The Power of the Herd (64 page)

This may sound like an outrageous challenge — and it is when you suppress your emotions over the long term, creating a tangled mass of sensory input that may have little to do with the current situation. Conserving energy for true emergencies involves deciphering the messages behind the emotions as they arise, taking appropriate action, and then going back to “grazing.” In this way, your mind-body awareness system operates from a clean slate and it can pay attention to subtle changes in the environment.

People who can do this for themselves avoid overreacting to threats, remaining thoughtful in situations that unnerve others. But leaders must also be able to manage fear in groups of individuals who may not have these skills, troubleshooting to discover which concerns represent legitimate external threats, and which ones involve those internal, vulnerability-related issues (changing old patterns, recognizing skill deficiencies, trying something new, and so on).

If you're skeptical about or overwhelmed by this prospect, it helps to know that even soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder can differentiate between these two types of fear, especially when supported by counselors and family
members who also understand these emotional-intelligence definitions. Veterans I've worked with are relieved to find that much of the anxiety they feel reentering stateside life is vulnerability related, the psyche's natural response to changes in lifestyle, career, and daily routine. Moving from a rigid militaristic system (where your every move is moderated by orders, policy, and routine) to a more fluid civilian lifestyle is fraught with extreme changes in habit, perspective, and behavior.

In teaching emotional-fitness skills to men and women who were planning to return to Iraq and Afghanistan, I learned something about fear management that surprised even me. Apparently, even in chronically dangerous situations, the body can intuit the relative safety of the environment — if we're willing to listen to it. The topic came up during a two-day equine-facilitated workshop for soldiers and their spouses. We were discussing how horses use fear as nature's warning system. One dedicated, recently wounded soldier, “Steve,” perked up at the mention of this somatic alarm system:

My sergeant really encouraged us to use our personal radar to notice subtle changes in people's behavior. He actually invited us to tell him about weird feelings or anything else that felt off, no matter how vague. One day, after returning to camp, I felt like something was wrong, but I just couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was. It didn't go away, no matter how much I dismissed it, so I went to my sergeant after dinner and told him about it, I guess partly to see if he was really serious about listening to such things.

Sure enough, the officer calmly interviewed Steve about this feeling. Through a series of questions, the two realized this intuitive “warning light” was associated with the camp itself, not the notoriously dangerous patrol routes laced with improvised explosive devices and gun-wielding insurgents. With no additional information available, Steve's sergeant decided to do a last-minute drill before bedtime to rehearse strategies for defending the camp, “just to be on the safe side,” he told everyone. Later that same night, when the camp was indeed attacked “unexpectedly,” the troops responded with poise and skill, and no one was seriously injured.

With all this in mind, I created a sequence of fear-management protocols for leaders who see the value of
reducing
fear in groups without suppressing the messages behind this sometimes lifesaving emotion. In the long run, of course, you'll want others to master this troubleshooting process, but you can most certainly promote the idea of emotional-fitness training by using some or all of these techniques the next time you find yourself in a potentially volatile situation.

F
EAR
-M
ANAGEMENT
P
ROTOCOLS

1.   Before entering a situation where fear or vulnerability may be a factor, do your own body scan. If either of these emotions is present, make an effort to understand your body's concerns. (See Guiding Principle 2, in
chapter 14
, to review the body scan, and the section on fear and vulnerability in Guiding Principle 1, in
chapter 13
.)

2.   Stay in contact with your body as you enter the meeting room, using your body as a tuner, receiver, and amplifier for tension and relaxation coming from others.

3.   Notice and continually breathe into new tension-related sensations arising in your own body, whether or not you can decipher any related messages. (Remember: breathing and holding your breath are both contagious.) Breathing during a tense situation activates the parasympathetic nervous system, helping people to think more clearly rather than escalate into flight-or-fight mode, where the logical part of the brain is suppressed in favor of instinctual survival responses.

4.   Meet the affect contagion of fear with the affect contagion of thoughtful, centered engagement with each person's concerns. Do not inflame the situation with cynicism, dualistic us-versus-them thinking, or reactive emotional states. Instead, model the use of emotion as information and “eye of the storm” clarity. Act as the radio station in the hurricane.

5.   Help each person use emotion as information, asking questions to assist the group in determining which concerns involve external threats (fear) and which concerns involve internal threats (vulnerability). Remember to ask the
questions
associated with these emotions. Don't ask people if they're afraid or vulnerable; most won't know what you're talking about. (See Guiding Principle 3, in
chapter 15
, to review this particular skill, as well as the “Questions” section of the Emotional Message Chart.)

6.   Create a context in which vague intuitions can be aired and addressed at any time. You might even share the soldier's intuition story. Help people distinguish between present intuitive concerns and projections or transference from past difficulties and traumas. (Again, see Guiding Principle 3 for examples on how to phrase questions about past and present concerns.)

7.   Based on information collected during the “emotion as information” segment of the meeting, begin the problem-solving process, soliciting
and eventually prioritizing proposed goals or solutions, strategies, and training and/or coaching support.

8.   Choose individuals to spearhead specific goals based on who is calmest, clearest, or most experienced in each area. The comfort and confidence of these individuals will be contagious to others.

9.   Continue to train your staff in the use of emotion as information.

10. Provide emotional-strength-training strategies, fostering higher tolerance for vulnerability and the ability to sit in uncomfortable emotions without panicking. Teach people how to go back to “grazing” and offer immediate positive feedback, modeling this yourself in all situations.

11. Never, ever reward a staff member for using another person's vulnerabilities against him or her. Even the subtle nonverbal undermining of another staff member must be treated as cause for correction and, if chronic, cause for eventual demotion or dismissal.

12. When you hire leaders or promote people into management positions, choose, whenever possible, those who exhibit a high tolerance for vulnerability, while teaching staff who panic in response to change, interpersonal conundrums, and other challenges to increase their tolerance over time.

A
n oversimplification of Darwin's “survival of the fittest”
concept is still used today to justify predatory political structures and business practices, even though an early-twentieth-century theory on mutual aid as a factor of evolution challenged these assumptions (see my discussion in
chapter 6
). Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin's extensive observations of herd life in Siberia and the Steppes of Eurasia suggest that

1.   nonpredatory individuals far outnumber carnivores;

2.   large herbivores are fierce and protective of vulnerable individuals;

3.   mutual aid among wolves and lions is necessary to attack even the weakest of these imposing prey animals; and

4.   groups of predators do so at their peril and are sometimes injured, killed, or simply unsuccessful in these efforts.

Long before I encountered the Russian prince's writings, my own herd challenged widespread notions that prey animals are quivering victims living at the mercy of powerful predators. My stallion Merlin, who would let squirrels share his daily bowl of grain, dealt harshly with aggressive dogs wandering into his space, sometimes grabbing a stunned canine by the neck and tossing it toward the gate, ready to trample the poor creature if it didn't get out fast. Our otherwise gentle mare Rasa would cheerfully, playfully chase coyotes out of her pasture (though these legendary desert tricksters didn't seem to be having much fun as they ran under the gate with their tails between their legs).
And two days after Spirit's daughter, Artemis, was born, I watched her mother, Panther, calmly herd our precious filly to the far end of the foaling pen as a massive bear waddled by less than twenty feet away (while I stood quivering in my boots).

For years, these incidents rolled around and around in my brain like loose marbles, eventually causing me to update my perceptions — and my language — regarding the relationship between predator and prey. I began to speak of nonpredatory power rather than “the wisdom of the prey,” realizing that I no longer had to associate strength, bravery, and protection with carnivorous metaphors. Once I formulated this concept in my own mind, images of nonpredatory power seemed to pop up everywhere.

The day I sat down to write this guiding principle, in fact, I typed the phrase “power of the herd” into Google and came across a particularly dramatic YouTube video that bolstered my case.

First posted in 2007, “Battle at Kruger” captures an altercation between a large pride of lions and a herd of water buffalo. In what starts out as a typical amateur African safari video, a bull, a cow, and their calf are languidly walking toward a large watering hole. The tourists then notice several lions prowling in the grass about a hundred yards away.

Sensing these massive cats, the bull begins to run, herding his family away from potential danger, whereupon the pride leaps out of hiding and races toward the calf, pulling it down with such momentum that this tumbling tangle of baby bovine and adult feline bodies skids down a small hill and plunges into the pond. The predators' efforts to kill their prey, however, are momentarily interrupted by a crocodile, who tries to steal this convenient meal away.

Working together, the water-logged lions drag the calf back to shore, where they have to deal with something even more menacing: Just as they're about to take that final, fatal bite, the bull and cow return — with reinforcements, an angry mob of close to fifty buffalo. Surrounding their young herd-mate's attackers, bulls and cows trade leads as different individuals try to drive off the predators from optimal angles. Finally, one nervy buffalo leaps forward and scoops the nearest lion up with his horns, tossing this massive cat six feet in the air. The rest of the herd gains leverage as a result, scattering lions in all directions, surrounding the now standing calf, welcoming him back to safety.

At no point in the video do the buffalo waste any effort trying to kill the offenders, letting them disperse relatively unharmed (though bulls have been known to kill lions presumptuous enough to hesitate in their retreat, let alone try to fight back). This tendency to avoid fighting to the death, to live and let live, is a major characteristic of nonpredatory power.

What was perhaps most astonishing to me was that no one — from the original tourists talking in the background to the numerous people commenting on this compelling footage — asked what was, for me, the million-dollar question: how in the world did the calf's parents rally that imposing herd?

It took around four minutes for the pair to return with this remarkably cohesive group. From a twentieth-century animal behaviorist viewpoint, this is an unusually
long
period of time for a “stupid, instinctual beast” to even
remember
what happened, let alone remain focused on organizing others to pursue a common goal. At the same time, four minutes would be an incredibly
short
amount of time for a couple of two-legged parents to motivate a group of people to help them out under similar circumstances. Some sophisticated nonverbal communication and coordination was involved, with concern for a single calf motivating the kind of altruistic courage we would call heroic in humans.

This single incident suggests that we still know very little about the intelligence of nonpredatory herds. But one thing's certain: prey animals are not the dim-witted, cowardly weaklings they've been made out to be by human politicians, philosophers, scientists, and animal trainers who overidentify with their own predatory tendencies.

Increasingly, observations of natural herd behavior illustrate that power does not have to be harsh, exploitative, oppressive, or shortsighted if you master the skills associated with this guiding principle. In fact, after collecting insights on predatory versus nonpredatory power to make the following chart, I find that the only constructive purpose for human beings to invoke their inner lion would seem to involve optimal use of that concept known as culling: killing to maintain balance between the herd and the available natural resources, nourishing human members of an interspecies society in the process.

By this, I'm even more specifically referring to the Mongolian practice of slaughtering those cattle, sheep, and horses in the late fall that are not likely to endure the harsh winter ahead. If Eurasian herders did not cull these animals, they would suffer needlessly while draining severely, though temporarily, limited resources that two-legged and four-legged tribe members must use judiciously to survive this seasonal challenge.