Perspectives 4: Can chickens collaborate?
“Defensive thinkers best defend themselves from knowing who they are.”
So… can chickens collaborate? Let’s start by defining collaboration as working jointly on an activity, especially to produce or create something. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the answer is no, chickens can’t collaborate. However, chickens, like people, can have behaviors that negatively impact production or creation.
In Cultivating Collaboration: Don’t Be So Defensive, Jim Tamm discusses his fascinating experiment with chickens before outlining the number one behavior that prohibits successful production or creation.
In his TEDx talk, Jim explains that he identified two different types of chickens: moderate producers of eggs and high producers. What he found was that those that were high producers produced more eggs because they bullied the moderate egg layers, causing stress and less egg production. Therefore, the more aggressive chickens laid more eggs in comparison to the moderate egg layers.
Jim describes these aggressive birds as red-line chickens and the moderate producers that were milder in temperament as green-line chickens.
In an experiment, all red-line chickens were put together in one living area for a year, and all green-line chickens were placed in a different living area at the same time. So surely when you put all the best performers together, you would have the best egg production, right?
Wrong!
What Jim found was that most of the red-line chickens didn’t even survive the year, egg production was terrible, and the chickens that did survive had no feathers and lots of injuries.
For the green-line chickens, however, production went up %260 that year. Look at the impact of removing the bullies (or negative influences) from the community!
Can you relate to how a red-line chicken feels? Undoubtedly you’ve been involved in an effort that was supposed to be collaborative and left feeling like you’ve been attacked and had all your feathers pulled out. I know I have.
Jim suggests that many collaborative efforts become hostile because people get defensive.
“When we get defensive, we are not defending ourselves from another person, we are defending ourselves from fears inside of us that we don’t want to feel.”
According to Jim, three common fears that lead to defensiveness include:
Worries about our own significance
Our competence
Our likability
Jim proposes we identify the first feeling that indicates we are getting defensive and create a way to defuse reactions early on.
For me, I’ve got one primary trigger and one predictable reaction. The trigger is when someone treats me disrespectfully, and the reaction is a student surge of adrenaline, making my heart rate spike.
Unfortunately, as soon as this happens, I stop being able to think clearly. Jim says this is normal and that we tend to lose measurable IQ points when we become defensive, turning us stupid.
He proposes we create a mechanism to recognize and defuse our defensive reaction. He admits this is easier said than done.
Reflection
So what’s your trigger? And what is that initial reaction when you realize you’re becoming defensive?
