Organization design as guano ring management
Probably a multipart series. Mainly wanted to get this old metaphor out of my head.
Stephen Jay Gould has a wonderful essay - “The Guano Ring” - in his collection Hen’s Teeth and Horses Toes. In it he introduces us to the blue-footed booby of the Galápagos Islands. The bird is interesting for a host of reasons but for my purposes here it’s the animal’s nesting and child rearing behaviors that matter. The bird’s nest is a ring of guano (bird crap to you and me). And while they tend to lay two eggs, they only rear one chick. Infanticide occurs when then second chick wanders out of the guano ring. At this point the mother is either unable or unwilling to acknowledge the chick as theirs.
Similar dynamics play out across most large organizations. We subdivide the enterprise into functions, departments, cost centers, P&Ls, etc. And while there are big operational benefits to these arrangements they often become organizational guano rings. The organization becomes incapable of seeing / thinking / recognizing / acting beyond these divisional confines to access the possibilities operating just outside the guano ring.
The tools - here the organization design - become the master. This is often the root of the oft proclaimed mantra of consultants and the buyers of their services that we need to “break down silos”. I’ll return to this topic in greater detail later but the bird shit nest as filtering mechanism / organizational division of labor metaphor has been knocking around in my head for ages and I needed to set it free.