The Boiling frog effect
In a previous article, I referred to organisational culture as a sea that everyone in the organisation swims in, so that changing the cultural tide requires not just corporate signposting from leaders but sustained ongoing commitment from everyone.
But organisational culture is only a small part of a broader cultural and community eco-system. Taking the analogy further, seas are usually partially enclosed by land (organisational borders) and often found at the margins of oceans (the broader cultural environments that we live and participate in).
And yet, despite these interrelationships, organisations sometimes cling to their internal culture, maintaining behaviours and actions that are inconsistent with broader community expectations and values. External environments are ignored or ‘normalised’ through cognitive biases to justify maintaining the organisation’s alternative reality.
But in doing so, organisations run the risk of becoming a ‘boiled frog’ as they fail to adapt to the changing moral, social and political temperature around (and under) them.
Some immediate examples that spring to mind involve senior leadership (ex-leadership in many cases now) of the financial services industry as uncovered by Commissioner Hayne in the Financial Services Royal Commission. Within the public service, there has been board changes at NSW’s icare and even more recently, governance concerns at ASIC and lastly, ‘watch-gate’ at Australia Post.
In relation to Australia Post, Christina Holgate’s resignation was in my view not really about a ‘one off’ lapse of judgement but the moment when Australia Post’s internal culture reached a public consciousness boiling point. As reported in the media recently,[1] according to (unnamed) Australia Post staff:
"There is a culture of excess and largesse which, to be fair to [Christine Holgate] started years ago. There was a complete lack of oversight on credit card spending. If you did an audit of [company credit cards] the waste would be enormous…
…The attitude to government in there was also quite amazing. They were very indignant to government scrutiny and that attitude was not restricted to the CEO. That attitude pervaded the whole organisation"
Such organisational myopia is also applicable on a much larger scale. Plenty has been written about the US Presidential election, but in relation to my points above, I will add comments from a recent article by Peter Hartcher which referred to an interview with Michael Steele, a former Chairman of the US Republican Party from 2009 to 2011[2].
In that article, Steele explained that:
"A lot of people have borne a sense of displacement, a sense of anger, a sense of frustration, a sense of being left behind.. No-one listens to them and their concerns. Then [President Trump] comes along . This despot weaves a fairy tale about what he will do.. People feel a sense of security from that.."
As Hartcher then noted:
"Trump has built an alternative reality so powerful that tens of millions of Americans prefer to live in it. Even if it kills them. Steele was moved to endorse Biden because, he says, the safety of his family was more important than his attachment to the Republican Party."
But boiling frogs are not limited to organisations and politics…we are all subject to this risk.
In 2018, a University of California study[3] looked at how subjective descriptions of weather patterns in social media were ‘normalising’ weather which was historically unusual. The study looked at 2.18 billion posts on Twitter between March 2014 and November 2016 which referenced US sentiments about the weather, and then cross-referenced those comments against localised weather data between 1981 to 1990.
The study looked for how people reacted to significant changes in localised weather conditions in order to determine what kinds of weather people found normal or unusual. In the first instance, it was not surprising that people were generally more likely to tweet about weather that was unusual for the season where they lived – e.g. warm conditions in winter, or cool temperatures in summer. [4]
However this understanding of ‘normal’ depended on past experience, in terms of people's memories of weather in recent years, being an imagined reference point of what the weather was like between two to eight years ago.
As the study noted:
"Temperatures initially considered remarkable rapidly become unremarkable with repeated exposure over a roughly [five-year] timescale.
Collectively, these data provide empirical evidence of the “boiling frog” effect with respect to the human experience of climate change… Here we provide evidence for this social normalization occurring in a large population and show that it can happen at rapid timescales, much faster than generational turnover…
… the declining noteworthiness of changing temperatures implies short-lived public attention and therefore the “windows of opportunity” to advance climate policy on government agendas may be severely limited.."
So whatever the context – organisational to communal, local to global - beware the risk of ‘normalising’ or ignoring the world around you. Too often, the perception of 'reality' is far too influenced by the immediacy of the culture/environment around you.
Sitting idly by invites a slow, uncomfortable and inevitable fate. As Michael Steele told journalist Peter Hartcher, the 'clincher' in changing his vote from Republican to Democrat was a quote often attributed to Martin Luther King:
“We begin to die the day we don’t act on things that matter”.
[1] Visentin, L. (2020, 7-8 November). Holgate takes high road with exit. Sydney Morning Herald
[2] Hartcher, P. (2020, 7-8 November). Why they love Trump to death. Sydney Morning Herald
[3] Moore, F. C., Obradovich, N., Lehner, F. & Baylis, P. Rapidly declining remarkability of temperature anomalies may obscure public perception of climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/11/4905.full.pdf
[4] https://www.sciencealert.com/human-beings-are-susceptible-to-boiling-frog-phenomenon-climate-scientists-warn