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What is it that makes organizations operate smoothly and efficiently? Why do some seem to fly to the moon while others crash to Earth? Why is the average age of large organizations falling? There are, of course, no simple answers to these questions if there were they wouldn’t be worth asking, and we would all understand the dynamics well.

These conundrums persist as they are complex, with a palimpsest of factors layering on top of each other. We have a natural tendency to seek hard numbers to explain problems, they are so much easier to work with and manipulate but they can rarely provide the whole picture. For me, as editor of a magazine focused on leadership, the underlying reason is founded on fuzzy human factors.

In recent decades the Kenyan government has applied stricter land regulation across the country, meaning that there is less freedom for nomadic herders to roam.

Often when we are presented with complexity the best thing to do is to step back and try and visualize the main elements as a simpler model, and once we have a good understanding of that, then dial up the complexity to see where the issues can be resolved or at least relieved.

It was with this approach that I spent a week with the Maasai in Kenya, in the company of Anthony Willoughby, who has a long association and close friendship with those we were staying with, and a group of interested others, ranging in age from 14 to mid-70s.

The Maasai are the iconic tribe of East Africa. They are nomadic pastoralists that is traditionally they moved with their herds of cattle, sheep, and goats on a continual circuit to fresh pasturelands. In recent decades the Kenyan government has applied stricter land regulations across the country, meaning that there is less freedom for nomadic herders to roam. This has forced the Maasai to become more static in their ways, leading to them living in more permanently settled communities, and inevitably this has brought change to their traditional way of life.

The challenge for nomadic peoples, like the Maasai, is how they can find a path to balance these tensions. Can they maintain a cohesive and collaborative community while the attractions of the modern world lure their young to the cities?

Alongside this change, the modern world has equally inevitably impinged on their lives. From actively having sought to remain separate from modernizing influences, and government structures, today they realize that to have any influence over their domains they need to be part of the conversation. They are gradually, though in many cases reluctantly, becoming advocates of Western-styled education which those we stayed with stressed, teaches knowledge but not wisdom, which the Maasai value more than knowledge. Children will walk long distances at a young age to go to school and a significant number aspire to go on to college and university. These changes bring greater interaction with the modern world and create tensions between traditional ways of life and new ones. For instance, as Kenya has led the way in mobile technology and the opportunities it can bring principally through M-Pesa, the mobile banking service to the outside world and commerce is no more than a click away.

The challenge for nomadic peoples, like the Maasai, is how they can find a path to balance these tensions. Can they maintain a cohesive and collaborative community while the attractions of the modern world lure their young to the cities? This question is not so dissimilar from that which executives are asking themselves and their boards, about their employees how do we create loyalty, a sense of belonging amongst our staff that will make them want to stay? There will always be greener grass elsewhere, so what can be done to make organizations more attractive to stay with?

The moving parts of a nomadic herdspeople’s lives may be less complex than those in a fast-moving modern city, but nonetheless, no life is simple especially with the onslaught of climate change.

I first spent time with a group of Maasai in 2019 and was struck by their extraordinary sense of community. Like so many traditional societies they have practices and traditions that have impacts that may at first not be apparent but the elders amongst them are deeply aware of the importance of these practices.

It is worth noting, that while this article seeks to highlight some of the practices that we in the more economically developed West could valuably adopt or readopt, as they are mainly practices we have abandoned and forgotten the Maasai way is not an ideal, there are many things people in the west (and increasingly the Maasai too) would not wish to embrace which are neither beneficial nor benevolent. Foremost is that it is a patriarchal society, women certainly have influence, but very much less so than men; and the structure of the groups is such that it promotes cohesion over change, so innovation can be slow to occur. Emmanuel Mankura who leads one of the communities we were staying with is doing all he can to break many of these barriers and taboos in his community including FGM.

The lack of a single ‘figurehead’ chief is important. It creates a radically different mindset within the collective, be that a tribe or an organization. Power does not coalesce around a single individual.

The moving parts of a nomadic herdspeople’s lives may be less complex than those in a fast-moving modern city, but nonetheless, no life is simple, especially with the onslaught of climate change; many communities have seen up to 90% of their cattle die in the recent drought. And where there are people, there are complications as well as solutions. That relative simplicity, however, provides an opportunity to see the moving parts more clearly.

Responsibility, Ritual, and Rules

Responsibility

Lolkerra may only be five years old, and his mother still has to cook for him and wash his clothes, but regardless of this he has been given a responsibility that he primarily enjoys, but also that he takes very seriously. Lolkerra is tasked with taking a goat out to pasture, and more importantly, bringing it back at the end of each day. He does not do this entirely alone, there is a group of young Maasai children who have their own animals and they do not go far from the manyatta, or homestead of three huts. Rarely even out of sight of it. Nonetheless, the goat is Lolkerra’s responsibility to look after – and livestock are the central wealth of the Maasai.

When he is older he will become a warrior and look after the cattle. These may need to be taken away from the manyatta for days or even weeks in search of fresh grazing, depending on the season and the rains but the path towards doing that starts at a very young age.

The giving of responsibility to people is a fundamental element of creating purpose in our lives. Ultimately, we all want to ‘matter’, we want to matter to other people, whether colleagues, friends, or family and we want our work to matter. If what we do matters to no one, or is so replicable that no one cares who does it, we disengage. You don’t care, so I don’t care.

In the Maasai, the tending of livestock lies at the very heart of their existence. It is centrally important it is their wealth, their key to trading for other goods they do not have, and the source of their sustenance too. Livestock matters so being given responsibility for a goat matters too. And with that understanding comes an awareness that they have a place in the community. It may not be pivotal, but it is an essential part of the successful functioning of the community.

We spend an enormous amount of time and resources selecting, interviewing, and then onboarding new people into our organizations and all too often we fail to give them responsibility for anything meaningful. Decisions are all shifted up the hierarchy or to committees, slowing progress and over-burdening leaders, while leaving able and eager new employees feeling disengaged, and wondering if the work they do ‘matters’. Perhaps we should all look around and see if there is a metaphorical goat we can entrust to people, where they can have more decision-making power and responsibility that matters.

Ritual

One of the most striking and beguiling parts of spending any time with the Maasai is their enthusiasm to sing, dance, and engage in traditional rituals. The group we spent time with were well off the tourist trail, and there was a real sense of excitement and fiesta when our party arrived at their village having walked there from our camp through the bush, guided by some young ‘warriors’ and elders.

At the village gates, we were greeted by all the womenfolk singing a song of welcome. It was a surprisingly emotional experience. It is well understood that collective singing is a hugely bonding experience 1 being both an expression of unity as well as an activity that brings people together. While communal singing is not prevalent in organizations, though the likes of Music in Offices in London are leveraging this power effectively, there are plenty of community choirs in the west that draw people in and create a sense of belonging and community. Perhaps what is less normal in Western groups is male dance groups. The Maasai are well known for their unique dance style, adumu. This is where the young warriors dance competitively by jumping up and down on the spot, rhythmically to the singing of their peers. The performance is a combination of prowess, strength, and unbridled joy and laughter, all with the background swell of the primal rhythmic singing.

It is difficult to immediately see where a parallel or similar activity can be brought into work organizations. In smaller organizations and often within teams or groups there are ‘offsites’ and ‘away days’, but they don’t usually hold any ‘ritual’ sense to them. The closest to that perhaps is the Christmas Party, but the rituals there are often ones that do less to bond people in than people seek to avoid! The lack of office ritual has become more apparent since the pandemic and the rise of working from home. Sport tends to be better at building rituals into their practices, the pre-match routines and postmatch celebrations or consolations.

Elders do not have a need to be ‘commanding’, their approach is much more to be observational and accessible

What is clear with the Maasai though, is that these communal rituals extend far beyond singing and dancing, to the rites of passage for boys as they become ‘warriors’ and the bleeding of cattle for blood, or the ‘meat camps’ that the men sometimes go on, all weave a sense of belonging and pride into their Maasai-ness. Other parts of the route to maturity are having to change though the identity that came from the courage required to kill a lion no longer exists, lion-killing is now being outlawed, thus the community we were in is ‘teaching’ that the pen is their new spear and the sheet of paper is their new shield. “An educated man never goes hungry” is the new mantra.

By participating you feel part of the group and as you get older, that moment of participation looms ahead of you, drawing you inwards and onwards in the group, until you are part of it. It not only acts as an incentive to keep going, but there is also a sense that if you leave the group you lose that connection and ability to participate in something that your peers all really value. Rituals really become the glue for the group.

Good leaders need to identify the activities that can act as, or be evolved into, workplace rituals. They should be joyful and seen by all, though the ability to take part may only come as certain milestones are achieved. They should not be confused with perks though. The car park space or additional holidays are not rituals.

Rulers

Perhaps the most significant lesson we can learn from the Maasai and many other indigenous groups too is that they are run by a network of elders, with no single chief. It is a very human model that has been practiced by homo sapiens for millennia. Leadership and responsibility are shared amongst a group of elders. When challenges arise the most experienced elder in that area is consulted, or a group of elders discuss the issue.

For major challenges the discussion is opened to a wider audience and a collective decision is taken, which everyone must adhere to. Clearly, this is a simpler process when you are managing a group of 30-150 people than an organization of thousands. Above 150 and collective decision-making becomes chaotic usually. However, the need for large group decisions is rare, both in tribes and in commercial organizations.

The lack of a single ‘figurehead’ chief is important though. It creates a radically different mindset within the collective, be that a tribe or an organization. Power does not coalesce around a single individual, there will inevitably be some senior elders who are ‘more equal than others’, that have more influence and informal authority. But by keeping the field of senior elders broad it allows everyone to feel that they have a pathway to influencing the tribe if they wish. Anthony Willoughby recalls asking a group of Maasai elders ‘who is the leader here?’ and they simply replied “Everyone is a leader, please can you tell us the problem you wish to solve and we will select the most appropriate person to solve it.” In today’s business world, no single person has all the answers, so a move to more distributed leadership has been occurring for some time, but hierarchies still tend to culminate in single individuals.

It should be noted that while senior elders certainly are deeply respected, they are not necessarily any wealthier or better provided for. The route to senior elderhood is essentially one of community acclaim. The more respected you are for your behavior and maybe your prowess at various activities be that hunting or medicine or conflict management or some other valuable skill - the more valued your opinion and the greater your influence on discussion.

This sets a tone and a pathway in indigenous groups that is very different from that of the modern commercial or bureaucratic organization. An individual’s pathway to a position of influence emerges out of how they are viewed by the rest of the group. Without concrete positions for people to aim for and obtain, there is less politicking to be done to secure such roles. Marshall Goldsmith’s 2008 book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, describes the often practiced dog-eat-dog tactics of the climb up the corporate ladder which are not what makes a good CEO who really needs to be ‘in service to the whole organization’ and not just ‘in service to themselves’. In order to progress to positions of influence and respect you have to be ‘in service to the whole organization’ from the very beginning. Any indication of being ‘in service to yourself’ is a quick route to losing influence. When Willoughby once asked Joseph Nombri, a worldly Papua New Guinean elder, ‘How do you select leaders?’ his reply was “We watch who people follow.”

There is an interesting circularity here as Lolkerra with his goat learned from an early age that to gain respect from his parents and those close to him, he needed to look after the goat attentively the sense of being ‘in service to the organization’ also began at that point.

Elders as a collective group, do not have a need to be ‘commanding’, their approach is much more observational and accessible. They are happy for others, the more active and energetic young (though you can be a senior elder from a relatively early age in your mid-30s even) to make their impact and create progress for the tribe.

This can cut both ways, it does mean that for much of the time, the tribe/organization is not being encouraged to surge forward, grow, and dominate. That works well for a tribe and society, it is riskier for many capitalist organizations where the attack is often the only form of defense.

Leadership

From a leadership perspective, where the leaders are creating the conditions for others to do their best work in pursuit of a common objective, this Maasai/indigenous peoples’ approach is very effective. By building responsibility and so a sense of purpose; binding members into the group through practices and rituals that foster their sense of self and belonging; and managing the collective with a looser, broader group of guides as elders, a sustainably cohesive and mutually cooperative organization develops.

As mentioned earlier, the Maasai way is far from a panacea or ideal, but there are lessons to be learned and absorbed, on how with a different, more collective, mindset the human side of the group gains, to use the modern term, greater psychological safety, and a more cohesive, harmonious and happier and sustainable way of operating ensues.