Cultural learning allows individuals to acquire skills that they would be unable to independently over the course of their lifetimes (Van Schaik & Burkart, 2011). In this talk I'll examine how things like management structure, role definition and incentives impact this process, and share some tips on how you can use it to improve the culture in your organisation.

1. Optimising for Cultural
Learning
Chris Read
An Experience Report
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2. Learning
• We are what we repeatedly
do. Excellence, then, is not
an act, but a habit.
(Aristotle)
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3. Learning
• To know and not to do is not
yet to know. (Zen Saying)
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4. Cultural Learning
• Learning through
observation or interaction
with others. (Lehmann,
Feldman & Kaeuffer, 2010)
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5. Cultural Learning
• Allows individuals to acquire
skills that they would be
unable to independently gain
over the course of their
lifetimes. (Van Schaik &
Burkart, 2011)
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6. 3 Recent Biology Research
Papers...
Downloaded from rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org on October 30, 2013
Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social
Learning Strategies Tournament
L. Rendell, et al.
Science 328, 208 (2010);
DOI: 10.1126/science.1184719
doi: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02096.x
Cumulative cultural dynamics and the coevolution of cultural
innovation and transmission: an ESS model for panmictic and
structured populations
L. LEHMANN*, M. W. FELDMAN & R. KAEUFFERà
*Institute of Biology, University of Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland
ˆ
ˆ
Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
àDepartment of Biology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.
Social learning and evolution: the cultural intelligence
hypothesis
Carel P. van Schaik and Judith M. Burkart
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2011 366, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0304, published 28 February 2011
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(this information is current as of April 9, 2010 ):
Keywords:
When individuals in a population can acquire traits through learning, each
individual may express a certain number of distinct cultural traits. These traits
may have been either invented by the individual himself or acquired from
others in the population. Here, we develop a game theoretic model for the
accumulation of cultural traits through individual and social learning. We
explore how the rates of innovation, decay, and transmission of cultural traits
affect the evolutionary stable (ES) levels of individual and social learning and
the number of cultural traits expressed by an individual when cultural
dynamics are at a steady-state. We explore the evolution of these phenotypes
in both panmictic and structured population settings. Our results suggest that
in panmictic populations, the ES level of learning and number of traits tend to
be independent of the social transmission rate of cultural traits and is mainly
affected by the innovation and decay rates. By contrast, in structured
populations, where interactions occur between relatives, the ES level of
learning and the number of traits per individual can be increased (relative to
the panmictic case) and may then markedly depend on the transmission rate
of cultural traits. This suggests that kin selection may be one additional
solution to Rogers’s paradox of nonadaptive culture.
References
This article cites 77 articles, 13 of which can be accessed free
Abstract
cultural accumulation;
cultural transmission;
individual and social learning;
innovation;
kin selection;
relatedness.
"Data Supplement"
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"Audio Supplement"
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Introduction
Learned traits and in particular cultural traits are nongenetically determined phenotypes that are acquired
during an individual’s lifespan. They are not only
characteristic of humans but are also expressed by many
vertebrates (Laland & Janik, 2006). For instance, chimpanzees use sticks to catch prey and stones to crack nuts;
and macaques wash potatoes and apples, unwrap and
consume caramels, and can learn a whole spectrum of
other feeding behaviours (Lefebvre, 1995; Whiten et al.,
1999; Dugatkin, 2004). Some birds are able to learn new
songs but they can also acquire techniques to bait fish,
batter or drop different types of prey on different
substrates, use caps to carry water, use twigs to push
Correspondence: Laurent Lehmann, Institute of Biology,
ˆ
University of Neuchatel, Switzerland.
Tel.: 032 718 2234; fax: 032 718 3001;
e-mail: laurent.lehmann@unine.ch
2356
Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections
behaviour (462 articles)
evolution (646 articles)
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This article cites 30 articles, 9 of which can be accessed for free:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5975/208#otherarticles
This article appears in the following subject collections:
Psychology
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/collection/psychology
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nuts, and pull fishing lines to get fish under water
(Lefebvre et al., 2002).
There are two basic ways by which an individual may
learn a new trait (Rogers, 1988). First, the trait can be
learned individually. Here, an individual interacts with
its environment and learns the trait by trial-and-error,
lucky accident, insight, or deduction. This can be viewed
as cultural innovation, and this process may also depend
on the number of traits already carried by the individuals
in the population. Alternatively, a trait can be learned
socially, in which case an individual obtains the trait by
imitating or copying it from another individual in the
population. This is cultural transmission. This second case
is likely to involve social interactions between individuals
in the population, and errors in transmission may further
increase the rate of innovation of cultural traits.
Cultural innovation is to cultural evolution what
mutation is to biological evolution: without innovation,
cultural traits and therefore cultural transmission would
not exist. In humans, these features may have led to the
ª 2010 THE AUTHORS. J. EVOL. BIOL. 23 (2010) 2356–2369
JOURNAL COMPILATION ª 2010 EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
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Supporting Online Material can be found at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5975/208/DC1
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1567/1008.full.html#ref-list-1
Article cited in:
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1567/1008.full.html#related-urls
Subject collections
Updated information and services, including high-resolution figures, can be found in the online
version of this article at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5975/208
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on April 9, 2010
Supplementary data
Science (print ISSN 0036-8075; online ISSN 1095-9203) is published weekly, except the last week in December, by the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1200 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005. Copyright
2010 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science; all rights reserved. The title Science is a
registered trademark of AAAS.
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7. Cumulative cultural dynamics and the
coevolution of cultural innovation and
transmission
• Developed Game Theory Model “for the accumulation of cultural traits
through individual and social learning”
• “...in panmictic populations, the ES level of learning and number of
traits tend to be independent of the social transmission rate of cultural
traits and is mainly affected by the innovation and decay rates.”
• “By contrast, in structured populations, where interactions occur
between relatives, the ES level of learning and the number of traits per
individual can be increased (relative to the panmictic case) and may
then markedly depend on the transmission rate of cultural traits.”
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J. EVOL. BIOL. 23 (2010) 2356–2369
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8. Social learning and evolution: the cultural
intelligence hypothesis
• “The evolutionary version of the hypothesis argues that species with
frequent opportunities for social learning should more readily respond
to selection for a greater number of learned skills. ...The cultural
intelligence hypothesis can also account for the unusual cognitive
abilities of humans, as well as our unique mechanisms of skill
transfer.”
• “...subjects acquire particular behaviours or skills faster when exposed
to skilled role models than they do in a control situation, in which they
can independently explore and eventually learn the skill individually”
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Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2011 366, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0304, published 28 February 2011
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9. Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social
Learning Strategies Tournament
• “...it remains unclear why copying is profitable and how to copy most
effectively. To address these questions, we organized a computer
tournament in which entrants submitted strategies specifying how to
use social learning and its asocial alternative (trial and error)...”
• “However, social learning can also cost time and effort, and theoretical
work reveals that it can be error-prone, leading individuals to acquire
inappropriate or outdated information in nonuniform and changing
environments”
• “The winning strategy (discountmachine) relied nearly exclusively on
social learning and weighted information according to the time since
acquisition.”
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Science 9 April 2010: Vol. 328 no. 5975 pp. 208-213, DOI:10.1126/science.1184719
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10. Summary for us non
Biologists:
• Humans are built for Cultural Learning
• Age of what we’ve learnt matters
• We’ve got to put our learning in to practice
• Without direction and guidance, humans will probably go in
the wrong direction
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11. Business Environment
• Team Structure (Belbin, etc)
• Team Lifecycles (Tuckman, Linstead)
• Team Interactions
• Business Unit Interactions
• Group Training
• Common Goal & Language
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12. Flat Org Structure
• No “corporate ladder”
• No pre defined pay bands.
• Teams Organised Around
• Service
• Business Unit
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• Upper Management Access
• Incentives based on
• Individual <
• Team <
• Organisation
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13. Mobility
• Make it easy to change roles
• Colocate related teams and individuals
• Make it easy to access the right people
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14. Knowledge Sharing
• “Borrowing” people
welcomed
• Working with vendors
(mainly hardware)
• Telepresence & office visits
• Conference Attendance
• Open Source
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15. Specific Examples
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16. Tickets
• Introduced by new IT management team to establish order
• Actively blocked communication between teams
• Reduced visibility of service teams of needs of the clients
• Now used internally by some teams to track backlog conversations are primary interface
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17. Breaking Down Silos
• Adding social interactions and new groups around concepts
breaks things down
• Shared automation/dev team for those too small for their own
• Communities of Practice - Wikis, Discuss
• Embedded Planted Engineers
• Encourage flow across communities in synthetic groups
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18. Do Not
• Spend all your time learning - you need to apply what you’ve
learned
• Take anything to extremes
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19. Innovate to Survive
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20. Focus on the Goal
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http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ronnie_O%27Sullivan_PHC_2011-2.png
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21. Don’t Limit Learning
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22. Thank You
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