The Maasai and Organization Development

I’ve been a member of the Organization Development Network for the last three years. People who practice OD tend to be a dedicated group and very committed to being knowledgeable in their field. We also have a regional group in Atlanta called the Organization Change Alliance. If you want to learn about organizational consulting there is truly no better place than one of their monthly meetings.

The National OD Network puts out a quarterly scholarly journal, OD Practitioner, consisting that accepts a wide variety of articles in the field. The notion of “field” is interpreted extra broadly this quarterly with an article by John Scherer and Kukuta Hamisi. They report on John’s visit to Kukuta’s Maasai tribe in Kenya and the lessons they learn about leadership and organization while visiting. Several passages are worth sharing, but I don’t want to be accused of copyright violations, so I’ll keep my quotes to a minimum.

Their article is called “Organization as Community: What we Have to Learn from the Maasai about OD. They talk about how the Maasai value community above individual achievement, and that unlike in many modern organizations I’ve consulted with and worked for over the last decade and a half, the commitment to community is not just lip service.

To back up that claim, they describe the process by which a dispute between two people is settled:

The elders would go to Person A and say, “Do you want peace?” Then to Person B: “Do you want peace?” Kakuta tells us, “There is only one right answer to that question! If either person says ‘No’ they will be gently but firmly escorted out of the community.”

After agreement is reached that peace is the goal, each person has a chance to air his side of the story inside a hut and in front of supporters – no interruptions. After both sides tell their story the supporters repeat the stories and then work out a resolution. In the end, one person must yield by giving the other person a goat. The issue is resolved, and when the two disputers meet in the future they “greet each other using the name of the goat.”

Just a bit later there is another awesome story where John traded his “wristwatch, binoculars, a Swiss Army knife and some Kenyan dollars, for a Maaisi spear and shield.” As readers we trust this was a worthwhile arrangement, but John soon missed knowing what time it was. One of the Maasai gave him a family bracelent and said, “John, this is a Maaisai wrist watch. Now you wil always know what time it is.”

The Maasai warrior did not mean time as it is measured in hours or minutes, instead he explained, “Look John . . . I’t s time to be doing exactly what we are doing right now.” No second hand needed!