Humans began farming 12.000 years or so ago, in many places across the globe. Cultivation of barley, wheat, peas, and lentils, along with the domestication of sheep, goat, and pigs in the Fertile Crescent; rice and millet farming in East Asia; corn in Mesoamerica; potatoes and beans, along with llamas and alpacas raising, in South America; sorghum and millet in sub-saharan Africa; and sugarcane and taro in New Guinea. From the geological time perspective, that wave popped up almost simultaneously everywhere. Notice that it did not “spread” but emerged among diverse populations far apart.
How can one explain this apparent synchronicity? Maybe the human brain, ability, and knowledge evolved linearly among hunter-gatherers. Maybe natural selection pushed humankind through development in a forward, logical direction. These two hypotheses, isolated from context, lead to a false explanation to what sparked farming.
Humans did not follow an intrinsic biological mechanism leading into agriculture. It was not a natural ability matured over thousands of years of hunting-gathering. What actually happened is that men and women had to adapt to the several cycles of ice-age expansion and retreat. The anticipation of cyclical periods of abundance and scarcity, forced humans to adopt a new paradigm. Instead of going after food, they reversed the flow; food came to them via farming.
This way of revising History is insightful; it clarifies problem solving and creativity. Everything is part of a complex system. Context in time and space hides the causes for phenomena we try to understand or intervene. History is full of contextual drivers to explain synchronicity. Examples are the emergence of spoken and written language, ideology, religion, technology and so on. In the example above, the drivers that led to the invention of farming was not a simple element in human’s genes or brains, but the natural way humans used “available” tools to multiply food, adapting to similar climate conditions worldwide.
In professional routines, this insight shows that complex challenges require systemic perspective. A systemic perspective can be revealed through time (sequence of events, delays) and depth (hierarchy of events, interconnectedness). For the sake of clarity, let me give you two examples on how time and depth perspective can induce creative solutions to systemic malfunctions.
In my country, the ministry of education organizes school holidays per region, in three different dates, avoiding overcrowding. The system, comprised by parents in search for destinations during school holidays, is managed in space and time. An elegant solution that spreads consumption and crowding instead of building up extra assets for the peak season.
The Zappos case, an unique approach to high employee turnover, is another example of systemic perspective in long lasting solutions. After the initial onboarding training, Zappos offers an attractive sum of money to those who leave, after realizing that the company culture is not for them. Next, customer-facing employees are encouraged to build up relationship with their clients instead of following old fashioned metrics of client acquisition. The company aims at the loyalty of their clients, not at the size of their wallet. Finally top managers are encouraged to reflect the central company culture on performance reviews among employees. In recent years, this human resources experiment evolved into a unique leadership style of self-management. Once again, perspective in time and depth is the underlying source of systemic solution.
The Unconscious Skill 