The first part of this lesson emerged from a discussion with a senior leader in the industry about how difficult change is in large organisations compared to small companies. I was reporting back on a study I’d done of a firm’s strategic planning processes, a study that included interviewing about 50 of the senior and mid-level executives. Part of my report confirmed something the leader already thought: her teams had deeply embedded habits of procrastination. In the name of ‘buy-in’ and ‘alignment’, important decisions were deferred and fudged until they were made too late or obviated by the passage of events. It wasn’t just the leader that knew this. Everyone I’d interviewed knew it too. Behind closed doors, they joked about never making a decision if it was easier to call a meeting. This company was incurably indecisive, a trait it shared with many pharma and medtech firms I’ve studied.

Drilling down into their company culture revealed the causes of their indecisiveness. There were two mutually exacerbating issues. The first was their obsession with flat structures and matrix teams. Words like subordinate and boss were frowned upon and replaced with colleague and co-worker. The idea that someone might be superior, with greater authority, was almost considered distasteful. The second was a culture of shared ownership. It was seen as arrogant for anyone to ever claim a solo achievement. Even when individuals received praise, the culture required immediate humility and sharing of the credit with others, even when it really was an individual triumph. The net result of these cultural factors was what one research respondent called decision offloading. Decisions were, whenever possible, offloaded onto someone else or another group. The idea of an individual executive consulting and then making a decisive choice was as culturally alien as walking into the office in evening wear. It just wasn’t done.

This firm’s challenge – and I stress again that it is a common one in our industry – was still stewing in my head when I came across a paper by Jeremy DeSilva and his co-researchers1. These evolutionary scientists have found that in the last few thousand years, a period that roughly coincides with advanced societies, human brains seem to have shrunk significantly. After millennia of rapid brain growth, civilisation seems to have favoured us getting dumber, at least to the extent that brain size correlates to intelligence. The authors use some clever analytical methods and data from humans and ants to suggest a reason for this. After considering possible explanations like diet and correspondence with body mass, they come up with an idea that seems to apply well to my indecisive company: cognitive offloading.

If they’ll forgive my simplification, these academics argue that brains are metabolically expensive so evolution shapes them to be as big as is advantageous but no bigger. As we evolved from our hominid ancestors, bigger meant better. But then came civilisation and complex societies and with them the ability to offload some of our thinking and decision-making burden. Simply put, hunter-gatherer life involves more decisions than life in a structured, role-oriented society. And faced with a lesser cognitive workload, evolution cut down on unnecessary and expensive grey matter.

Perhaps you can see the parallels? If you create an organisation where it’s unnecessary or even inappropriate to make decisions, your employees’ decision-making ability will wither. Their brains may not literally shrink but their cognitive habits might decline because, in effect, decision-making has been offloaded onto the organisation. Your matrix-structured, process-driven, alignment-seeking organisation might, in effect, cause the cognitive and evaluation capabilities of your executives to weaken, just like sitting at a desk all day might cause your muscles to waste away. This may be good for the organisation, if the capability of the employee network is improved, but it might also make your key people less competent and less employable.

The Darwinian explanation that cognitive offloading leads to organisational indecisiveness has useful, practical implications for the leader who asked me to investigate her firm. Indecisiveness is a by-product of her choice to build a flat organisation that shares ownership. She could, in time, reverse that decision and encourage decisiveness. But it also holds lessons for her team. If you want to keep your cognitive and decision-making strength, look for a business where decision-making is valued and offloading isn’t the norm.

You can find podcasts and videos of this and earlier columns by searching for Darwin’s Medicine at YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

1https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.742639

This column is also available as a podcast here or search ‘Darwin’s Medicine’ on your podcast provider.