How Not to Parachute More Cats

And on strategic beaver deployment. And The Great Emu War.

Meme origin unknown but probably inspired by a similar line from modern fantasy author Jim Butcher… who is just that kind of funny.

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.

And that includes showing you how a futurist thinks.

Welcome back to my How To Think Like a Futurist series. Next week I’ll start teaching you how to create your own forecasts.

On my first day — in the very first hour of class — in the Studies of the Future master’s program at University of Houston - Clear Lake back in the days of yore Professor Peter Bishop told us the tale of how the World Health Organization (WHO) inadvertently caused and then solved an outbreak of the plague among the Dayak tribe in Borneo in the 1950s.

WHO originally had been trying to solve another problem at first: the Dayak tribe was suffering from an outbreak of malaria. WHO figured this was an easy problem to solve. They sprayed large amounts of DDT over the area, the mosquitoes died off, and the malaria outbreak ended. Problem solved.

Then the thatch roofs of the Dayaks’ huts started falling in and some of them started catching the plague.

WHO went back in and found that the DDT killed the malaria-carrying mosquitoes as planned but the DDT also killed a species of wasp that controlled a thatch-eating caterpillar/termite type of bug.

• So when the wasps died from DDT poisoning the termites ate through the thatch roofs.

• Then the local gecko lizards that fed off of those wasps died from DDT poisoning.

• Then the local cats that ate the geckos died.

• Then the local rat population boomed. Some of them were carrying the plague.

• Boom: plague outbreak.

WHO decided they couldn’t un-spray the DDT or fix any other part of the system… except one. I’ll say this slowly: The World Health Organization got a whole mess of cats, I presume sedated them, put them in a large box attached to a parachute, flew over Dayak tribal areas, and shoved the box out the door.

Which worked. It was called Operation Cat Drop. It’s one of the classic stories of unintended consequences, (bad) futures work, and systems thinking. You can read about it here, here, and I just now discovered there’s a book on it. (The book is about instilling a culture of change into your organization. I haven’t read it yet but it looks good.)

So when I hear someone lay out a plan I silently ask (1) Will this solve the actual problem?, (2) Will there be good OR bad follow-on consequences from this and what could they be?, and (3) Are we gonna need some cats?

And if the proposed plan is really bad, like This-is-going-to-end-up-stinking-like-a-dead-woodchuck-under-the-porch bad, I try to gently ask how we will reckon with the follow-on ramifications of that plan. And then I start looking to pre-position some feline-based solutions.

Some plans work even better than intended, though.

In 1948 Idaho Fish and Game wanted to rehabilitate an area of Idaho’s back country by improving its water capture but the area was so remote (no roads, transit only via horse or mule) that the department captured 76 “nuisance beavers” from near Idaho’s cities and towns, and parachuted them into that remote area in specially-designed automatic-open-on-landing boxes. The beavers, once they stumbled out of their boxes looking like they’d had a rough time in ‘Nam, did their job.

More recently ecologists and the California state government noticed that beaver-dam-created marshlands have served as fire breaks during wildfires in the state and are looking at ways to strategically deploy some of their beaver population. If nothing else, beavers fight fire for free just by being beavers.

So when I look at personnel assignments and where particular people are moving to within an organization I ask What is that person’s beaver-nature? How will they follow their natural tendencies in that new context?

• This is very different from the bad assumption that past behavior will predict future behavior. Instead, think about the person’s underlying orientation as a person and deeply-held internal narrative and then about the nature and tendencies of the new context itself.

• If you get a good match — like sending someone who is naturally entrepreneurial and operates well in ambiguous environments to figure out a new solution or launch a startup — then great.

• If you get a mismatch — like sending the wrong people or using the wrong strategy or tool for the job — then you get another Great Emu War.

The Great Emu War was a misbegotten venture in 1932 that resulted from Australian farmers asking the Australian military rather than the Australian Department of Agriculture to help them handle an infestation of emu in Western Australia. (Flocks of emu, having migrated westward to new territory, found they loved the taste of farmers’ crops and ravaged the farms with gusto.)

Australian troops hunted flocks of emu with machineguns and the emus simply… ran away. In every direction. At 40 miles per hour. Again and again. Out of the 20,000 emus the soldiers hunted and out of the tens of thousands of rounds they fired they killed only 1,000 — leaving 19,000 to continue to wreak havoc on Australian farms. The Australian government declared the emus the victor and ended the military campaign because it was an embarrassment. Also because someone invented an emu-proof fence.

(The Oversimplified channel on YouTube has an excellent video on this and I can make my kids settle down instantly if I say “HEY! I’M TURNING ON THE EMU WAR VIDEO NOW!” They come running in and sit down quietly immediately. I gift this wisdom to you.)

So my (second) gift to you this week is: If you need quick ways to think future about somebody’s proposed plan, ask (1) Will this plan necessitate rapid cat deployment later?, (2) Can this problem be solved by strategic beaver deployment instead?, and (3) Is this the right strategy to address this emu-based problem?

Next week: How futurists forecast the future. The short form. So you can learn how to forecast on things you care about.

Bonus: Not future-related but animal-related. Someday I’ll tell you about the time I almost got into a fistfight with a goat while overseas on a work trip. I was alone. I had no backup. I would have lost.