Fish pond metaphor complexity of management

The Fish
Pond
Metaphor
Complexity of
Management.
Ali Anani and Bas de Baar
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Introduction
Image by lesmana andry.
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Foreword
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The world is changing dramatically, fast and beyond everything we have
seen. Globalization and technology have introduced more diversity, more
dynamics and more interdependencies than ever before. This provides
project management, and management in general, with a challenge. How to
survive in this environment? Together, Bas de Baar and Ali Anani, we are
taking on this challenge with an attempt to provide some structure and some
answers for management practitioners.
We call this effort:
The Fish Pond Metaphor: Complexity of Management.
In essence, we believe the answer to adapt successfully in our new, ever
morphing world is to have a flexible mind, a brain filled with many models of
the world. We would almost claim that being open minded is the key to
survival. To help you create some new and exciting ways to look at the world
and business situations, we introduce the Fish Pond Metaphor. We opt to go
for the fish pond as a metaphor for the new world.
The Managers’ New Brain
Every project is unique. Circumstances are always different. Different people.
Different goals. To lead a project to success, you need to tailor your
approach to the situation. To be able to do this you got to have a flexible
mind. One that can switch from one world view to another; one that can use
one set of assumptions right now, and an entire different way of thinking in a
couple of minutes.
Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry
in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr.
Anani got interested in applying
scientific approaches to economic
and social issues.
Bas de Baar is making
complex people stuff less
complex. As The Project
Shrink he helps people find
ways to enjoy the diversity of
human interaction in their
projects and organizations so that they can get
out of their own way and achieve their goals.
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If you are trying to run a country and you have a communist
background, you probably are trying to regulate, centralize and
formalize as much as possible. You focus on controlling individual
behavior in order to control the entire system. When you are
raised with a more laissez-faire world view, you can adopt a reign
that is totally governed by the free market. Nothing is centrally
controlled, everything will take care of itself. Needless to say that
both world views have drawbacks and advantages.
In our world every country has its own customized version of one
of the world views, or something on the gliding scale between
them. The successful Project Manager can look at his project and
assess the situation using different world views, one in which
control is the answer to everything, and one where let it go is the
holy grail. And if he trains his mind enough, he can even use a
mental slider to get to the spots between the two extremes.
Why A Fish Pond?
The Fish Pond Metaphor is not one coherent picture of a
particular pond. It is merely a collection of narratives and
analogies centered around a common theme, the ﬁsh pond. We
choose the Fish Pond for more than one reason, but mainly
because it is an ecosystem. An ecosystem let us describe our
main problem with reality called “dynamic complexity”. In our
normal line of thinking, we think about an event A that happens,
and that causes something else, say B. The occurrence of B
might trigger some event C. A nice linear cause-and-effect chain.
With dynamic complexity this is exactly what is not taking place:
cause and effect are not close in space and time, and therefor,
very difﬁcult for us to see.
Bas de Baar, Zandvoort, The Netherlands
Ali Anani, Amman, Jordan
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Copyright
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© 2008-2012 Ali Anani / Bas de Baar
This report is free and share it with the world under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
This report contains a collection of articles that appeared on The Project Shrink blog in the ﬁrst
half of 2008.
The authors have made their best effort to ensure that this is a high quality, informative and
helpful report. This text is a recommendation only, the authors cannot take responsibility for loss
or action to any individual or corporation acting, or not acting, as a result of the material
presented here.
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Chapter 1
A Metaphor
For
Management
Image by Jurvetson.
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Project life can be quite frustrating when one day after another turns out not how
you planned it. The software should be ready when you said it would. It has to.
Otherwise you have people waiting, customers complaining and bosses getting
annoyed. It is your reputation and ultimately your job on the line. Do you think that
if you just plan harder, more detailed, than the plan must be correct?
Of course you don’t. Although rationally we all know this, it still can come as a
shock for many of us when we can't force reality in sticking to the plan. We just
have to forget it. It is not going to happen. Ever. But still, it seems to be a habit
hard to break, a state of mind hard to get rid of.
Having a false mental model of how it all works, “projects, management, people,
reality”, has disastrous results. IT projects have a high failure rate with many
reasons why. If you think you can predict the future, if you think you can plot the
path reality has to take, but in fact you can't, you have the source of the high
failure rate of projects. 
 
If you are brought up with just one view on management, it is difficult to change
your view on this subject. To help you make the switch, to assist you in going to
the other side, we have developed the The Fish Pond Metaphor for Management.
We are going to dive into a real fish pond, see how it operates to learn valuable
lessons about managing projects and organizations in general.
Section 1
This first section explains the effects of
dynamic complexity, how best practices can
become worst practices under changing
environments, and how the fish pond
illustrates both.
Complexity Of Management
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This first chapter in our series about Complexity of Management
should tickle your imagination. We aim to make you aware of the
reasons why we can't predict the future. Our next articles will be
explaining the need for the new metaphor and the details and
reasoning behind the Fish Pond.Best practices become worst
practices under changing environments.
Best practices become worst practices under changing
environments.
We opt to go for the fish pond as a metaphor for the new world.
Fish, which live in vast spaces such as oceans, seas and rivers,
have been transferred to live in fish ponds or farms. This situation
emulates the collapse of the world into a global village.
Imagine a piece of pacific ocean: the fish, the water, the
vegetation, the currents, the depth, the enormous width of it all.
And now imagine you put four glass walls side by side in the
ocean, to isolate a small column from surface to bottom. You
didn’t change the population of fish, you didn’t change the water
or depth, you merely made its size smaller. From all the
possibilities that could change, you just changed one thing.
Obviously, the fish will have less room to swim in. A fish in an
ocean or sea has enough space to swim and move. This
movement is restricted in a limited space and may not give fish
enough space to go a full distance before turning around. A very
interesting research is that reported by Debby Turner. This
research aimed at correlating the behavior of fish with that of
people. The fish were confined to a large tank. The researcher
observed that the fish used the whole area of the tank in their
swimming. When a glass partition halved the tank into two
compartments the fish still tried to swim the whole area of the
tank.
The fish banged their heads in the process. After a while the fish
adapted to swim up to the glass partition and turned around
before making contacts with it. The researcher removed the glass
partition afterwards and watched the swimming behavior of the
fish for months. None of the fish made an attempt to swim the
whole tank for fear of colliding against an imaginary barrier. Fear
paralyzed the fish from discovering new frontiers.
This is not different from bees when you put them in a transparent
bottle. If we lay the bottle horizontally on a table and place a light
source to the bottom of the plastic bottle the bees will move
towards the light source and stay near the bottom of the bottle
when they could escape their prison by moving towards the open
mouth of the bottle.
Practices perceived as best practices become worst
practices under changing environments.
Assumptions on how things work under certain conditions can
have an entire new meaning when other conditions are valid. We
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might base our view of tomorrow on assumptions that can be
utterly wrong.
It is not just the behavior of the fish that undergo changes by one
change in the environment. Physical processes that regulate an
ecosystem can get a direct hit from the reduction of pond size.
For example in deeper ponds the production of the much needed
oxygen is produced by phytoplankton, as explained by Aeration
and Oxygenation in Aquaculture. However in shallow ponds it's
not the phytoplankton but the vegetation like algae that performs
this job primarily. And because the macro vegetation is creating
the oxygen, water temperature and illumination are effected.
The pond depth influences the role of algae: the deeper the pond
is, the less role algae have. Algae are just a single-cell plant that
grows like crazy when properly nourished with sunlight,
nitrogenous waste and water.
Here is the dilemma: fish releases ammonia, which is converted
to nitrate. This nitrate help algae grow. And fish feed on algae. But
the rapid growth of algae deprives the fish from oxygen, because
now the are competing with the enormous amount of algae for
oxygen. Over-population of algae causes the death and decay of
algae. The decayed algae is a big consumer of oxygen.
Fish produce byproducts that eventually lead to their killing!
In a pond the build up of the nitrate is problematic, but in a sea it
is not. The shallower the pond, the more acute the problem is.
Here the algae come to play the role of savers!! Algae consume
the nitrate and rapidly populate the pond and might easily get out
of control. They blossom and compete with the fish for oxygen!
Another example. Not from the Fish Pond.
A car repair shop has not much to do. If a client comes with his
car, he can be helped immediately. After a while worth of mouth
about the speed of service, provides this repair shop with an
increasing number of clients. As the number of clients grows, the
waiting time for service also increases. When the service time
takes to long, clients go away. Having fewer clients, again, the
speed of service is up again.
In this short example, and the Fish Pond, our main problem with
reality becomes clear. It is called dynamic complexity. In most of
our normal line of thinking, we think about an event A that
happens, and that causes something else, say B. The occurrence
of B might trigger some event C. A nice linear cause-and-effect
chain. With dynamic complexity this is exactly what is not taking
place: cause and effect are not close in space and time, and
therefor, very difficult for us to see.
Basically, reality is too complex for us to comprehend. And in a
real fish pond dozens of these processes are taking place all at
the same time.
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The Fish Pond And Organizations.
So far we have talked about confused fish and a poisoned
ecosystem. It explains why it would be very difficult to describe
what happens when you isolate a small part of The Pacific. The
Fish Pond metaphor provides a link to people working in
organizations.
People are not different from fish. Fear of punishment and change
and forcing strict rules on their peoples actions so that they may
not deviate from best practices confine people to limited spaces.
This is contrasting with self-organizing behavior when space
limitations, the repeated folding and stretching of the space, lead
to utilizing the available space efficiently and in an organized
manner.
Living systems remove barriers and find a way to deal with them.
Best management practices are great in certain environments and
are real barriers to growth and self-organizing in other. The
limitation of space in a pond requires new forms of management
that allow for exploration and remove the barriers of fear.
And regarding the algae and the oxygen, here is the analogy with
toxic employees. They offer you help to ease your life or the
teams life, but only for a short while. Once they grow and
populate your organization they poison your life. These
employees suffocate the good ones and force them out. They
spread more and their poison spreads more. This is a vicious
cycle that is not encountered in large waters or very deep waters.
They consume more oxygen at night! They know when to attack!
With this first section we hope to fire up your brain and
imagination to start looking differently at projects and
organizations. In the next chapters we will explore the Fish Pond
metaphor more in depth.
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Turn on your television and try not to look at CSI Miami or NYC. It is amazing how
popular crime series are, crime series where the technicians will save the day. It
must be a universal thing, as the series are as popular in Europe as in The United
States. For a Project Manager it is a great inspiration. They find a dead corpse and
an FBI Profiler is brought on the scene. He looks around, sniffs the air and creates
a nice profile of the potential killer. Gut feeling, combined with a mix of experience
and science may transform a dark alley into a rich source of evidence.
When looking daily at the remains of your planning you might feel like an FBI
Profiler, or more appropriate, a Project Profiler. Look at the evidence and know the
problem. Like the FBI, based upon assumptions a profile is created. New
information can lead to new assumptions and a new profile. But also the
underlying assumptions steer the direction of the investigation, hoping to find
evidence that support the probability of the profile. So, it is not just a matter of
information gathering, and presto, you have a clear cut description of the problem.
It is a lot of backward and forward reasoning. Based upon some first sparse info
snippets assumptions are made, and as time progresses you get a cycle of
assumptions leading to the direction of investigation and information leading
towards change in assumptions.
Section 2
To be able to handle change you need to have
a flexible brain. Metaphors, like the Fish Pond,
are a great technique to train the brain.
However, not every metaphor has positive
effects.
Our Need For Metaphors
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To be able to create assumptions and being able to reason to
what happens based upon those assumptions, you need models,
you need metaphors.
They provide you with a simplified version of reality which makes
it possible for us mortals to have a clue about what happens if we
press button A or button B, take the blue or the red pill. To be
able to perform an analysis of a problem in a project we need
metaphors about project reality.
Metaphors for managing projects and organizations have been
widely used to visualize the various needs of project and seeing
these needs through various lenses. Metaphors are not just
linguistic devices for making the task of reading more interesting,
they are the basic means whereby people create their relationship
with the world. In fact, the study of several metaphors used in
project management reveals how attitudes to project
management developed and the focus to which project
management attuned to.
Different Metaphors.
The literature is rich in employing metaphors in project
management. We will review very briefly on selected, but widely
different metaphors as a necessary prelude to introduce the fish
pond metaphor.
The machine metaphor is an established one and has been
sharply criticized for treating humans as machines and the
metaphors false assumption that it is possible to predict the
outcome of projects. The rate of project failure provides enough
support to discredit this metaphor. The ignorance of human
factors and their interactions are among the strongest factors
against the machine metaphor. The advancement of
communication technology led to extreme changes in the
management of projects. Virtual teams, data collection,
visualization and mining, rising competition and innovation and
throat-cutting competitions exemplify the rapid changes in doing
business today that call for new project management
approaches.
Recent metaphors have taken more consideration of new project
management requirements than the machine metaphor.
Examples include:
The Extended Mirror Metaphor (Timothy Johnson, 2008) - The
use of extended mirrors to see beyond the present is an excellent
metaphor for project planning because it stretches the thinking
process and imagination to enter a space before physically
entering it. In defining your requirements, you have to mentally go
forward, then look in your rear view mirror and mentally drive
backward through your project, define your route (plan your
scope), and then actually drive forward.  
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Helicopters Metaphor - (Harrin, 2006) helicopters allow the
seeing of the forest with the simultaneity of allowing for zooming
on the trees. For projects, this metaphor allows for overseeing the
overall progress or zooming on certain tasks. We believe this
metaphor may be further enriched by supplying the helicopters
with infrared camera, CIS information system and meteorological
data to capture information and plan ahead.  
Star Wars Metaphor (Phil Bennett, 2006) – This metaphor links
the roles in the movie with the roles that project managers
undergo.  
The Chimpanzee Tea Party (Helga Drummond and Julia
Hodgson, 2003) – This is a very interesting metaphor and in a way
remind us of chicken herd. The Chimpanzees follow no rules and
chaotic party results. How to bring order into project is what this
metaphor provides skillfully. “This metaphor highlights the limits
of assumptions and shows how control-based approaches to
project management can be counterproductive. Paradoxically,
situations may arise where projects can be more effectively
controlled by not attempting to impose control,” as mentioned in
the abstract of the article. This metaphor is in essence another
example of the extended mirror metaphor.  
The Pie Metaphor (Kevin Shockey, 2005) – This is an interesting
metaphor on how to allocate project resources to project tasks
and how to expand on the share of a tasks pie. The pie metaphor
gives a useful way to relate to management. Sometimes it is who
puts on the biggest show that gets more pie.
Models Effect Reality.
The mindsets, the metaphors in your head, are a very powerful
tools. They really do affect reality in a sense that the effect the
decisions and behavior of the people that hold them. When using
metaphors you are taking the images of a different system, and
use that to describe, to model the workings of the system at
hand. The use of the famous metaphor as mentioned earlier, that
of a machine when looking at an organization, meant neglecting
the individual character of every employee.
People can talk about projects as if they are conducting a war.
They are using words like marching orders and the troops. If a
Project Manager has a mindset like this, war as a metaphor, his
mind is thinking in friends and foes, allies and enemies. You are
either with him or against him. This view of the world will make it
very difﬁcult to collaborate with this person if you disagree. In the
end, the war metaphor effects reality. If the model is powerful
enough and wide spread among more people, the model will even
become a reality. The project will end up as a war.
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If models can have such an impact on the performance of reality,
you almost have to be aware of the images that people try to fill in
your head. Sumantra Ghosal makes a connection in his article
”Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management
Practices” (Academy of Management Learning & Education,
2005, Volume 4, No 1, 75-91) between theories that are taught on
universities and excessive stock options at companies like Enron.
He mentions particular the use of agency theory in which
managers will only do the right job for the shareholders of the
interests of both parties are aligned. By providing enormous stock
options the managers can be “trusted” to do the right thing for
the shareholders. At least, in theory.
Ghosal sums it up nicely in the same article: 
 
“Unlike theories in the physical sciences, theories in social
sciences tend to be self-fulfilling.”
We are raising this point because many practitioners are not
aware of this phenomenon and its effects can be disastrous.
Please, stop and think for a short moment contemplating this
matter. If you perhaps used to work in environments very
influenced by corporate politics, the metaphor created for
yourself could be that of monkey hill where all the baboons are
showing off their butts to each other in the eternal struggle for
having the most red butt.
Although this model can help you to run many projects in such an
environment, after a couple of years all you can remember is that
you are working in a zoo. Everything you see is getting translated
into an image of a political arena. In the end, you almost become
what you hated in the first place.
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As a manager you are now more than ever faced with the fact that part of your
team is at the other end of the world. Different cultures, different time zones,
different languages, different customs. You hardly see them, let alone know them.
A part of the team (and stakeholders) may permanently be on the move. They are
multitasking beyond compare. It is rare if someone is dedicated full-time to one
project. For most of them you don't have full-time tasks. You need more and more
different specialization's for every new project you take on. More people doing
more fragmented tasks.
Globalization has affected the work environments in many ways. Now, we refer to
the networked world as a small village. This has led to many new aspects of
project management such as self-organizing teams, risk management, information
poverty, virtual teams and project management, information economy, and many
other aspects. The question in mind is to find a suitable metaphor that fulfills these
requirements. What other systems that lived within a large space and then moved
into small space? We find that fish ponds provide a suitable metaphor. We
transferred fish from rivers, seas and oceans and accommodated them in tanks,
jars or ponds.
Section 3
In this section we connect the global trends
that are taking place in our world to the Fish
Pond. What is happening and why does this
make a fish pond a proper mental image?
The Fish Pond Metaphor
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We have also gained experiences in monitoring the behavior of
fish in ponds. What are these lessons? How may we relate them
to project management?
What changes are necessary in managing projects? These
questions and others are the theme of this work.
The new trends of the global business and their associated
tensions have been ably summarized by Joo-Seng Tan as follows:
• Globalization: Global versus Local
• Diversity: Heterogeneity versus Homogeneity
• Flexibility: Flexibility versus Stability
• Flat: Centralization versus Decentralization
• Networks: Interdependence versus Independence
A summary of these concepts is given.
Globalization- Globalization is a converging and diverging force
at the same time. Companies merge and diversify products and
services while having at the same time to tailor these products to
the tastes and needs of each local market.  
Diversity- Globalization has increased the diversity of employees
in organizations. Never before groups of different cultures, have
backgrounds, specialities and ages been put to work in the same
place. The tension on how to deal with diversity of people
necessitates the acquirement of communication skills to a degree
that has been never experienced before.
Flexibility- Established work norms are in tension with new ones.
Self-organizing teams, flexible working hours and deviation from
long-established procedures create tension because of peoples
tendencies to reject and resist change. But to stay competitive in
the global markets people need flexibility to produce new
products and services while maintaining a minimum structure to
hold the company together.  
Flat- It is the fastest who wins and not the strongest. Information
and its communication need circulate fast in organizations
nowadays. The swing from pyramidal organizations to flat
organizations is creating tension from those who are on top of the
orthodox pyramidal organizations and from managers who love to
manage by controlling others. Self-interest is conflicting with
organizational-interest and this is creating tension.
 
Networks- Networking enhances flexibility of organizations as
well as reduction of fixed costs. However; these benefits are in
tension with the need to control distantly positioned teams to
keep the quality of products and services.
We propose a new metaphor for management:
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that is The Fish Pond Metaphor.
The reasoning behind selecting this metaphor is to provide a fresh
look at projects that cover the realities of todays business climate
and that assist the working Project Manager in his daily work life.
We need a metaphor that fulfills the following requirements:
• A live metaphor. Water in a pond is subject to variations and is
not static. Growth of algae, draining, response to changes such
as temperature and acidity fluctuations affect water and make it
a live metaphor as fish that live in this water are affected too.
• Use of different scales of the metaphor to allow for
experimentation on different conditions, sizes, times and
environments.
• A metaphor that allows for use of the extended mirrors in that
we may not only visualize, but also experiment on a small scale
to see behind the boundaries.
• A metaphor that is communicative, adaptive and sensitive to
changes.
• A metaphor that allows to study the effect of the environment
on individuals, groups and external changes.
• A metaphor that is sensitive to minor changes that affect a host
of dynamic balances to allow the study of responses to such
changes.
• A metaphor that is sensitive to location because it lies on the
boundary of different climatic zones so as to optimize its
selection and to promote the potential of success of the project.
• A metaphor that doesn't provide a very gloomy view of the
world, but is realistic enough.
We live in a world that is changing continuously. Change creates
tension and tension is stressful.
Globalization has created five major tensions. The fish pond
metaphor reflects these stresses:
• Global Vs local or big seas vs. small ponds
• Diversity- We may diversify the fish ponds by adding to the
pond aggressive fish, food-greedy fish, hibernating fish, and
contaminants, toxic materials (toxic employees) and different
plants that increase the competition for space.
• Flexibility- fish may gather in schools as a way of self-
organizing. How flexible fish are to changes and how they cope
with them. Some fish hibernate while others die. Big fish might
eat small fish like big competitors eating small competitors.
• Flat- Fish use different communication channels depending on
where it is located. Electromagnetic signals, voice and body
movement that conveys messages to other fish are means of
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circumventing communication barriers. Fish lure other fish to
capture them and feed on them.
• Networking- Communication skills mean maximizing
interactions among fish.
The concept of the fish pond metaphor lies in viewing the fish
pond as a miniature for the global world. Globalization has
increased the interconnectedness of countries but at a price- the
social and political powers also got reshaped. “Poorer,
'peripheral', countries have become even more dependent on
activities in ‘central’ economies such as the USA where capital
and technical expertise tend to be located”, according to Smith
and Doyle.
Globalization involves the diffusion of ideas, practices and
technologies, and fish ponds involve the diffusion of oxygen in the
pond and of communication. Ponds may easily become muddy
and globalization is thus hindered.
Communication, availability of food and space affect social
relationships with far greater magnitude in a fish pond than in an
ocean. Small local muddy area in a pond is expected to have far
greater effect than the same muddy spot in an ocean.
Globalization has revealed that such a trend really exists. Anthony
Giddens (“The Consequences of Modernity”. Stanford University
Press, 1990) has described globalization as “the intensification of
worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a
way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many
miles away and vice versa”. This involves a change in the way we
understand geography and experience localness.
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Times are changing. The world is getting smaller. World orders are shifting. The
ocean is turning into a pond. That is the whole idea behind the Fish Pond
Metaphor. In this section we will have a more detailed look about the globalization,
into people interacting on a global scale. What is going on in The Big Pond?
What Drives Human Behavior?
Our investigation starts however on the lowest level: the individual inhabitant of
our planet. What is driving their behavior? What is determining the way they
interact with other people? Our journey has to start here before we can make
some sense of the overall result of all those interactions on a global scale.
Generally spoken, people will try to reach their goals, their desires, or try to avoid
their fears come true. However, this can be so generic, therefor we will go one step
back; peoples needs.
The needs of humans is their ultimate goal that drives their actions.
People have physical or material needs. Think about food, a roof above their
heads, or maybe some kind of transportation. We will categorize this type of needs
as economic needs. In its simplest view we will just assume monetary rewards in
return for labor when we are referring to economic needs.
Section 4
We are approaching projects and
organizations as groups of people interacting
together. It is a complex adaptive system in
which the agents are formed by people. In this
article we look at why people interact in the
ﬁrst place, and how this leads to the emerging
of groups. The themes discussed are why
people behave the way they do, and the
creation of economic and social clusters.
The Big Pond: Global Village
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Next to economic needs are emotional needs, like feeling
accepted, acknowledged, loved and trusted.
These needs are all expressed in relationship to other members of
the globe. That is why they are considered social. In this context
we also consider the concept of group affiliation. Group affiliation
is what it is all about in our lives. During your life you are a
member of a lot of social groups, by default, by choice or by
force. One of us, that would be Bas, is a Dutch white male,
member of a child-less double income household, Project
Manager, author and web aficionado, to name just a few of his
traits. The Dutch white male is something that he is by birth, by
default. All other affiliations are more or less done by choice, even
though you can debate if in all case he was totally aware of the
choice made.
The group memberships determine how we see ourselves in the
whole of society, it determines our identity.  
 
Actually, we have more than one identity. We can choose, we can
switch depending on the situation. Bas, again, likes to see himself
also as an author. He likes the worldly sophisticated aura that is
associated with it, even though every one can publish a book
these days. Within the professional world he emphasizes the
software project manager affiliation. You have been dealt a lot of
group affiliations. You can emphasize or down play each affiliation
to create your identity.
As an identity is how we see ourselves within the ultimate large
group of humans, it not something that is to be seen an an
individual level, it is a group thing. Without groups, the whole
concept of identity wouldn’t make sense. We are shaping
identities by combining three mechanisms: categorization,
identification and comparison.
Although broadminded people like to think they do not put
everyone in boxes, everyone does. We always put people in
categories, we label them. This is done by looking for signs that
we associate with a certain group. These signs are the mentioned
use of icons, rituals or speak. To be able to associate yourself
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with a group, we first have to divide society into groups.
Identification is the part where you affiliate yourself with a group.
People are in continuous pursuit to satisfy their economic and
social needs. And we are grouping together to accomplish that.
Just like fish.
Fish In Schools.
Fish do not simply float around in a tank. Although they once in a
while bump into glass walls, they are able to find food, detect
other fish and perform other cases of interacting with their
environment. Fish in general can sense changes in the
environment either by vision, by smell, sound and by the
sensitivity of the skin (changes in water pressure, acidity and
temperature). Yes, if fish want to communicate, they blow
bubbles, as suggested by a contributor at Answer.com.
In a pond or ocean fish will continuously sense their environment,
make something of that information and change their behavior if
needed. We can discuss to what level a fish uses a mental model
to make explicit decisions. But at some level, conscious or at a
more hard-wired biological level, information is processed into
action. For fish the speed of which they can make use of the
latest information is essential.
A useful aspect for our metaphor is that some fish are social.
They group together for a purpose. They travel in schools. The
website Petplace.com offers great insight in why fish actually
travel in schools:
“Should a hungry predator approach the group, the first line of
defense begins with the many confusing silvery flashes or
mesmerizing stripes that make it difficult to focus on a single fish.
Schools also seem to make finding food an easier task.“
This does sound familiar to our previous discussion on clustering.
We group together for economic reasons: it is easier or even
essential to get life’s necessities being part of a mob instead of
being on your own. The other reason for forming clusters is
social: it determines our position in the world, it is how we make a
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stand for our selves while protecting our brain against the
complexity of the world.
In the metaphor we link the two reasons for schooling (food and
protection) respectively to the notion of economic and social
clustering.
In the first section of this chapter we started out with this
question:
“Imagine a piece of pacific ocean: the fish, the water, the
vegetation, the currents, the depth, the enormous width of it all.
And now imagine you put four glass walls side by side in the
ocean, to isolate a small column from surface to bottom. What
happens?”
What happens to schooling if you put a few fish in a more
confined space like a tank?
If a schooling fish are kept in a confined space, most likely one of
the fish will start to dominate, according to PetPlace.com. He
turns into some kind of a bully that will drive other fish into hiding.
The dominant fish might even start to nip at the fins of the other
fish. If the weaker fish is not able to get to the food because of
the bully, he might eventually die.
Humans In Economic And Social Clusters
Suppose we have a model with agents (people) modeled after the
concepts as described in the previous paragraph, and suppose
we look at the global perspective. What is it we will see? All the
fish in the pond are grouping together.
Economic Clustering.
Like the oceans are all connected to each other and provide us
with currents, so are the economic forces in constant flux and
alternating over the globe. Work moves around. If it can be
produced cheaper, more efficiently or better, it gets relocated.
Talent moves around. If one area on the globe is more exciting
and thrilling than another, people relocate. Work moves around
and people that perform the work move around. Not necessarily
dependent of each other.
Regional population changes rapidly. Asia gets a booming
population growth. First world nations have a enormous amount
of seniors coming towards them as the baby boomers are getting
old. With regional changes in the populations, the demand for
work shifts.
But one remarkable aspect is that work seems to be located
around certain topological centers like a harbor, a place rich of
natural resources or just cities. Work is not spread out evenly over
the planet. There are concentrations of it. The same goes for the
other current, that of talent moving around, as described by
Richard Florida in “The Flight of the Creative Class: The New
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Global Competition for Talent”. The most incredible, creative
talent is looking for great places to live. Places where tolerant
stimulating locations provide company of like minded people.
Both currents have as a net effect that people are clustering, one
gets clusters because people have the need to satisfy their
economic needs.
Social Clustering.
Imagine the map of the earth doesn’t reflect countries, but it
represent ideas. Or they would represent religions, world views,
life styles and other concepts. Imagine a spatial representation of
concepts. People will not be spread out evenly. What you will see
is that people are cuddling up next to each other. As their social
needs by definition can only be fulfilled in relationship to other
people, the association needed with groups ensures the
clustering will be a fact when using a conceptual map.  
 
When discussing social clustering in the context of The Fish Pond
one needs to consider what has been termed Big-fish-little-pond
effect (BFLPE) by Hebert W. Marsh. According to Wikipedia “the
self-concept of students is negatively correlated with the ability of
their peers in school.” Bas was a good math student in high
school. That all changed when he enrolled his first year at a large
Mathematics department at the university. Even though his math
skills only had improved.
Do big fish in shallow waters compare themselves with others?
Socialization in a small world might intensify the feeling of
belonging in either a positive or negative ways as proximity might
encourage comparing oneself with others. If a team member feels
he is a Big-Fish in a Little-Pond will behave differently than if he
feels that he is a Small-Fish in a Big-Pond. The idea is similar to a
hefted weight is perceived as heavier than normal when
“contrasted” with a lighter weight.
Closeness of social groups may produce another effect.
International teams may produce different breed of ideas as fish
produce different breeds of fish in a fish pond. Most pond fish will
breed with regularity in a pond containing plant life. It is always
fun for everyone to see the baby fish hatch and see what colors
and characteristics they develop. Socialization in international
teams might lead to novel ideas because of their hybrid
fertilization.
What puts the village into Global Village?
Until now we didn’t touch on the current trends that are taking
place. The world is shrinking. But what does that mean? The
world is getting flat is a statement we hear a lot. It reflects the
effect of globalization on economic needs. As observed by Clyde
Prestowitz, our “flat” world, a phrase popularized by author Tom
Friedman, is created by the disappearance of some trade barriers
and technology. However, he sees it more as a slightly tilted pane,
one that moves production, power and wealth from West to East.
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The removal of trade and other barriers, the ever increasing
availability of cheap communication are what puts the village into
Global Village. And the impact is not only economic. Globalization
also has its effects on social needs.
On the Globalization Website from the Emory University we can
read how globalization creates a social problem by changing
world order. All of a sudden we now realize that we have to live in
one world. And we are trying to ﬁgure out how to view this. We
are trying to see what to make of this globalization. Different
images are formulated: “some portray the world as an assembly
of distinct communities, highlighting the virtues of particularism,
while others view it as developing toward a single overarching
organization, representing the presumed interests of humanity as
a whole,” as formulated on the mentioned website.
What is happening in this live time is unprecedented. Economic
and social barriers as we know it are removed; mostly creating
new ones. People will still form clusters, but that is a grouping we
are not familiar with. All the barriers that used to separate people
from each other are gone. The same people are now in one room
together, and we are all running for a corner to get the familiar
feelings back.
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Chapter 2
Fish In
Schools
Image by JennyHuang.
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Imagine all the people in the world floating around, freely. They group together for
a while, and some float further. Others dock to the people left behind. Clusters
evolve and clusters dissolve. Relax, this is not a yoga exercise, this is the image
we created in our previous chapter about The Big Pond.
Imagine a cluster is a group of people working together. Suppose this is a project.
And now we take the stretch to
the Fish Pond Metaphor, imagine
your project is a Koi Pond.
We want to especially focus on
the filter and drainage system of
the pond as this will function as
a fabulous metaphor for people
docking and leaving your team.
The filtration and drainage
system can be viewed as the
essential blood cycle of a pond.
According to JadeDragon.com
fresh oxygen is created as “the
filtration system purifies the
water of wastes, bacteria and
Section 1
This is an example of a specific narrative
surrounding the Fish Pond metaphor. It makes
the analogy between the filtering and
drainage of a pond, and the need for trust and
elimination of toxic employees in a project.
Filter And Drainage: Trust In Teams
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other toxins... (and) pushes air into the water so the fish will have
oxygen...”  
The Filter.
As anyone that has worked some time in projects will tell you, the
purifying element in teams is trust. Trust will enable smooth
operations among the group members, it creates flexibility and
creativity. Not every free floating developer will be able to enter
the pond. The project should have some kind of filter, some door-
policy who may enter and who doesn't. If everybody knows your
name and fame, and your are trusted, you pass the filter. In this
way the fresh flow of trust is ensure while pumping in new team
members.
The shrinkage of the global project playing field brings new
challenges and opportunities. What happens if everyone lived in a
small town? What happens if everybody knows everyone? Or at
least, when someone you know, has a sister, that has a friend,
that knows the other person? In this small pond, every fish has
heard about the reputation of every other fish. And that is a good
thing. In order to succeed you have to treat people nicely. You
have to play fair.
If you want to enter the Koi Pond, you have to be kind and nice in
the new world.
The basic argument goes like this:
Lets assume I am a manager in US and I am looking for a virtual
development team in India. If I treat people well and I have a good
track record, the good people from India will work with me. If I
treat people like dirt, the good developers will not work with me,
and I will be stuck with the people of lesser quality. If I have
people of poor quality, my project will be of bad quality. Therefor I
will have a bad reputation as a manager in the US.
The filter on the pond ensures that only the people that bring in
trust will enter the pond. The flattened and spiky world makes
sure reputations spread faster than you can say Geronimo. Over a
decade ago it seemed almost impossible for someone in Europe
to have a clue about the reputation of some person in Africa. With
the Internet we have reputation systems in place where crowds
share opinions among each other. On Amazon.com we share
book reviews, on Ebay.com we share buyer and seller
reputations, and on some sites we even share reputations about
IT skills.
Although your local Koi Pond has just one filter, all the filters are
working together in this way to ensure the flow of trust.
The Drainage.
At the bottom of the Koi Pond is the drain. The drain pulls water
out of the pond. Some fish in fish ponds generate a lot of wastes.
A large amount of water is needed to balance these wastes.
Wastes will reduce the amount of oxygen available to the fish and
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the older the fish are, the bigger the problem is. But it can get
even worse. Lower oxygen levels might introduce other fish
types, ones that stick to the bottom and making the water muddy.
According to Ohio Pond Management muddy water can create
problems for fish trying to feed themselves and affect their size.
Phytoplankton might also became scarce and increase the
problem of growth and malnutrition.
A toxic employee is a well established fact, that brings down the
level of trust within the team. Some employees are like fish that
produce toxic materials that kill the fish themselves. It is a kind of
suicide. In a fish pond this suicidal effect is multiplied. Toxic
employees do the same thing. They spread negativity, demotion
and stress through the organization. They contaminate the work
environment and suffocate the morale of employees.
Like in fish ponds, pollution might kill the desirable employees
and replace them with undesirable ones. Or, the good employees
leave before they are suffocated. The cost is high and the
strategy is to prevent toxic employees from working in the
organization by using the right filter. However, while toxic
employees can be created over time, or the filter may miss
something, the drainage should work properly. The members of
the pond that muddle the trust should be released into the great
wide open, floating free, away from you project.
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Fish schooling is an important part of the Fish Pond Metaphor. Schooling mimics
human tendency to organize and view our selves in groups of people. This leaves
the question of how individual fish operate within a school resulting in one organic
adaptive entity? How do they deal with changes in the environment?
When fish pack together in a school their movements are tightly coordinated
without one central fish giving orders. The school can make very sharp turns
adapting to any threat in the environment. Speed is of essence. Be slow and you
are dead. The fish on the outside of the school sense the threats. If enough
outside fish make a certain turn the rest follows automatically. 
 
As explained on PetPlace.com:
“Tightly packed bundles of protruding hairs, called a neuromasts, encased in a
jelly-like sheath, are scattered around the head and body. Most are concentrated in
two canals along the sides of the fish called lateral lines, which run from the head
to the base of the tail. With the slightest change in pressure, the tiny hairs bend.”
The faster information is transferred through the whole school, the better its
adaption. However, this is not the entire story. If the fish act upon any piece of
information that hits their body the movement of the school gets slow and slightly
Section 2
Take a chair and read this one when you have
a clear mind. We make the connection
between the availability of information and the
use of the OODA loop as an essential skill to
adapt to the environment. The OODA loop
was first conceived by the US military as a
way to structure the process to adapt on a
battlefield.
Driving On The OODA Highway
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chaotic. By focusing mainly on the fish in front of them, you get
this tightly packed movement. The fish seem to swim upstream
the information flow.
“As a result, the macroscopic behavior of a school, such as its
steering behavior, is closely related to the transmission of
information within the school … Individuals in natural fish schools
tend to follow the motion of their front neighbors, a tendency
called front-priority … This front-priority tendency means that
individuals in natural fish schools tend to receive information from
their front neighbors...” as mentioned on a Penn State University
website.
Instead of looking at information as some kind of package that is
lying around somewhere, we have to view information as a
stream.
The constant flow of information is dripping and feeding the
school and the fish in it. If not enough information is flowing in,
the image of the environment is incomplete. If too much
information is entering the loop one drowns in an overload of
information. And finally, the quality of the flow is important to the
adaption skills. Poor or false information can be even more
destructive than no data at all.
Making the comparison to groups of people operating in a
shrinking world, we learn two important elements from the
schools of fish. The adaptiveness of an individual within the group
depends a) on the quality of the information he receives and b) on
the individuals place within the group.
In this section we discuss the effectiveness to deal with a
changing environment depending on the availability of
information. In the next section we will talk about the role of the
place of the social network.
A Network Of Interactions.
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Whatever your take is on projects, at the end of the day it is just
bunch of people working together to achieve a certain goal.
During this endeavor to laugh, cry, pull pranks, play dirty tricks
and have all other kinds of behavior towards each other. If you are
lucky they even work to reach the ﬁnal goal. If you take everything
away, and put people in the center of what a “project” is, you will
see a group of stakeholders interacting with each other; just like
any other group of people would do.
Just to make things easier on our life, we call the result of all this
behavior “the project”. In this sense it is nothing more than an
abstraction. If we say the project is late, this doesn’t mean that
some creature or entity from outer space showed up later than
expected; it is the result of the project people working together
that wasn’t ﬁnished on the time we predicted.
In this sense the word “project” is the same as “economy”. If our
economy is improving, there is not some kind of energy force that
is doing better than before. The whole system of people working,
people buying and people living that is better off in some way
than in the past.
Projects, organizations and even society in general are all
abstractions of the interactions of individuals.
Eating Information And OODA Loops.
To have a complex system, like groups of interacting people, that
is resilient to changes, that has a mechanism to transform itself
and to be able to adapt to the environment it needs feedback
from the environment. Feedback information needs processing
and communicating to other agents. To do this an agent has to go
through the OODA loop. John Boyd, a famous military strategist,
created the so-called OODA loop to give us structure when
discussing this subject.
The loop consists of four steps: Observe, Orient, Decide and then
Act. When looking at how a cluster of people (organizations,
projects, society) adapts to changes, we have created the image
of individuals operating on continuous OODA-loops.
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Observing reality based upon absorbing information from other
agents and the environment. The processed information is used
for orientation in combination of the mental model a person has
of the reality. Based upon the expectations resulting from both
previous steps an agents decides what to do. Like a little PacMan
we are eating information packages on the OODA highway. The
higher the amount of high quality information, the better our
effectiveness in adaption.
The Long Tail Distribution Of Information.
The effectiveness of these snacks, the information packages, is
depending on the amount of solid processed information. While
traveling through life you have positions where you have more of
the proper information and places where you are lacking
information. The road of life in this way becomes ﬂat and spiky.
‘Spiky’ meaning huge differences between availability, ‘ﬂat’
indicating equal opportunity to access information for everyone.
Processed information, like wealth, is unevenly distributed. It
follows a long tail distribution.
According to Wikipedia:
“The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of
some statistical distributions ... The feature is also known as heavy
tails, power-law tails, or Pareto tails. ... In these distributions a
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high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-
frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually “tails off.”
In many cases the infrequent or low-amplitude events ”the long
tail” can make up the majority.
Information is a type of wealth and is expected accordingly to
follow the same distribution. Recent studies show that this is the
case indeed. The Internet has drastically lowered the cost of
stocking and distribution of information (music, news, art, etc.)
and physical products. This opened the way for long tail
applications, such as the spread of online video over the web.
These ﬁndings tempt us to conclude that the information
landscape is both spiky (large differences between the amount of
processed information available to agents) and ﬂattened
(everybody has the same amount of information available). Not
everyone has access to the same amount of processed
information. Every agent has different amounts of information
available depending on its location and place in time.
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In the previous section we painted the image of people walking on the OODA
highway, continuously performing OODA loops, interacting with the environment,
in the search for information packages that help them adapt to changes. In this
posting we discuss the importance of your location in the network; we want to
extend this notion to the use of social OODA loops.
Humans are social. A group of people interacting with each other has to be viewed
in a social context. We wrote earlier:
“(Human) needs are all expressed in comparison of other members of the globe.
That is why they are considered social. In this context we also consider the
concept of group affiliation. Group affiliation is what it is all about in our lives.
During your life you are a member of a lot of social groups, by default, by choice or
by force (…) The group memberships determine how we see ourselves in the
whole of society, it determines our identity.”
If we want to have a proper understanding of how groups of people adapt to
different situation, we need to have a look at how resilience is created within a
social complex system. By making the system social the OODA Highway is
effected in the observe step by the influences of others on our mental constructs.
Section 3
In a traditional OODA loop your mental
models of the world are used. Your view of a
situation, with your experience and history.
But because humans are social, a large part of
our mental constructs are connected with
other people. Religion, economic relationships
or even just being married create a shared
construct. It is impossible to look at humans
as individuals. We have to make connections
with the larger groups.
Social OODA Super Speedway
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Curtis Gale helps us explaining the first aspect by his introduction
of social OODA loops. He points out that in a traditional OODA
loop the orient phase is assisted by mental models and
experiences from the individual person.
But in the context of social systems being affiliated with a certain
social group brings a specific set of mental constructs with it. If
you consider yourself religious, you are guided by a different
mental model than when you are a Darwinian. The notion as that
these mental constructs are shared among the members of the
social group.
The effectiveness of adaption in social complex system can be
considered depending on the quality and amount of mental
constructs a person has as his disposal.
Like people on the previous OODA Highway, who were eating
information like PacMan for their survival, our social PacMans
must have food too.
We are proposing the concept of social capital as being the
central available element that expresses the effectiveness of
resilience and adaption within a social system. Although there are
a many definitions going around for this concept, like on
Wikipedia, it provides the notion that a higher value shows better
access to other people, to either share, exchange or in an other
form influence shared constructs.
A definition by the Center of Disease Control comes close in
reflecting this aspect: “The individual and communal time and
energy that is available for such things as community
improvement, social networking, civic engagement, personal
recreation, and other activities that create social bonds between
individuals and groups.”
Social capital is closely related to “social networks”. If you are
better connected, you are more likely to have a larger social
capital.
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Although we insinuated above a direct relationship between
social capital and the level of connectivity in the social network, in
reality the dimensions are a little more complex. For example, the
location in the network is a balance between direct bonding and
keeping a little distance. Some possible negative effects like too
strong bonding, exclusion of outsiders, bullying of deviants and
resistance to change are associated with being in a center of a
social network and are not contributing to adaptability.
The Distribution Of Social Capital.
This turns us to the question on how social capital is distributed
among the system. Does the information OODA Loop have any
impact on the Social OODA loop, or vice versa? It turns out, they
do. For example, information exclusion might lead to social
exclusion, which in turn affects social interactions.
The “network effect” was ably recorded by Buchanan. This effect
leads to the spiky and ﬂattened social landscape, in which agents
experience differences in their ability to observe and gather
information depending on their location on the landscape network
organization. Moreover, a network organization depends only
weakly or not at all on the actions or character of their individual
members. In other words, your own individual actions have no
real impact on the whole, its your place within the network, who
you know, that makes the difference.
The question turns now into: if information is not evenly
distributed, would they result in uneven social OODA loops? Or,
will social networks produce different landscape of interactions
than that of the information network? It turns out that social
networks behave similarly.
In the following example we illustrate how this might work.
Say you are living on a small rural village in Jordan, somewhere in
a dessert. You have internet access, a telephone, you speak
English and have all the skills that are in high demand. You don’t
know anyone outside your village. You start calling people up
using the phone book and start by the letter A-Z… every week
you learn one person that is connected with something you want
to do.
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You move to the capital, the city of Amman. You attend a small
seminar and meet 100 people . All relevant people that can help
you out in getting what you want. Those 100 people also know
people, and because they are all in that city everyone’s networks
accelerate by the growth of anyone else’s network. Being in the
center of economic activity, being on the spike, acts like a
tornado, it sucks everything to it.
The social network brings you information, an opinion of the
information, perspective on the information. Connections
between people emerge. But they also dissolve, either because of
a changing need, but also because there is a limit to the amount
of relationships a person can effectively keep. Actually, it is not
just the size of the network, but of course also quality of the
people in it. People on the spike have more choice of
connections, and therefore can make a better selection of the
connections that are kept.
Being on a spike increases the network in size and quality.
Staying on a spike creates exponential growth of the network size
and quality.
After a year you can move back to the rural village in the desert.
You take your network with you. Creating your own small spike.
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The fish pond represents a complex ecosystem. Being confined in space, a fish
pond allows for the observation of what goes inside it. The fish is disturbed if
predators are present in the pond or if they are stressed by the presence of
parasites, lack of Oxygen or space, lack of appropriate place to hide or if exposed
to strong light, just to name few factors. External stress may easily remove the fish
from their comfort zone. External disturbance of fish pond by anglers hook
compound the stress on the fish, which in turn behave abnormally.
In contrast, watching fish without disturbing them does not added an element of
stress on fish and accordingly the fish behave normally. Direct watching of fish in
the fish pond is made difficult if the surface of the water is turbid. The wear of
Polaroid glasses and by watching the pond from a short distance above the water
surface helps in reducing this problem.
Watching the fish at different times and seasons reveals varying pattern of fish
behavior. It is interesting to note that fish are far from being cold and alien, as
many people think of them, fish can be heatedly emotional and express
themselves through a variety of physical displays. The fish circle, dance and
jubilate because they are leading a normal life and they are not stressed by feeling
endangered.
The Management Lesson:
Section 4
Just looking at employees or fish can already
have an impact on behavior. Again the
similarities are striking.
Indirect Control By Just Looking
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We may draw very important managerial lessons from observing a
fish pond. Employees live in complex organizations, Complexity
imposes unpredictability of the future and only a turbid picture of
the future may be sensed. The direct control of the employees will
stress them and the employees will act and not behave normally.
If a manager wants to see the real behavior he has to do it
indirectly and from a distance. He has to observe behaviors at
different times and see the collective behavior of employees
without direct interferences.
The examples are numerous for attempting to make direct
monitoring of employees. One example is the study of
cyberloafing, which is the act of employees using their
companies’ Internet access for personal purposes during work
hours. The employees feel stressed being watched and their
reactions have created newer problems. The loss of privacy at
work provides one example. The staggering estimates of annual
loses resulting from lost times using the internet for personal
reasons totaling sixty three billion dollars annually prompted the
direct monitoring of internet use. The employers and employees
are at two polar ends. A new conflict emerges and the cost of
which might tip those costs resulting from surfing the internet for
personal use.
The realization that observing behavior without stressing
employees is the practical option to find the real causes of why
the observed employees behavior has emerged in a particular
fashion. Are the employees using the internet for personal
reasons because they are not busy? Are not sure of direction?
Are their work assignments in line with their desires? Low
performance results from low desirability, low ability and low
institutional support. Knowing the real cause of the problem is
only possible through observing.
Observing behaviors under normal conditions have other merits.
The observance may help in detecting early signs of deviance of
normal behavior: coming late to work, poisoning the work
atmosphere, failing to submit report on time and lack of patience
with others are indicators of emerging problems.
Facial Expressions.
The use of Facial Expression Analysis is an advancing field to
observe the emotional reactions of people by looking at the entire
face, a part of the face and even by analyzing individual muscle
functions.  
Observing work performance and providing feedback about it
should be a routine part of the performance management
process.
In the book “What Did You Say? The Art Of Giving And Receiving
Feedback” by Seashore c.s feedback may be defined as
“information about past behavior, delivered in the present, which
may influence future behavior”. Feedback should be based on
observed and/or verifiable work-related behaviors, actions,
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statements, and results. This type of feedback is called behavioral
feedback. Effective feedback helps the employee sustain good
performance, to develop new skills and to improve performance
when necessary.
Interestingly, observing the behavior of birds show similar
patterns if birds are kept in a cage. According to
PetEducation.com birds develop behavioral problems when they
have problems satisfying their basic needs, like food, water,
social interaction or if they outgrow the cage.
We observe the same problem if a fish outgrows its pond or an
employee outgrowing his job.
A second major problem is boredom. This is a major factor in
behavior problems because the bird has nothing to do, so it finds
something to do on its own, as mentioned on Discovery.com.
Boredom might be a significant factor in changing the behavior of
employees.
The managerial lesson is Observe, Orient, Decide and then Act.
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Chapter 3
The
Organizational
Pond
Image by Alan Vernon.
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this chapter we will introduce a view on organizational structures using The Fish
Pond. It provides an alternative perspective in answering the question whether we
should have flat organizations, pyramidal organizations or something in between.
We will use the process of pond stratification as illustration.
Stratification of fish ponds means having different layers or levels of water type
(level of oxygen, density, e.g.). These levels are not fixed as the environment of the
fish pond changes during daytime and seasons. Depending on the circumstances
this layering will change. The environmental conditions demand differences in
layering to create a stable ecosystem in the pond. In other words, the stratification
serves a purpose. However, if certain circumstances take too long, negative
consequences can occur. Also tinkering with the ecosystem to eliminate some
layering can have negative consequences.
The management lesson provided: there is no ideal fixed hierarchy or organization
structure, only one that should be adaptive to environment.
Unlike sea water, fish ponds do not allow for the free flow of water resulting in the
stratification of their water.
“During summer, the heat and relatively calm weather causes pond water to stratify
into layers. There is a less dense, warm, upper layer that is exposed to the sun and
atmospheric oxygen, a very thin layer where temperature and density changes
Section 1
We introduce a view on organizational
structures using The Fish Pond. It provides an
alternative perspective in answering the
question whether we should have flat
organizations, pyramidal organizations or
something in between. We use the process of
pond stratification as illustration.
Stratification: Structures In A Pond
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rapidly, and a cold, denser, lower layer that receives little sunlight
and does not mix with the upper layers...” as mentioned by the
Virginia department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
This process is called stratification. And it can cause problems as
explained on the website of North Carolina State University: 
 
“Pond stratification with turnovers can become a problem in
ponds because the deep bottom water has no to low oxygen
levels. When the barrier breaks, the oxygen-rich surface water
mixes with the oxygen-poor or even oxygen-deficient bottom
water. This can result in severe oxygen depletion with a fish kill.
Pond turnovers happen quickly, and you should be prepared to
handle a low oxygen situation.”
Too much layering in a small work pond will deny the lowest layer
with oxygen.
There are two complementary problems addressed in this case:
the lack of oxygen, and the sudden addition of oxygen.
When the bottom layer doesn't receive oxygen, it is essential to
add it by means of aeration, pumping oxygen into the pond.
Otherwise fish get killed. But it's not only the fish themselves that
get into trouble. Worms and bacteria that keep the pond clean
and and support the creation of nutrients from the sediment, are
also unable to survive with a lack of oxygen.
In this case the lesson is clear: lower level employees need
aeration to survive in a work pond much more than they need it in
a copious working space. Unless this condition is fulfilled, mass
destruction to the organization where they work might happen. By
making the analogy to the Filter and Drainage story from chapter
5, too much layering (or shielding the team of from outside
influences) disturbs the needed flow of “fresh” trust entering, and
the building up of toxins.
Adding oxygen might be beneficial as indicated. But this should
only be done if the mixing will not make oxygen deficiency all
through the pond. Normally, the bottom layer is prone to oxygen
deficiency. Flattening this deficiency by mixing all layers will be
counter productive if deficiency of oxygen will make the new
emerging homogeneous layer oxygen-deficient. This will also lead
to mass kill.
This means that we may have multi levels of organizational
structures and each level must have assignments in parallel to the
prevailing work conditions and their possible changes.
The integration of these levels and the flow of information must
be initiated to satisfy the prevailing work conditions. The issue is
we may tolerate few layers to distribute our resources even
though one layer will be deficient. Trying to distribute the
resources equally will make the whole organization deficient
leading to its killing.
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In conclusion, sometimes layering is needed for protection,
making sure that deﬁciencies or not spread all over the place.
Sometimes layering is just adding handicaps, like limiting the ﬂow
of information and trust.
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As projects start and end within organizations the demand for employees
fluctuates. It seems that in certain times the workforce is just too small to handle
all tasks, and in slow times many employees are doing nothing. With change and
with projects come the tidal movement of need of labor force. Most projects will
be done in times of change, when economic forces are up or down. Times of
stability don’t call for much projects.
Hibernation: After Busy Times, Leave Them Alone.
Businesses go in cycles and each cycle demands a different caliber of staff; like
each season imposes different demands on fish ponds. Fish hibernate during
winter and it is not recommended to feed them during hibernation. At water
temperatures below 50 degrees fish become almost motionless, hibernating in the
deepest and warmest part of the pond.
Businesses also go into hibernation and for long spells sometimes. Do we expect
employees to hibernate during this people? Some employees will have low
resiliencies and will tend to hibernate any way. Fish hibernate for purpose.
Many fish pond managers make mistakes that are repeated by some business
managers. Sometimes when the weather gets a little warmer than usual, fish might
get a little active. Misinterpreting this behavior as the end of hibernation, some
owners start to feed the fish. But when the temperature becomes normal again,
Section 2
As projects start and end within organizations
the demand for employees fluctuates. It
seems that in certain times the workforce is
just too small to handle all tasks, and in slow
times many employees are doing nothing. This
article provides two insights: 1) Hibernation:
After Busy Times, Leave Them Alone; 2)
Recruit During Economic Winters.
The Pond And The Workforce
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and the fish should start their hibernation again, the float to the
surface as their bodies cannot handle the unexpected food.
Transient time may tempt some managers to make the wrong
decisions and actually to kill their businesses. Employees are
more stressed during change, during projects the intensity of
work is increased. True project people know the cyclic effects of
projects and take that into consideration. They go full throttle
when needed, because they know they can rest later.
Management should know: after busy times, leave them alone.
Don’t keep them busy with stupid tasks, give them leisure,
pleasure and relaxing time. Everybody will win this way.
Recruit During Economic Winters.
Before you can make use of employees, you first have to recruit
them. Stocking your pond. Timing of populating a fish pond is a
crucial factor for the survival of fish in a pond. Stocking a pond in
mid-summer should be avoided.
According to the University of Florida website ...
“... High water temperatures and low dissolved oxygen may
weaken fish being transported. Sudden temperature changes can
cause fish to go into shock and die. When stocking fish, transport
water and pond water temperatures should be equalized by slowly
adding pond water into the transport container.”
It is the conditioning of fish that adapt them to the new
environment. Better still, is to add the fish to an experimental tank
for some time before transferring them to the fish pond to ensure
that the fish are healthy. An unhealthy fish is not expected to
interact with other fish and its environment in a healthy way. 
 
The economic conditions under which you are recruiting can have
a large impact on the quality of the new employees.
Fish can be conditioned into being adaptive. The conditioning of
employees is not different and should follow similar steps. “I think
that conditioning your employees to expect change, to live in an
era of change, and to embrace it in a positive way rather than fight
it, is an important theme in almost every industry,” Marc Hebert,
executive vice president of Sierra Atlantic said as quoted on
SearchCIO.com.
These facts and the image provided by the Fish Pond Metaphor
prompt us to propose a different recruitment and keeping pattern
of staff. When business goes down it might be a better idea to
recruit or keep staff that have been conditioned for hard times.
Experiences in meeting suffocating problems are highly desirable
in such situations.
This conclusion is reinforced by the observation that the single
constant in business is resistance to change. We are all creatures
of habit and will continue doing the things that we are doing
unless those habits are challenged in some manner. People who
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have the ability to survive hard times and business downturns are
always needed because no business will avoid occasional lengthy
downturns.
The idea of placing fish in a tank prior to their transfer to the fish
pond suggests another dimension for time management.
We need enough lead time to select the appropriate employees
and to put them under test to monitor their healthiness and
readiness for the job. Rather than adding employees directly to
projects or business we may consider putting them first in a
simulation chamber to monitor their behavior. Only candidates
who perform well may be later added to the “work pond”.
The key to successfully developing such a program is to follow a
proven recruiting process for the positions you need to fill in a
timely manner and in a way to prove that performance of recruits
would meet future challenges. Resist the temptation to omit
steps, because shortcutting the process can shortchange your
results.
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Fish pond metaphor complexity of management

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