On Elephant Island the men had to try to find shelter. What they ended up with was the two boats overturned on top of stones with bits of moss and canvas stuck in the wholes. All twenty-two of the men lived in that!

Their days were spent discussing the Caird voyage, walking around the tiny strip of land, hunting and taking care of patients:

“Kerr developed a bad tooth and Macklin had to pull it for him. ‘And a grimy quack of a dentist I must have looked,’ wrote Macklin. ‘Not much refinement here – ‘Come outside and open your mouth’ – no cocaine or anesthesia.’“

Wordie’s hand became infected, and Holness was troubled with a sty. Rickenson was slowly recovering from the heart attack he suffered the day they landed, but the saltwater boils on his wrists stubbornly refused to heal. Greenstreet’s feet, which had been frostbitten in the boats, did not improve and he was confined to his sleeping bag.

Hudson seemed in a serious way. His hands showed definite signs of healing, but the pain in his left buttock which had begun in the boats had developed into a very large abscess which pained him constantly. Mentally, too, the scars of the boat journey apparently were still with him. Much of the time he lay in his sleeping bag for hours without speaking, and he seemed disinterested and detached from what was going on around him.

“The most serious invalid was Blackboro. His right foot appeared to be recovering, and there was hope that it might even be saved. But in the toes of his left foot gangrene had already set in…”

(Lansing, 199-200)

Eventually Blackboro’s toes all had to be amputated with the surgeons performing the surgery in that tiny hut!

Somehow, they still had that banjo!  So Hussey was still playing that for entertainment.

The men had to spend the winter on Elephant Island, and the days grew so monotonous for them.  All they could do was wait……

What, though, happened to the James Caird?

It took 16 days, but our heroes did reach their destination. The men aboard the boat were divided into two crews who took turns navigating the boat or going down below to try to sleep.

They really didn’t get to sleep that much as it was virtually impossible to do so. On this trip there would be no floes upon which to stop and even partially rest. This trip was a direct, non-stop.

What a difficult journey:

“’We were getting soaked on an average every three or four minutes,’ wrote Worsley.‘This went on day and night. The cold was intense.’ Particularly hateful was the task of working the pump,

which one man had to hold hard against the bottom of the boat with bare hands – a position that could not be endured beyond five or six minutes at a time.”

(Alexander, 146)

Sprayed by water, baling water, trying to steer, stung by the wind, chipping ice off the ship – these were all non-stop efforts. Day after day of gales and hurricanes faced by this twenty-two foot open boat.

We’ve already mentioned the rogue wave that nearly capsized the James Caird. How did theyhold up?

Here’s what faced them physically:

“The men were soaked to the bone and frostbitten. They were badly chafed by wet clothes that had not been removed for seven months, and afflicted with saltwater boils.Their wet feet and legs were a sickly white color and swollen. Their hands were black –with grime, blubber, burns from the Primus and frostbite. The least movement was excruciating.”

(Alexander, 147)

The trip took a toll on Vincent who appears to have just cratered. McNeish suffered as well:

“’Two of the party at least were very close to death,’ Worsley wrote. ‘Indeed, it might be said that [Shackleton] kept a finger on each man’s pulse. Whenever he noticed that a man seemed extra cold and shivered, he would immediately order another hot drink of milk to be prepared and served to all. He never let the man know that it was on his account, lest he became nervous about himself.”

(Alexander, 147)

If you look into nature, into these places of community, you will find an amazing degree of alignment; there is a beautiful, symmetrical pattern. No friction, no member out of alignment—the flow is seamless. These organisms all behave intelligently, even though their members are unaware of the big picture and there is no “central controller” to guide them. According to futurist and complexity author Kevin Kelly, they are out of control—a state he describes as “distributed being.” Since this is the preferred operating mode of complex biological forms that have thrived for millions of years, Kelly suggests that our own increasingly complex organizations will inevitably follow the same pattern. In the simplest terms, they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively simple and locally autonomous agents, rather than a single, super-intelligent executive branch. They are bottom-up, self-organizing systems. In the language of complexity science, they are complex adaptive systems (CAS) displaying emergent features.

For organizations, reaching anywhere close to this level of performance is only possible in a decentralized environment. But decentralization of decision rights requires corresponding levels of personal responsibility.

Agile project teams are an excellent example.

George: “Birds flocking, fish schooling, bees swarming, all move effortlessly in the same direction, it is a more efficient way to forage and travel, the whole uses less energy to operate in this way. Somehow great teams and great organizations are able to operate as something approaching this ‘frictionless’ state. There is something extra–something invisible at work.

“Some companies become fossilized by centralizing all authority. This is suboptimal. Decisions have to be made as close to the customer as possible, at the lowest level of knowledge and skill. Organizations are patterns of relationships. Conversations are the heart and soul of organizational life. Conversations shape commitment to the organization and create a sense of what is possible. Like Buckminster Fuller’s trimtab on the rudder of a ship, conversations seem insignificant, but have tremendous hidden power. Conversations characterize everyday work life and negotiations between people in the organization and their customers. They determine the quality of service and the overall effectiveness of the company. In many organizations, conversations are negative and blocked or fall into otherwise destructive loops.

“Change cannot be imposed or controlled from the top or from the outside. It is better to work with people at all company levels to help them discover for themselves what is possible and what can be done better. This helps to facilitate new conversations, which often cross boundaries within organizations. By focusing on those conversations at the core of the organization, the greatest leverage can be created, for executives working on strategy, teams working on projects, the whole organization working on its next transformation, or any other critical business function. Systems, structures and processes all help the effective organization, but they count for little if the conversations and relationships are not real. Imposing command-and-control solutions to business problems, especially around knowledge work, has proven to be almost completely ineffective.”

A life science of management and leadership exposes the obsolete industrial age Taylor paradigm that still to this day is limiting so much individual and organizational performance. The Taylor model is based on Descartes’ 400 year old clockwork universe and does not  integrate new science discoveries of the last 100 years, especially quantum mechanics and complexity science. By recasting organizations as  living, complex-adaptive systems, an organization’s full capacity for Superperformance can finally be unleashed.

The traditional view of organization—woven together through a systematic framework of production, decision support,  knowledge, and information systems— is based on the model of a well-oiled machine engineered to deliver maximum performance derived from pre-defined parameters and specifications. This industrial age model considers performance a derivative of external controls defined by the designers of organizational systems. They have given only marginal importance to the self-adaptive and emergent nature of organizational systems and the dynamic environments they inhabit. In other words, they are still far from operating with an immune system of distributed decision rights and with management and leadership capacity distributed everywhere, to the very edge of organizations. These bottom-up, agile characteristics of living, complex adaptive systems are precisely what is needed during times of rapid changing operating and knowledge environments, such as those that exist today.

Nested Hierarchies are Natural

From Organism View the self-referencing fractal pattern of system inside of system is apparent. The parts and their environments are continually co-evolving. From this view there is perfect parallel between organization and organism, which present as a set of nested structures, each inside of the next, like Russian dolls.

Organization                                 Organism

Economy                                             Ecosystem
↓
Industry                                              Species
↓
Organization                                       Organism
↓
Function                                              Organ
↓
Department                                         Tissue
↓
Work Team                                        Cell
↓
Individual                                           Organelle

From Organism View the entire global economy can be seen as a gigantic ecology of interdependent and continually interacting (work) cells, organs, and organizations engaged in the production, buying and selling of goods and services. And like any ecology it is self-organizing, not centrally controlled or coordinated.

Regardless of scale or level of complexity, there is a corresponding compartment at every tier of the organization/organism hierarchy. This is not just a novel coincidence—it is the natural expression of order that pervades all of life, from ecosystem to economy. It is simply the most efficient way to organize.

In fact, throughout the entire text of  Darwin’s Origin of Species, the only illustration called for was the picture of a nested hierarchy.

Nested Hierarchy from Darwin's Origin of Species