The Good Part About It Being
a Jungle Out There
By Larry Dressler

There is much to learn by the jungle's example when it comes to workforce management. Larry Dressler is president of Boulder, Colorado-based leadership and organization development company Blue Wing Consulting (www.bluewingconsulting.com) and author of the book Consensus through Conversation: How to Achieve High-Commitment Decisions. He has culled a slew of management tips from his experience living and working in the Amazon rainforest.

The "it's jungle out there" expression has given the real thing a bad rap. In actuality there's also a lot of cooperation going on in the wild, says Dressler, who lived in the Amazon for a year in 1994, and goes back periodically. "In rainforests, cooperation is rewarded," he points out. "When you walk into a tropical rainforest, you don't experience it as a place where species are competing, per se. You see a system of really diverse and very interdependent players. Symbiosis is a way of life in the forest" For example, he says a tree may produce a kind of sap that attracts a certain kind of ant, whose presence then protects the tree's bark from fungus and other kinds of insects that would harm it.

Similarly, organizations can develop a culture that emphasizes cooperation rather than competition, Dressler says. "Biologists have found nature favors cooperative traits over competitive traits," he explains, "because cooperation takes less energy, so if you think about how organizations work, how much energy gets sapped up by [being territorial], by internal competition or by withholding information and resources?" To remedy the sense that workers are pegged against each other, Dressler recommends the use of multi-disciplinary and cross-functional teams to work on projects of mutual interest. "I'm a huge advocate of cross-functional conversationsš diverse players talking together about new ways in which their disciplines, their resources and their goals could come together to create something entirely different that what they­ve been able to create by operating independently."

Companies also can learn from the positive role played by change in the rainforest, Dressler says. "What we learn from nature is when organizations spend too much time in their comfort zone, they die" he says, explaining that the nearly constant environmental change of the rainforest forces species to adapt or die off. The same is true of the business worldšorganizations that don't adapt to changing times will eventually lose profitability, and employees who don't acquire new skills will find themselves out of work. ™Disturbance that moves people and companies out of their comfort zone and into their learning zone is a good thing. As a trainer, the thing I have to ask myself is, 'How do I create an impetus for people to be positively disturbed?'" he says.

One course Dressler teaches, "Fierce Conversations," teaches leaders to constructively discuss touchy subjects. Says Dressler, "When people take on the toughest conversations, that elicits growth and learning. Healthy rainforests and healthy organizations are constantly adapting and tapping into mutually beneficial relationships. In forests that happens as a natural process. In organizations, it happens through skillful conversation."

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