A few days ago, a hummingbird found its way into my garage and was flying around trying to get out. The strange thing is that both garage doors were fully open, as was the side window, and there was plenty of daylight coming in. And yet the bird was 'trapped' in my garage. For hours, it flew around in circles constantly tapping against the ceiling, and taking frequent rests on a bar just under the ceiling, but it just could not find the way out.
Freedom was never more than a couple of metres away, and had it flown just a little lower, it would have passed straight through one of the open doors. At one point, it did actually manage to fly beneath the open rolled back garage door, making its way to the light and for a brief moment, it looked as though it had found its escape route. But then it drifted sideways, climbed again, and returned to circling the ceiling.
Hummingbirds have excellent eyesight, and so it shouldn’t have been a question of not being able to see the outside world. The information was there. So why didn’t it leave? Something powerful was overriding what would seem to be the obvious - and that was its survival instinct.
When faced with uncertainty, danger, or confusion, a hummingbird’s natural response is to go high. In most situations in the natural environment, that behaviour probably serves them very well, and over the eons it has likely helped it avoid predators, navigate obstacles, and find safety countless times before.
So, this hummingbird wasn’t behaving irrationally, it was behaving exactly as it had learned to behave - it just didn't work in this 'new' environment that it found itself in.
And that got me thinking about organisations.
Many of the behaviours we see inside organisations started life as good ideas:
These behaviours survive because they work, and often they work for a long time. Over time they become the accepted ways of doing things; new employees learn them, managers reinforce them, and success appears to validate them. Eventually, they become part of the organisation’s culture - the accumulated learning comprising the collection of behaviours, assumptions, and beliefs that experience has taught us are useful.
And that way of interacting with the world works well, till one day it doesn't. The business environment rarely stands still: markets change, customers change, technology changes, competitors change, and organisations grow. What worked yesterday, sort of works today, and may not work tomorrow. Yet the behaviours often remain long after the conditions that made them successful have disappeared.
The hummingbird’s instinct had not become wrong, it had become misaligned with its environment - and many organisations find themselves in exactly the same position.
We often talk about culture as though it were something abstract, but in reality, culture exerts a powerful influence on behaviour. I see it as a kind of organisational gravity; people are naturally drawn towards familiar practices, accepted norms, and behaviours that have been rewarded in the past. That is often a good thing, and without it, organisations would struggle to coordinate effort, maintain standards, or create consistency. Forming culture is part of our natural instinct that enables us to work, live, and survive together. Strong cultures can be tremendous assets.
But like gravity, culture can also make it difficult to move in a different direction, and the stronger the culture, the stronger the inertia. People continue doing what has worked before because experience has taught them that this is the safest and most sensible course of action. Over time, alternatives become harder to see; it's not that people are unwilling to change, but because the existing behaviours feel both logical and proven.
The hummingbird kept returning to the ceiling - not because it wanted to remain trapped, but because every instinct told it that was where safety could be found.
My perspective was that the hummingbird was not trapped - its perspective was quite the opposite. My perspective enabled me to see what was happening, come to an understanding of why, and so work out what needed to be done.
The same happens with organisations. Often, from the inside, it is difficult to see the assumptions that shape your thinking because behaviours feel normal, processes feel necessary, and constraints feel real. Most organisations already possess capable people, considerable experience, and more information than they realise, but what they need is someone to ask a few challenging questions (which often seem obvious in hindsight) such as:
Often the answer is to do something surprisingly small: a slight adjustment in thinking, a willingness to challenge a long-held assumption, or look at the situation in a different way. The hummingbird did not need to fly harder, it simply needed to fly a little lower.
Watching the hummingbird, I was struck by how close freedom actually was. The doors were open, the way out was clear, and it had the capability to fly. What prevented escape was not a lack of opportunity, but a behaviour that had become automatic through years of successful use.
And in organisations, the habits, processes, and assumptions that once helped us succeed can gradually become the very things that keep us circling beneath the ceiling. Sometimes progress does not require more effort, more resources, or a grand transformation. Sometimes it begins with something much simpler - lowering our gaze, challenging an assumption, and looking at the problem from a different perspective.
Consultant are good at helping with that.
Ad Futurum
Graham
PS - Happy ending. The hummingbird was assisted to freedom - by means of a strategically placed feeder hung under one of the open garage doors, then 2 people to corral and chase it in the direction of the door opening when it went to the feeder. Once out the door, it immediately flew upwards and made its way to the top of the tallest near-by tree.
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