Business Agility Tastes Like Chocolate by Marsha Shenk

We've got four techies working on this. We're still not sure it's that one, but we'll see. This is certainly an outrageous claim, that I think you lose a civility taste like chocolate. I believe it's true, and I hope in the next 30 minutes to show you why I think that. Furthermore, I propose a new metric—this is a leading indicator, an early indicator of whether your agility is improving. And guess what? It has to do with chocolate. Hang on, we'll see if we can do this.

Your ecosystem is continually emergent. The point about this that makes it so difficult is that these changes keep changing. As the exchanges keep changing, they might be rich, they might be home, they might be painful, or they might eat Susan.

Whatever the proposal is, it comes from an intersection of social neuroscience, business anthropology, and ecosystem thinking. That's a whole lot of stuff—a whole lot of it. That's why it took me 40 years to figure it out. But we will see. We'll see if you think it's enlightening.

Here we have—whoops—alright, gentlemen, can we do this? Here we have a lovely video that doesn't want to come on. It's not moving. We're agile, a reaction. We could do this without the video if you have to read. Rather not? Okay. It's taking its time to load.

This is about wolves being introduced into Yellowstone Park—a big park in the United States. Fifteen wolves were introduced into the park, and like wolves do, they began preying on deer. Then there were fewer deer, and so more plants grew. As the plants grew, other species appeared—very important species like the beaver, which built dams. Beaver dams attracted other animals, etc. Ultimately, the rivers changed their course. The rivers changed their course because there were so many more trees as a result of all the other changes.

This is how ecosystems change. Ecosystems are biological—they’re not technical—and biological. Why is this important? This photograph was taken in India in 2006. It blows away so many things that we know. So we know that animals cooperate. Oops—that's a frog. It's not a mammal. It's not a social animal. And yet here we have a moment of agility—the frog carrying the mouse across a flooded river. I love this photograph.

I'm not going to read the part about the spider—you can read it, you'll get the slides. But as the exchanges change, the ecosystem changes. So what's going to happen because that ballast is on the other side of the river? We don't know. This will keep happening in your business ecosystem. And hopefully, you'll be the one that carries the mouse across the river—because you're open.

Okay, well, I want to bring in a bit of social neuroscience. This wasn't available when I was the age that most of you are, but I suspected that it was true. And now it's been proven, which I love. The brain is designed to stop learning at puberty. If you think that's not important, look at these photographs. Just notice how you feel when you look at them. You feel something because you're tuned.

People began to be surprised by these photographs, and there are a lot of them now. They've exploded—species that are supposed to be predator and prey who bond and go through life together. This is agility. This is agility interaction.

Mammals are 65 million years old. Our ancestors—maybe three or four. So that enormous advantage of raising the young, bonding, and working together is the advantage of autonomy.

This is a recent photograph. It was in Rolling Stone in 2019. This is a recent photograph of India LaVon. I cried at it because these people are still living the way they lived in the Stone Age. They're being protected, certainly, but we learn about what life was like for them. They knew their ecosystem. By the time they reached puberty, they had complete security in their role. That is to say—how do I contribute, and how am I contributed to? Who can I count on? Who could I not? Maybe someone is hard of hearing—you want to watch them if they're near where a river falls because they might fall.

This is the kind of thing you know if you spend all your life with a small group of people. You know who's hard of hearing. You know who has a great throwing arm.

This experiment, which is indicated by these two characters, changed the course of neuroscience. I'll take a minute to tell you about it. College students were selected, as they often are for these kinds of studies. They were put into an MRI, and this is what they saw—figures throwing the ball. Sometimes they threw the ball to the subject. Then the subject gets to decide—who do I throw the ball to? And then, after a while, the two figures only throw the ball to each other. They don't throw it to the person who's in the MRI.

This experiment has been repeated and tested. To a person, the students emerged and said, I don't like it. They didn't like me. They didn't think I was good. They didn't want to play with me. And their mood was subdued. Of course, neuroscientists were watching what was going on in their brain.

I was asked to do another talk this afternoon, which I'm going to do. I'm going to go deeper into the social brain. For now, we're going to leave it like this.

These hubs—which are built before puberty—create that mechanism: I'm not sure they liked me. Maybe I didn’t play well enough. This is very old. You don't get rid of this. This is not something that you make go away. This is deeply, deeply in your brain. And yes, we can train ourselves, of course. But it's there.

Now, coming to business anthropology—which is where I have spent my career—what I have always noticed is that when asked to design a new exchange, such as the frog carrying the mouse past the river, we hesitate. But we have learned to design. We have learned to experiment. We have learned to extend safety—what Google calls psychological safety, I call social security. We can learn to extend that.

All these changes are based in vulnerability. This is what our brains are designed to make us do. So here's my first introduction to my metric. Any demand for an exchange is a stressful moment—it's a moment of social stress. You can get through it very quickly.

You could be in a small shop buying a banana in the morning, and that could be a painful exchange. It could be a meh exchange. It could be a rich exchange. Probably not going to be a sweet spot exchange. But you could make it a rich exchange so easily. Instead of being just another person who comes through the store, the clerk has a moment of brightness because you extended gratitude.

This has huge consequences in business. The clerk is rejuvenated—or the clerk is depleted.

I want to talk about sweet spot exchanges. A sweet spot exchange is a moment with contribution from the best of you.

Just this past Friday, this came across from a test company—a startup called Starry. They're giving software to public housing projects in Austin so that everyone living there has top-speed internet. This has positive consequences for the city. Other cities are now buying this for their housing projects. Developers building market-rate apartments are buying the product and being encouraged to provide low-income housing as well.

These guys had a smart idea about 5G and public housing. They're making a huge difference.

This is a sweet spot exchange. This is ecstasy. Imagine being the person who thought of that.

In my consulting practice, I have built businesses around rich and sweet spot exchanges. And I can't tell you how many times people told me it was impossible. I've stopped counting.

If you measure your rich and sweet spot exchanges, you measure your increased agility. If you do that, then you'll be the one they will talk to. You'll be the one they build strategy with. You'll have the partners to design the value that's going to take you through whatever is changing.

And that's my sales pitch. I think I'm done.

Remember—biology. Don't forget it. Because history is online—and in a few books.