Belief 2 - Flamingo 火烈鸟

On last week, I read a magazine and learned some knowledge of Flamingo. It was found that the migration of flamingo is interesting and shown us some ideas when we are facing the challenge of leading, or we can say the challenge of culture change in organization.

Flamingo is a gregarious wading birds in the genus. They are found in both the western hemisphere and in the eastern hemisphere, but are more numerous in the latter. Flamingo has white color originally and its red feather came from the mineral from its feeding. The migration of flamingo is not its habit periodically, it only migrates to other area when the food was shortage or mutation of its living area. Its migration is always started in the night to prevent the attacks from other accipiters.

The most interesting thing is its way how it starts the migration. The migration is usually started by one flamingo and it is always identified as the leader of the group. When the leader started to fly to other area in the first trial, there are only a few members to follow the action. There were only 5 to 10 flamingoes to follow and the leader will fly back to the base and take a rest. Afterward, the first tier of 10 flamingo starts the migration again. This time, they will fly many turns on its living base to attract more followers to join the tier, it may be 100 flamingoes to follow the action but 100 flamingoes were still the less portion of the group. Therefore, the second tier of 100 would back to the base. It is hard to say how many tiers can start the migration successfully, it started from 1 to 10, to 100, to 500, 2000, ... to all finally. We can find that if the number of bird in that tier exceed a certain portion or percentage of the group, all the group will start the migration.

In my point of view personally, the migration of flamingo is similar the way we implement the lean transformation. The leader starts to train the team and it will has some members found that it is meaningful and follow the way to do. After many improvement actions, some other members will find that worth to follow according to the result of improvement project and the number of follower will increase accordingly. When we are pushing the culture change, it needs a certain number of members to change and follow first. When it exceed the certain percentage, the culture will form in the organization. The problem is the leader has the passion enough to lead so many tiers until the culture is formed. It is the same way of how to start migration of flamingo. Why we give up the lean transformation when we faced the resistance of culture change? If you face the problem on the way in lean, let's tell your members for this story.