Credit: Evolution by Giuseppe Milo via Flickr

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

“Evolution” the noun; “evolve” the verb; and “evolved” the adjective are typically misunderstood and highly controversial terms. An evolutionary lens is important for IT leaders today as it focuses attention on three critical issues:

A] what is the environment we are trying to adapt to;
B] how well are our leadership style and methods adapted to current and emerging requirements; and
C] if there is a leadership disconnect with the environment, how long will adaptation take?

At the Value Studio I recently asked senior executives what word, phrase or image comes immediately to mind when they hear the phrase “evolution”. The responses – not unexpectedly – included, “Darwin,” “monkeys,” “Galápagos Islands,” “Scopes Trial,” “Origin of the Species,” “natural selection,” and “survival of the fittest”.

The Multiple Worlds of IT

The editors at Scientific American in Becoming Human: Our Past, Present and Future tell us that approximately “three million years ago a group of primates known as the australopithecines was walking capably on two legs – the better to navigate the African savanna – and yet still had long arms suited to life in the trees.” They cite the discovery by paleontologists of the 3.3-million-year-old fossil – “Lucy’s baby”. The find precipitated heated argument “centered on the observation that whereas the species has clear adaptations to bipedal walking in its lower body, its upper body contains a number of primitive traits better suited to an arboreal existence, such as long, curved fingers for grasping tree branches. One camp held that A. afarensis had made a full transition to terrestrial life and that the tree-friendly features of the upper body were just evolutionary baggage handed down from an arboreal ancestor. The other side contended that if A. afarensis had retained those traits for hundreds of thousands of years, then tree climbing must have still formed an important part of its locomotor repertoire.”

“Lucy’s Baby” – at least from an evolutionary standpoint appears conflicted. Part of her is designed for walking erect on the savanna and part of her remains suited for swinging through the trees of the jungle. Is this a metaphor for the CIO or what? Part of the CIO has to be attentive to the needs of the present while part of the focus has to be on the future. Part tactical and part strategic. How did “Baby Lucy” move on from tree swinger to the atom splitter who was modern man?

Evolutionary Time Scales

One particularly thoughtful executive applying evolutionary thinking [i.e., models, jargon, frameworks] came to rest pondering “evolutionary time scales, as in how long does evolutionary adaptation take”. In academia, evolutionary time scales are immense. Bernard Wood in Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction posits that our human evolutionary journey included the following mile markers:

Simplest Form of Life - 3 billion years ago
Vertebrates with Four Limbs - 400 million years ago [MYA]
Mammals - 250 MYA
Primates - 50-60 MYA
Modern Man “Splits” with Chimps - 5-8 MYA

“Palaeoanthropology is the science that tries to reconstruct the evolutionary history of this small, exclusively human twig.”[i.e., the last six million years].  Do you think paleontologists have something to teach IT leaders?

Evolution over the years has fascinated a wide and diverse cast of colorful characters. Dinosaur diggers, ship’s captains, flower breeders and monkey keepers have all wrestled with the basic evolutionary questions:

Where did we come from?
Who are we?
Where are we going?

What do you think?