The Fox Trilogy. Chantell Ilbury
asks the managing director whether he has read her viability study into ways of keeping the pit open. He says no, the decision to close was taken two years ago and coal is history. Her retort is that clearly reports have to be seen to be written rather than written to be seen. That’s the way sleek head-office hedgehogs like it!
The unnatural, inward-looking and incestuous atmosphere of a hedgehog lair resembles that of a royal court of old plagued by intrigue and infighting among the courtiers. The only measure of success is how favourable a courtier’s standing is with the king or queen. In the resulting competition in which each courtier is vying for the eye of the monarch, the hedgehog species show their expertise at stabbing their rivals in the back. They have so many spikes to do it with! Conspiracy theories abound, and any questioning of the party line laid down by the ruler is viewed as treachery. Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Florentine philosopher who promoted the use of unscrupulous statecraft to preserve power, would have been quite at home in the company of modern, smooth-talking hedgehogs. The only thing he would find unfamiliar in today’s world is the speed of travel and communication which has reduced us to a global village. Unfortunately, it has also produced a superclass of globe-trotting hedgehogs with no fixed abode and no fixed commitments to any community or country. Their entire time is spent chasing the bucks across national boundaries, cooped up in the intensive care of a 747’s first-class cabin. You can be sure that if Machiavelli had been alive at the beginning of the 21st century, he would have had multiple passports, several aliases and would be clocking up millions of air miles. Even as the prince of hedgehogs, he had respect for the fox. He had this to say about his rival: “As a prince must be able to act just like a beast, he should learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion does not defend himself against traps, and the fox does not defend himself against wolves. So one has to be a fox in order to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves.”
It goes without saying that hedgehogs are natural centralisers who want to achieve change from the top down. They are conceited enough to think they have all the answers for the working classes. Development – with a capital “D” – should radiate out from the centre. Foxy executives, on the other hand, support the idea of change from the bottom up. Decentralisation, without losing all control, is the name of the game for the business fox. On a slightly different note but in the same context, foxy monarchs in the old days used to employ court jesters with the aim of the latter bending the royal ear with unorthodox opinions on matters of state. As they say, there’s many a truth that lies in jest. Nevertheless, the court jester had to invest considerable humour in putting across his contrarian views in order to make the sovereign laugh and thus minimise his chances of being beheaded! We naturally choose friends that we agree with, but we learn something new from people with whom we don’t. An old Spanish adage goes as follows: “He who advises is not the traitor.” So, in plain English, don’t shoot the messenger.
A lesson from Mother Nature, flying frogs and sea-foxes
You needn’t have salt water coursing through your veins to imagine the following analogy: an angling hedgehog, if there ever was one, would prefer to fish within the known, protective waters of a cove where the effects of tide and winds are relatively certain and controllable. In contrast, a sea-fox would prefer to investigate other fishing grounds beyond the protective waters of the cove and be willing to operate in the uncertain and uncontrollable elements of the open sea.
Thus, an essential element in the difference between the mind-set of the fox and the hedgehog is the fox’s preparedness to strike out for the unknown. This in turn means an acceptance that mistakes do happen. What is more, mistakes are not just golden opportunities for learning; they are, in fact, sometimes the only opportunity for learning something truly new and making progress. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin accidentally when he saw that a bit of mould, which had fallen from a culture plate in his laboratory, had destroyed bacteria around it. Basically, he won the Nobel Prize, and a knighthood into the bargain, for a mistake which he had the intelligence to follow up on.
Hedgehogs balk at this approach because it may well expose them to peer ridicule. Indeed, they view mistakes in two possible lights. If it is somebody else’s, that person is to blame because somebody has to be held responsible and punished. If the mistake is their own, no-one is to blame because it was the result of circumstances beyond anyone’s control. In the latter case, hedgehogs are very good at producing an expression of injured innocence, reminding one of professional footballers about to be given a yellow or red card for a foul. Either way, mistakes are perceived by hedgehogs as aberrations which don’t advance you up the learning curve. Failure has the same penalty attached to it as drawing the “chance” or “community chest” card in a game of Monopoly that says: do not pass go, do not collect £200, move directly to jail! Better be right all the time is the maxim of the cautious hedgehog; or at least don’t be caught out if you’re wrong.
Foxes can take solace from the fact that their approach to learning and problem-solving has been used successfully for many years by the world’s most powerful and foxy CEO – Mother Nature. As pointed out by Professor Daniel C. Dennet, the Director of Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts: “For evolution, which knows nothing, the leaps into novelty are blindly taken by mutations, which are copying ‘errors’ in the DNA. Most of these are fatal errors, in fact. Since the vast majority of mutations are harmful, the process of natural selection actually works to keep the mutation rate very low. Fortunately for us, it does not achieve perfect success, for if it did, evolution would finally grind to a halt, its sources of novelty dried up.”
This is particularly evident in the enigmatic rain forests of Borneo which boast one of the largest concentrations of gliders – at least thirty different species of animals as diverse as lizards, squirrels, lemurs or colugos, snakes, geckos and frogs – that have changed their physiological structure over the years to allow them to glide from tree to tree. Why is this island so rich in gliding species while other rain forests like the Amazon have none? The answer – Mother Nature and evolution. The rain forests of South East Asia are dominated by giant dipterocarp trees which tend to crowd out other trees and, to add insult to injury, offer hungry residents infrequent and unpredictable bounties of fruit. To work within this context of inconsistent and non-controllable food sources, the frogs and other animals that lived within the area took to an ingenious way of moving from one arboreal restaurant to another – jumping large distances. A creative strategy indeed! They realised that this provided the most effective way of getting around without excessive climbing and exposure to the danger of predators. Gradually they evolved to a more manageable mode of movement – gliding. Understandably this didn’t happen overnight, nor without its fair share of bruised and battered little bodies. But it was all part of the learning experience.
The point of the gliding, flying frogs? The mind-set of making mistakes and learning from them to expand one’s knowledge, so intrinsic to the mind of the fox, is nothing new. It is a natural process, and it has been around for millions of years. The other important lesson to derive from this example is: think the unthinkable. A frog that glides? You’re pulling my leg. But it’s a fact like the flying hedgehogs in the previous section – except that the latter travel first class! Mind you, in the world of political affairs, the Florida recount in the US presidential election was also unthinkable until it happened in 2000.
How else can the advance in the forest gliders be construed to be of relevance to the global economy? How can those blessed with a higher cognitive function than a flying lizard benefit from this insight? Humans have the tendency to try and pre-empt a future to which they link adverse consequences by taking actions to head it off. To a risk-averse person there is nothing wrong with this strategy. Ironically, however, such restrictive thinking was not the type that laid the foundations for, and made possible, a global economy. The great explorers of the past, like Marco Polo, David Livingstone and Christopher Columbus were all foxes who were responsible for establishing trade routes and the exchange of ideas and cultures. The hedgehogs followed in their tracks as settlers. Much of the time these pioneering foxes didn’t know where they were going. Columbus thought he was heading for Asia, but intercepted America by chance.
Indeed, in determining their position at sea, the early navigators implemented a learn-from-mistakes philosophy. They would first make