The killer chickens that lay a lot of eggs

How do you improve performance? How do you identify and promote talent?

Say, for example, you’re the manager of a chicken farm and you want your chickens to produce more eggs. A common approach, written up in the Poultry Science Journal, has been to identify chickens that lay more eggs and put those chickens together in the same groups. Over time, you should breed chickens that are more productive, that perform better.

That approach worked, though there were a few nasty side effects. Those high-performing chickens often shared other traits, including pecking their neighbors to death. The attacks and stress would lead to mortality rates of 50% or more, so extreme that a chicken manager would have to trim the beaks of all the birds (a painful operation) to limit the losses.

An angry chicken. (Photo credit: James Whittall)

Other researchers tried a different approach. 

Instead of focusing on the performance of individual chickens, scientists (also writing in Poultry Science) focused on groups of chickens, selecting entire groups that performed well to breed the next generations. That shift, from focusing on individual performance to group performance, led to results the researchers called “astonishing”:

• Increase in annual egg production by 160%

• Decrease in mortality from 68% to 8%

• Double the average life span of the chickens

• Eliminated the need for painful beak trimming

I came across this arcane research in a dry but important book on on the evolution of cooperation: Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. One of the authors’ main points is that evolution isn’t restricted to individuals and their own “selfish genes”, but works at the group level as well. In what may seem like a paradox, “maximizing relative fitness [performance in a particular environment] within the group often decreases the fitness of the group.” In other words, sometimes you can’t just measure individual performance and expect it to add up.

The lessons apply well beyond the chicken farm. Modern companies, so focused on KPIs, “managing talent,” and “paying for performance”, often lose sight of what really matters. The results they want increasingly depend on groups of people working together. And so they need to take a more holistic, systemic view of their objectives and how they are are accomplished.

If you want more eggs, you need chickens with other skills beside being good egg-layers. You need chickens who are able to get along with other chickens.