The Brazil Nut Tree and the Strangler Fig

Here’s a parable.

In the rain forests of the Amazon there lives a massive tree known as the Brazil nut tree. This tree towers over the forest, reaching heights of two hundred feet. Most of us are familiar with the Brazil nut the tree produces, having seen it in stores or in whole nut mixes. A good nutcracker will open the wedge-shaped nuts.

What you may not know is that the nut itself grows with about two dozen others inside a shell not unlike a coconut. These shells weigh about five pounds, and if you were hit on the head with one dropped from some two hundred feet above you, you might not live to tell the tale.

The shell is so hard that only one animal – the agouti (resembling a large guinea pig) has teeth sharp enough to penetrate to the nuts within.

Truly, the Brazil nut tree stands out in a rain forest of impressive trees.

However, the Brazil nut tree has an enemy.

Far down below the canopy, in the ground beside the massive trunk of this tree, a seed sprouts. The seed is that of a strangler fig. From this seed will come the death of the Brazil nut tree. For the strangler fig, as it sounds, will grow up and up, and decades later will smother the Brazil nut tree. And so this mighty tree can be brought down by a vine that strangles it.

Why tell this story?

Because a strong business – any business, yours or mine, is like a Brazil nut tree. It can be the best business in the world, dominating the market.

The strangler fig is bureaucracy.

You see, the bigger a business gets, the more people it employs, the more money that flows through it – these things create the seeds of destruction. Big businesses are targets for lawsuits, for activists. They are also places where human error can be magnified, and consequences are huge.

So when something goes wrong – a process is sidestepped, or a corner is cut, or (as they say) somebody fell asleep at the wheel – the tendency is to put a procedure in place to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. As the business grows and more people are involved in the creation of its products and services, the business fragments into specialties, connected to each other by interfacing activities; and because people in one function sometimes feel that people in the next function may not have their best interests in mind, adjacent books and controls spring up, including internal accounting, internal project management, internal practices. Layered on top of, or weaving through this, are policies that over time become increasingly complex, often obscure, sometimes designed to fix problems that no longer exist.

And so sets of practices and layers of accountable activities grow, giving rise to sayings like “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” Agility runs smack into protective practices. Innovation stumbles over “but we’ve always done it this way.” Linear thinking that presupposes an orderly world cannot be discarded in favor of the disruption that so often characterizes an evolving marketplace.

And so our Brazil nut tree, our vibrant business, becomes clunkier and slows down. Competitors outside sometimes are ignored as attention is focused on the competitors within. And everyone is trying to do a good job, everywhere at once. Because if we didn’t have controls, if we didn’t have procedures, we’d have chaos. And that is a valid point. But without a balance, without a view towards what’s necessary versus what makes us feel secure in an uncertain world, we run the risk of strangling ourselves with our own well-intentioned policies.

Thus, the strangler fig.

Here’s an example, and this could be found in many organizations today. You have a project team. On that team are the worker bees. They are led by a project manager. The project manager must attend to paperwork that satisfies the program management office that the project is managed effectively. Additional paperwork accounts for project costs, in terms of hours spent and resources consumed. These accounts have to be reconciled with the finance activity, where another set of books is kept. And between the program management office, the finance activity, and the project itself are people who are reconciling the information that is maintained in these activities.

What this means is that, for every set of worker bees doing the work, there is another set (sometimes, alas! larger) that is helping the work around. They are doing meta-work. The more of that there is, the more bureaucracy there is – and the more strangulation.

Now let’s put a downturn into play. The company needs to cut costs. Unfortunately, a common way to do this is to make everyone take a “haircut” – that is, say, donate 10% or more to “the cause.” The problem is, waste isn’t distributed evenly in this model. And by cutting project staff along with all the overhead, we cut where we shouldn’t. And bureaucracy marches on, and costs don’t go down as intended.

The strangulation continues.

The harder work – the work we often do not or cannot bring ourselves to do – is to cut across the interfaces – to cut the vines of the strangler fig – and in so doing resolve our costs downward as a reflection of the marketplace we serve. Such agility requires both imagination and nerve.

Make no mistake – bureaucracy busting is hard work. Things are done for a reason, and often for the right reason. The art is in determining which processes contribute to safe, effective and agile operations, and which processes, activities and internal organizations exist as buffers and layers through and across which work must pass before the product or service can be offered to the marketplace. Master that art – much easier said than done – and you will master what it takes to perpetually reinvent and reinvigorate your organization despite the thicket of regulations and laws that form your mandatory ruleset. You have no control over those. But you do have control over your voluntary controls – the practices you design with the goal of protecting your organization but with the conflicting effect of weakening its effectiveness in the long run.

Good luck in pruning your strangler fig.