All companies place a premium on effective cross-functional working. Most have some issues with it and work to improve it. And, in rare cases, I come across life sciences firms where there is such a problem with it that it cripples the whole organisation. The week I wrote this column, I concluded a project with just such an organisation. Here’s how the firm addressed the issue and what you might learn from it.

The English have an expression, ‘no names, no pack drill’, implying confidentiality and discretion around a difficult problem. That’s especially true in this case, where I’m going to anonymise the company. Actually, calling it a company may be stretching a point. A mid-sized firm, it is the product of a series of mergers that sought to realise the obvious synergies between a number of small firms that cluster around a specialised therapy area. A great idea, straight out of the organisational theory textbook, but it retains a fragmented structure that can only work if it can make the parts work together. And that’s where this firm’s problems lay.

When I say ‘problems’, I should say ‘problem’, singular, because the aggregated firm generally worked well, with almost all the various sub-units quickly gelling into a cohesive operation that combined their various distinctive capabilities to deliver a well-differentiated value proposition. But almost wasn’t good enough. There was one subunit that didn’t play the game. It jealously guarded its customer relationships, kept secrets from its colleagues and, in every internal dealing, took a highly transactional approach. “I feel like I’m dealing with an outside supplier who wants the best price for their worst service,” said the head of one of the other subunits. “They’re focused on their success, even if it kills us,” said another. As I listened, facilitating a leadership team meeting, the image of a malignant tumour formed in my mind.

With my evolutionary perspective, this aggregated company reminded me of what I’d read about the emergence, about 600 million years ago, of multicellular life. This evolution wasn’t straightforward.

It happened independently many times and there are competing scientific explanations for how it happened. And it has left complex life forms with the persistent problem that some cells don’t play the game and instead take a free ride for their own purposes. Of course, the name we’ve given to that free-riding in complex organisms is cancer. And, to my mind, it was easy to see the parallels between this organisation’s rogue unit and an organism’s cancer. The parallels went ever further. Cancer cells generate their energy in a different way from ordinary cells, something we call the Warburg effect. And as I listened to how the rogue unit got its resources by ‘managing upwards’ to the leadership team, instead of managing cross-functionally with its colleagues, the similarities with the Warburg effect were uncanny.

Using evolutionary theory to understand organisational issues is only half my job; the other half is fixing them. Multicellular life became possible because of symbiosis between differentiated cells. And this only happened when cells repurposed old genes and evolved new genes to enable that mutual cooperation. So the answer to this firm’s problem lay in adapting and inventing organisational routines, the little sub-processes that, because they store information and can be copied, are equivalent to a firm’s genes. The question resolved to ‘how can we adapt our organisational routines to ensure cooperation and prevent free-riding?’.

The biological evolution of multicellular symbiosis wasn’t a case of tweaking one or two genes, it required the adaptation or creation of many alleles. It was, in biologists’ language, polygenic adaptation. This process provides a model for companies, like the one I was helping, that are trying to get their subunits to work together. In this firm’s case, three adaptations were salient among many.

First, there was an existing routine for coordinating the work of subunits, centred around regular project team meetings. These were adapted to include each unit stating explicitly what it needed from the other units, something that was previously implicit. Second, a new routine for making cooperation visible was invented. This was a form of 360 degree appraisals, so that unit leaders’ performance was assessed by their peers. Third, a harmful gene was ‘switched off’. The ‘Warburg effect’ routine that the rogue unit had used to subvert the normal budgeting process, by appealing directly to leadership, was blocked by the finance team.

Over time, these changes fixed the problem. The rogue unit began to cooperate and to work towards the firm’s interests, rather than its own. The firm’s leader now dines out on the story of how he has cured his corporate cancer. Except he hasn’t, of course. He’s put it in remission and he needs to be vigilant for mutant organisational routines that might crop up in the future. But, in biology and in business, remission from a cancer is sometimes the best we can hope for.