Weekend Reading: The Strength of the Wolf is the Pack — Character, Leadership & Computational Social Science
Discussions of?character?typically feature lists of traits — or "virtues" — that an individual demonstrates with reliable regularity. The case is the same in discussions of leaders, and perhaps there is sense in this if we think of leaders as those who display?virtuous traits that others seek to emulate.?
But we cannot discuss?leadership?in this way, for the term does more than to describe a disposition or role. Rather, "leadership" implies a dynamic and goal-driven process, and one that is only meaningfully expressed within a context that necessarily involves others — namely, followers.
Leadership and followership are sides of a coin. The twin terms connote an inherent role-fluidity: effective leaders are ready to step back and to assume the role of follower when context demands, regardless of formal designations or rank, just as effective followers must step forward reliably when context calls for the deployment of unique skills, knowledge, or experience that they may possess.
Few have expressed better than Kipling the perspective we wish to emphasize:
Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back — for the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
As a group-level phenomenon, successful leadership — and followership — can now be studied in action through data-based methods made available by computational social science. These tools allow us to obtain metrics by which we may predict the performance outcomes groups are likely to achieve (or not), thus enabling us to course correct with the aid of machine learning feedback loops.
These capabilities are set to transform both the study and the?practice of leadership. In turn, "computational leadership tools" will enable tremendous performance and productivity gains for organizations of all types, public and private. But before looking forward, let's take some lessons from history.
The Habit of Excellence
Service in the British Army offers a career-long education in human nature, leadership, and the lengths to which people who share a common purpose and identity are willing to go in service of their mission. Yet, oddly, and despite its centuries-long history, only recently was the UK Centre for Army Leadership formed and tasked with codifying the leadership lessons which that rich history of leadership experience affords.
While sometimes evidenced in acts of courage or heroism, it is far more often the case that leadership in the British Army is seen in every-day acts that reflect a readiness to do the right thing in service of the mission. And while ideas about what constitutes "the right thing" have most assuredly changed over time, as the Army Leadership Doctrine emphasizes, leadership has always been understood as a uniquely human endeavor that reflects "a combination of character, knowledge and action that inspires others to succeed."
Tracing its roots back to 1660, the British Army was and remains an institution that reflects the mores of the society it serves. In its formative centuries, leadership was viewed as the preserve of officers in formal positions of command and control. The Duke of Wellington, for instance, claimed to have had "no idea of any great effect being produced on British soldiers by anything but the fear of immediate corporal punishment."
But through the hard-fought arguments and hard-won lessons necessary to the slow process of professionalism, such thinking has shifted dramatically.
By the 19th century, Lt. Col. Garnet Wolseley voiced the "industrial paternalism" of his era, writing that officers "must make themselves loved as well as respected." He urged that "In our intercourse with the rank and file, we must make them realise that all our interests are identical, causing the latest-joined recruit to feel that success is of as much real moment to him as it can be to the general."
Leaders, that is, must rely on more than hierarchy and command-authority to achieve their will. "To get the best out of men, it is not enough to tell them that they must be ready to die in the last ditch," military theorist Basil Liddle Hart wrote in 1940. "They must be given a new vision of the future and a new hope."
Thinking continued to evolve in this direction and, today, the Army's Followership Doctrine?emphasizes decentralized command, the importance of decision-making at all levels, and empowering every soldier to lead as circumstances demand.?
Implicit in this, commanders must be prepared to?follow?willingly when circumstances demand, putting an ethos of "followership" on equal footing with that of "leadership."
Effective teamwork underpins our philosophy of mission command. It requires leadership at all levels, inspiring and motivating others into action. It also requires values-driven, proactive, and professional followers, performing at their best to achieve the mission. All leaders are themselves followers and nearly all followers have the ability to lead. From Private to General, we all have a responsibility to follow.
Every social group, team, tribe, organization, or society, must achieve coherence between the needs of the individual — 'the wolf' — and those of the collective — 'the pack.' And the story of human evolution has demonstrated that such coherence is necessary if we are to thrive rather than merely survive.
Contrary to the oft-perceived notion of leaders as those in defined positions of authority, we now recognize that leadership — and its inseparable twin, followership — are the preserve of every individual in the group. Effective groups — those best able to optimize their competitive advantages — understand this vital interplay between leadership and followership and demonstrate the humility that it necessitates.
And today we recognize that humans are primed by evolution to function in social networks. These manifest in formal hierarchies captured by org charts, but also — and more importantly — as informal relationships of power and influence.
We see this in the precepts of "Mission Command," defined in US Army doctrine as the "approach to command and control that empowers subordinate decision making and decentralized execution appropriate to the situation."
Now ubiquitous across NATO forces, Mission Command is an operational mindset that enables the Commander's Intent (the 'what' and the 'why'), to empower subordinates' action (the 'how'), applying judgment and decision-making as far forward on the battlefield as circumstances permit.
Kipling's timeless quote speaks to the heart of this doctrine. And yet these ideas, so clearly in evidence in military life, often struggle to gain traction among public sector policymakers and in private sector executive circles.
Coercive Competition
Behavioral scientists emphasize the value of social structures that enable groups of individuals to operate as a single "Supermind." But natural science establishes the behavioral substrate of our species, and scholars in evolutionary anthropology, genetics, endocrinology, neurobiology, and cognitive neuroscience all consistently agree: we are an "obligatorily gregarious" species — a pack animal.
"People expect from the social sciences—anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science—the knowledge to understand their lives and control their future. They want the power to predict," writes the father of socio-biology, E. O. Wilson. But suffering from insufficient appeal to the natural sciences, orthodox economic models — and the management theories they inspire — are "sealed off from the complexities of human behavior." This leaves us persistently flat-footed.
While Western traditions of economic and political thought reify individual distinctiveness, at our genetic roots we are better understood to be unique manifestations of a collective phenomenon, and one that makes the maintenance of group membership of paramount importance. The evolutionary imperative of belonging shapes our identities, thinking, beliefs, and behaviors, all of which bend towards established group-level preferences.
This "normative compliance" with the dictates of 'the pack' has implications for how we consider character, leadership, and management.
An emphasis on monetary incentives dominates orthodox economics. But it is entirely consistent with our evolutionary heritage that "rational actors" would seek to maximize belonging and even prioritize this over material gain. "The preponderance of the evidence—both observational and experimental—supports the hypothesis that we cooperate primarily because we crave reward (engagement) and fear punishment (exclusion) from other members of our group," writes the renowned security technologist Bruce Schneier.
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The dark-side of this is a so-called 'common-is-moral' heuristic: "A selfish behavior that was common was judged as more moral than when rare," one study found, "and an altruistic behavior that was rare was judged as less moral than when common." The 'right' behaviors, in short, are those witnessed among our peers—and the more often a particular behavior is witnessed, the more right it must surely be.
The imperative of belonging thus results in a coercive pressure that shapes individual and group behavior alike. In so doing, it directly shapes the performance outcomes that teams and organizations are able to achieve.
But because individuals likely belong to multiple groups within any organization, each exerting its own coercive force, they are subject to a "coercive competition" of sorts. Compliance with the normative dictates of one group may run counter to compliance with those of another. This confronts us with an infrequently recognized and poorly understood management challenge.
Mission Command may rely on the power of hierarchy to prioritize comportment with Commander's Intent. In most organizations, however, it is more likely that individuals act in keeping with the expectations of peers with whom they share the deepest bonds of trust. That is, they act in accordance with their closest social network neighbors, rather than any proverbial "tone from the top."
Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar has found that all primates exist within nested social worlds, with very few intimate peers at the center and decreasing levels of emotional investment and trust as we extend outwards. (See Figure 1) This is true in the organizational context as well: individual employees come together in clusters of highly trusted peers.
These peer trust networks have little to do with the formal intended ordering envisioned by org charts. Rather, they constitute what has been called "the company behind the chart."
Computational Leadership Science
Our social nature has fostered myriad advantages, but also gives rise to conflicts of interests and coordination challenges. Cooperation between groups is essential to achieving the common good, but coercive competition can ignite conflicts. Bureaucracy — both a product of these complex group dynamics and a hoped-for means of managing such — may facilitate coordination but may also hinder agility.
Ideally, consistent organizational values mediate the coercive competition between peer groups. But rather than rely on good fortune in this regard, tools made newly available through computational social science allow us to map the interpersonal trust networks operating within organizations and to measure their behavior-shaping dynamics. By sifting indicative—and predictive—signals from within readily available data sets, these tools equip us with heretofore unavailable leadership insights.
Notably, the related technologies evolved from the application of computing power in the natural sciences: they derive from earlier work in the field of computational biology, at the root of astonishing achievements in genetic engineering.
This new field leverages lessons learned through the long practice of leadership, knowledge accumulated through decades of social science research, and innovations stemming from advancements in computational power, data analysis, network science, and artificial intelligence.
Applied in the leadership context, computational social science seeks to enhance our understanding of how leadership unfolds, to predict performance outcomes, and to optimize organizational effectiveness by discerning patterns, trends, and dynamics in leadership processes and their surrounding contexts.
This new "computational leadership science" allows us to explore the intricacies of group dynamics by analyzing behavioral and decision-making patterns within social networks, and equips us with tools to map out the intricate connections among leaders, followers, and the various factors that shape their relational dynamics. Such insights promise to transform the ways in which we seek to lead and manage teams and organizations.
Leveraging data from various sources — including electronic communications, collaboration platforms, and even physiological responses in face-to-face encounters — machine-learning algorithms can identify patterns indicative of character traits such as trust, honesty, and humility as these are expressed in our social interactions within an organization.
For instance, trust might be assessed by tracking the frequency of collaborative efforts and the extent to which individuals share credit for successes. Honesty could be gauged by analyzing consistency between stated intentions and subsequent actions. Humility might be inferred from the degree of active listening demonstrated during group discussions and the willingness to adopt others' ideas. Real-time monitoring of these behavioral cues can offer immediate insights into the group's overall health and cohesion.?
The leadership tools these technologies afford help to illuminate the dynamics of coercive competition, making them subject to active and intentional management. When combined with predictive models, these tools serve as behavioral early-warning-systems, positioning leaders to intervene proactively to encourage desirable conduct norms and to curb the spread of behavioral norms inconsistent with an organization’s mission or values.
Equipped with such insights, we may identify transformative pathways through which to refine leadership strategies, bolster group cohesion, and foster sustainable performance successes. While still novel, in the near term, such capabilities will become standard in the arsenal of effective organizations.
Character and Code
Military leadership has evolved from the rigor of command-and-control discipline to the greater efficacy afforded through the enlivening of Commander’s Intent among troops in the field. In the workplace, top-down management bureaucracies have been displaced by the competitive advantages achieved through 'flat organizational structures.' And yet our leadership toolkits remain largely constrained by yesterday’s technologies and mindsets. It’s time for a new toolkit.
Leadership must be viewed as a cultural phenomenon. "Normative compliance" with a group’s cultural disposition shapes individual and organizational behaviors. When this is understood and managed actively within teams and organizations, habits of excellence may be achieved and maintained. And when leadership reflects and encourages trust, humility, and role-fluidity among leaders and followers, teams will overcome coordination challenges more readily and enjoy highly adaptive competitive advantages.
Leadership produces observable group behaviors, and digital signals reflecting these interpersonal dynamics can be distilled from standard, non-sensitive organizational data streams. These can be queried with analytical rigor through the application of computational social science methodologies.
Management tools based on these capabilities equip leaders with a data-driven compass by which to navigate the nuance of group-level performance dynamics, enabling agile real-time adjustments that support optimal performance outcomes. The adoption of such tools by those entrusted with leadership responsibilities marks them out as deserving of such.
Stephen Scott is the Founder & CEO of Starling and the Executive Editor of Starling Insights. With degrees in the social and management sciences from Cornell, Columbia, the London School of Economics, and the London Business School, his professional expertise is in investigative risk intelligence and applied behavioral science.
Lieutenant Colonel (Retd.) Langley Sharp MBE is the former Head of the British Army’s Centre for Army Leadership. Langley is the author of the British Army’s official account of leadership, The Habit of Excellence, distilling over three centuries of experience and understanding of what the Army considers its ‘principle professional competency.’ He is the founder of Frontier Leadership, an executive coaching and leadership advisory.
Brian?R. Spisak, PhD, is a senior partner and chief people officer at Csuite Growth Advisors and the program director of AI and Leadership at the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. He is a faculty member at the American College of Healthcare Executives and the author of the best-selling book Computational Leadership: Connecting Behavioral Science and Technology to Optimize Decision-Making and Increase Profits.
This piece first appeared in Starling Insights' newsletter on January 19, 2025. If you are interested in receiving our thrice-weekly newsletter, among many other benefits, please consider signing up as a Member of Starling Insights.