatre audience. One experiment showed that an audience who watched a tragedy, unlike those who watched a documentary together, exhibited elevated pain thresholds after the event (an indicator for increased levels of positive hormones). This made the audience members feel bonded to the other people in the audience – even though they had never met before.

Synchrony is also promoted with such simple solutions as walking meetings, and the military experience it during drill.?

Have your cake and eat it

Eating together is a key way communities have traditionally bonded and welcomed strangers into a community. One study revealed that holding a Big Lunch event at work could increase productivity by 12%.?

It's also handy to know that eating a meal together before, rather than after, an important meeting releases endorphins that positively affect its outcome

Storytelling

These passages on storytelling could have come from one of my articles about Drama for Change.

"Storytelling has been practised throughout history to bind communities together and help make sense of things."

"Storytelling, (…), is inclusive. It requires the listener to interpret what they're being told: it allows them to add in something of themselves, particularly if the story has an emotional hook. A good story is remade in the ear of the recipient and renewed in the mouth of the subsequent teller. At the same time, it is a powerful way to get a message across, because narrative is how we humans make sense of things and how we relate to one another."

And this leads us to gossip – something they are enthusiastic about.

Joking, gossip, and light-hearted criticism are evaluated as the most human ways to address breaches of societal norms. Organisations where laughter is rarely heard, gentle teasing is frowned upon, or no time for gossip lack those important self-regulating communal practices. Such social strategies work best when the community is small, and people know each other. We are always more willing to accept criticism from friends than from strangers.?

Woopsie

I'm a huge fan of this book, but it feels important to point out an error. They quote the often repeated populist interpretation of the Albert Mehrabian experiment suggesting that when we listen to someone speak, our attention is divided, so we only take in 7% of meaning from what they say, 38% from their tone of voice and 55% from their body language. In fact, this strange communication imbalance was only observed when the participants were talking about their feelings. Plus, these figures have not been replicated in later studies.

Work, rest and play

If we look at HR trends, there's clearly a place for the wisdom of The Social Brain. Only recently,?Gartner found that ?"while 82% of employees say it's important for their organisation to see them as a person, not just an employee, only 45% of employees believe their organisation actually sees them this way."

Toxic culture in the workplace is a widespread concern.?According to MIT Sloan , it was the single best predictor of attrition during the first six months of the Great Resignation — 10 times more powerful than how employees viewed their compensation in predicting employee turnover. Based on Glassdoor reviews, their analysis identified five attributes that people use to define a toxic culture: disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive. One thing these terms have in common is that they suggest a lack of humanity.??

I'll leave the last word to the authors:

"Some of the conclusions we draw are hard to implement, particularly those that address the underlying design of organisations. Some are easy, cheap and simple to incorporate. A meal together, a walking meeting, ten minutes shaved off a call for a more personal check-in – these quickly and automatically change the hormonal mix within which we operate, making work feel more like play. The pay-off from the various insights we offer could be the creation of organisations where the next generation will thrive – where work is decent, purposeful, and to be enjoyed, and where each person gets to express their individual talent in work that matters."