This epidemic is a classic example of the evolutionary trap of overadaptation. Let me explain what I mean in a few tweets. Often, creatures will become supremely specialized for the conditions they live under and outperform less adapted species until conditions change.
When conditions change, they go extinct fast, because they’ve overadapted. (It’s almost as though random mutation and selection didn’t read “The Black Swan” by @nntaleb.) Under stable conditions, though, the overadapted strategies really thrive; they just fail hard under change.
Right now, we are watching the effect of a sort of social overadaptation. Huge numbers of people have overadapted hard to conditions where not much changes and disasters are rare. In such conditions, things like bureaucratic reflexive self protection are highly selected for.
Under normal conditions, your competence at running (say) a public health infrastructure or disaster management infrastructure doesn’t matter much, but the ability to signal well, to be well liked, to avoid seeming “weird”, to avoid getting ahead of the crowd, etc., are adaptive.
So we end up with people in corporate and government bureaucracies who are very good at the social game, and who are absolutely terrible at actually responding to changing threats, but they’re highly, highly selected for by social pressures under normal circumstances.
Then, however, conditions change. Competing companies appear, or there’s a technology shift, or there’s a need to get ahead of a global pandemic, and the overadapted continue to try their well-honed strategy of assuming long term stasis and the need to protect themselves first.
Outsiders who are less oversocialized (I say “oversocialized” in the sense of “overadapted”, that is, socialized so far that they cannot adapt, that they privilege not looking weird over actually dying, etc.) then suddenly find themselves surviving where the overadapted do not.
The startup that will not make customers wait years for trivial improvements, the entrepreneur who sees how to disrupt a whole market, the person who knows that the automated trading strategy won’t work if it ignores rare but disastrous events, these all then outperform peers.
In particular, the current crisis seems to favor people and organizations that try to reason through what is certainly going to happen soon and act ahead of need rather than reacting after the fact. The overadapted don’t do this well; they wait for orders, they don’t innovate.
The overadapted care too much about never being seen to have made a mistake. The “agile” are okay with making mistakes so long as they can correct them quickly. They care about results more than appearances. But many organizations, under normal circumstances, fire such people.
I think the current crisis will have enormous lessons for many of us that will last us for the rest of our lives, and this is just one of them. Crises teach you a great deal about organizational behavior, adaptive vs. maladaptive strategies, and rational decisionmaking.
