Trophic cascade – team learning

Introduction

In 1995, the reintroduction of a pack of wolves to Yellowstone National Park triggered a chain of positive changes that restored the ecological health of the entire park. In the same way, a deliberately deployed team learning effort can act as a catalyst for functional transformation.

When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, it led to an ecological phenomenon referred to as a trophic cascade. In short, the reintroduction of a relatively small pack of wolves triggered a chain of positive changes that restored the ecological health of the entire park. Like national parks, organisational functions are also complex systems that self-generate benefits. Yet, in spite of massive training investments, most learning and development attempts fail because they remain disconnected from actual business drivers. We offer a solution where the Yellowstone wolves serve as a guiding analogy to illustrate that strategically introducing a high-performing team can unlock systemic growth through scaling team learning.

While working with a large sales function in the midst of shifting its primary focus from top-line revenue to market share growth, we quickly identified an unforeseen gap impeding progress. The majority of the 100-plus front-line sales leaders were overly focused on nonessential selling activities, shirking tough accountability conversations with veteran sellers, slow to hire and unwilling to consider hiring sales talent from other industries. It also became clear that leadership training and coaching were not the primary gaps constraining the function; rather, there were deeply rooted pervasive functional leadership beliefs and practices that were thwarting market growth.

Drawing from the trophic cascade analogy and inspired by the strategy of reintroducing wolves, we presented a business case for creating and deploying a new team of six existing regional sales leaders to serve as training directors charged with driving adoption of new sales leadership behaviours. This team of six became our analogous team of wolves. While we saw this learning effort as a viable way to revitalize sales leadership, we also acknowledged that this was going to require time and a solid year to drive any transformational progress.

Success was ultimately dependent on enacting several leadership behavioural shifts:

 keys to compounding team learning into functional transformation

YNP wolves were able to drive profound system change in short order by hunting overpopulated elk herds that had been straining plant species. Although the wolves’ impact on the elk may seem wholly detrimental, there is actually a paradoxical relationship in which the wolves simultaneously pose a direct predatorial threat to elk while also serving as a health catalyst for elk herds. YNP wolves largely targeted sick and weakened elk, thereby strengthening the entire herd.

Like the paradoxical relationship between YNP wolves and elk, our team of six training directors’ paradoxical relationships with the regions they supported also unlocked wide-reaching system benefits. As background, each of the six members had impressive sales records and deep relationship trust among their regional peers. These qualities meant that the training directors would have to manage the tension of simultaneously being empathetic regional insiders and initiative-driving outsiders.

Managing this span enabled the training directors to concurrently hold steadfast to company-wide priorities while also demonstrating regional understanding and empathy. Balancing the tension between empathy and accountability allowed the training directors to develop relationships with the regional leaders, which in turn made them able to accurately identify widely held regional beliefs constraining market share growth and discuss these constraints with the leaders in a way that reflected understanding and empathy. This ability to manage adversarial tensions positioned the team as a system catalyst capable of connecting regional histories with the new enterprise vision.

Ultimately, this small team served as connective tissue between the headquarter strategy and those who were ultimately tasked with executing the work regionally. Each time the training directors unearthed constraining regional rituals, a subsequent reevaluation of long-held regional beliefs ensued, and the regional leaders often shed their constraining stance on business practices that had impeded growth. Put simply, the training directors were like wolves in that they effectively culled many of the defensive routines that were limiting regional growth. The training directors did this by pointing out false assumptions, ways important decisions were being avoided, and work that had become comfortable and routine that was undermining the sales force becoming more effective.

The YNP wolves’ ability to learn and adapt collectively as a pack presents another apt team learning analogy. Specifically, YNP wolves demonstrated a new ability, unforeseen by ecologists, to successfully hunt bison in park areas where elk were scarce. This emergent pack ability — a new hunting prowess with daunting prey — was born out of necessity and realised through pack coordination.

Like the wolves, the team of training directors faced their own formidable target when leading a functional transformation. It was the manner in which the team learned to adapt — and then their ability to impart and replicate this ability — that spread the team learning impact throughout the sales function. This guiding analogy demonstrates how formidable challenges can forge team adaptability and how these conditions can be replicated to scale from team adaptability to functional adaptability.

The training directors’ practice in developing team learning extended beyond their group and provides insight into how team learning can further propel functional transformation. The team replicated their team learning best practices in their leadership development work. After a full year, the training director team established a rhythm for scaling team learning by introducing sales leadership concepts through dialogue, leading to explicit actionable content application expectations.

While the training directors took intentional steps to develop their capacity to learn as a team, it was the more formidable challenge of building this capacity throughout the function that prompted a new transformational ability.

While the intricate dependent coordination of wolves’ hunting behaviour has been extensively documented, recent computational modelling suggests that wolves, though appearing as deliberately coordinated, may actually rely on two simple positional rules when hunting: positioning relative to their prey and positioning relative to one another. These rules, in turn, enable an improvisational fluidity that ensures the wolves maintain positional advantage as they react to ever-changing movements of their hunting companions and prey.

Throughout this change effort we struggled with balancing defining training director task clarity and empowering role latitude. Finding the proper mix between accountability and creative flexibility can be complicated. Before sending our team of six into their respective regions, we first ensured they were equipped with tools and frameworks that aligned to a shared definition of initiative success. We also met early and often to settle upon broad, consistent and quantifiable standards for sales leadership.

That said, we also knew we could not predict exactly how these sales leadership standards would resonate with the regional sales leaders. While the training director team had methodically drawn plans for each program installment, in many instances they had to rely on an improvisational dexterity when sessions and discussions did not go to plan. Like the wolves reacting in fluid unison with the prey’s every shift, our training directors also had to read body language and detect audience angst, then pivot accordingly back to the fundamental guiding principles. Rather than simply driving toward a set goal, they improvised a response that simultaneously addressed the concerns of the sales leaders while also keeping the larger mission in sight.

The Yellowstone wolves were not reintroduced haphazardly into the park — they were deliberately prepped and nourished to ensure that they were fit for the environment. That said, at some point the conservation experts trusted that the wolves’ biological instincts would govern the way they navigated the ecosystem. Through this, the team established a few governing principles that functioned in the same fashion as the simple rules for the wolves and afforded successful alignment amid improvisation.

After 18 months, the impact of the training directors was quantifiably evident in program participant evaluations and, more important, in new field leadership behaviors essential to the functional transformation. Over the course of 2020, the training directors delivered two formal leadership development programs that spanned six weeks. The programs’ net promoter scores and evaluation ratings exceeded every company rating benchmark.

While the programs’ reception was encouraging, the functional response evident in new sales leadership mentalities and behaviours proved to be the most important indicator of success. Our original charge of shifting from managing activities rather than outcomes, driving accountability in coaching discussions and hiring outside sales talent all started to take root.

Summary of functional progress:

• Every regional VP set account activity standards and deadlines for every seller — a practice that had been largely neglected in the past.
• Every regional leader set growth expectation targets for each of their stagnant legacy sellers.
• Strategic hiring activity — job postings and candidate prospecting — nearly doubled, and the last two new-hire cohorts largely comprised sales talent from other industries.

We present this case and the Yellowstone National Park analogy as a contribution designed to evolve functional learning that is well worth attempting in practice:

• Identify where transformation-driving teams can use healthy paradoxical tension to develop connective learning tissue between the team and the broader organisational functions.
• Present transformation-driving teams with daunting tasks to elicit team learning that can be replicated with other teams to drive functional transformation.
• Challenge transformation-driving teams with learning how to simplify and master their improvisational transformation-building contributions.

We are aware that using the analogy of a trophic cascade in which a pack of wolves culls the elk population may sound like we are advocating a deadly and violent solution to an organizational problem. This is not the case. Instead, we are using the analogy to illustrate that defensive organisational practices need to be rooted out in order to change ineffective and outmoded practices to ones that produce positive and effective change. Since organisational status quo is often so comfortable and difficult to change, we think the trophic cascade analogy can serve as a wake-up call for how drastically entrenched issues need to be confronted in order to progress.

The analogy we use of a trophic cascade helps to illustrate how a small team can drive profound functional transformation. When the team of wolves was introduced into Yellowstone, the goals of those who introduced the wolves were limited. It was only after watching the cascading effects of the wolves thinning the elk population that the extent of the wolf team’s impact on the park as a whole became apparent. In the same way, a deliberately deployed team learning effort can act as a catalyst for functional transformation.