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intelligent behaviour. One now-famous scientist took somewhat offbeat
advantage of the rat’s famous intelligence. He decided to pay his way
through college by breeding rats and selling them to his fellow scientists.
He then concluded rightly that scientists would pay a considerable pre-
mium for “super-intelligent” rats. So he labelled a considerable percentage
of the perfectly ordinary rats that he bred as super-intelligent and reaped
significant extra profit. But it didn’t stop there. He followed up the career
of the random rats that he had labelled super-intelligent and guess what?
His highly trained scientific customers all assessed the behaviour of their
top-of-the-range rats as being “superior”.

So, a couple of mildly mischievous and slightly disaffected psychologists
set up a small experiment to pit rat intelligence against that of the cream
of human society, the university undergraduate. Rats are famous for their
ability to rapidly learn to run mazes and find a reward of food. Could
humans learn as quickly or as well? Mazes were built with the human one
an exact, but scaled up replica of that used for rats. The reward for rats was
the usual food pellet, that for the relatively impecunious students was a
small sum of money. The experiment was completed. Humans and rats
learned to run their respective mazes. Let me save human blushes and say
that the result was an honourable draw. The experiment was completed
and the rats happily withdrew to their cages. The humans kept on running
the maze. The rewards had been withdrawn, but the humans continued to
run the maze. They were asked politely, then firmly to stop and they con-
tinued to run the maze. They were banned from the laboratory, but they
snuck in and ran. The doors were locked and barred to keep them out, but
they broke in and ran the maze. Another example of working conflict, the
desire to be better than competition, no matter how smart the other side.

Warring conflict

One of the most popular books of 2001/2002 has been Nathaniel’s Nutmeg,
the story of how the Dutch and English cheated, tortured and slaughtered
each other over centuries as they fought to dominate the nutmeg trade. An
extensive example of what in business terms we call “warring conflict”.
This is conflict in which it matters not at all how hard the opposition try,
because our intention is to destroy their best efforts and thereafter take
the easy track to ongoing success.

n Do you see signs of conflict and competition within your teams? (If
you do you need first to assess whether it is working or warring
competition. If it is the former think very carefully before you
decide that the challenge is, of necessity, a “good thing”. If there
are winners there are losers and losing teams melt.)

n Should the conflict be confronted?

n Should it be re-directed at others outside the group?

Getting people to work together 75