Equal But Not The Same

In 1983, Stephen O’Brien, an American geneticist, discovered that cheetahs have “close genetic uniformity.” He and his colleagues performed skin grafts on several cats from different populations. Normally, the grafts would be rejected within a couple of weeks because the cat’s body would identify the graft as foreign. This didn’t happen with the cheetahs. Their bodies thought the grafts were their own, meaning the foreign material was genetically the same—like they were twins.

Around this time, an outbreak of feline coronavirus (FCoV) and an aberrant immune response, feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), decimated the cheetah group at the Wildlife Safari in Winston, Oregon. This wasn’t the only outbreak. Unlike the effect of this disease in other feline groups, where death is rare, in the cheetahs it was almost always fatal.

Epidemics love monocultures. An epidemic is a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time. A monoculture is a prevailing culture marked by uniform structure or composition throughout. Infection spreads rapidly and easily through a community composed of individuals who are fundamentally the same.

There are many examples of the dangers of monocultures in agriculture: the Irish Potato Famine, the Gros Michel banana, and coffee rust, to name the more widely known. What begins as an attempt to increase yield, improve flavor, and reduce variation can lead to problems with the surrounding environment and reduced disease and pest resistance. It’s not that there aren’t advantages; it’s more that those positives can come at a high cost.

The same is true of communities of people.

Human monoculture, or the dominance of a single culture within a community, can lead to reduced adaptability, limited perspectives, and increased susceptibility to epidemic behavior. While it might foster a sense of unity, it can also hinder creativity, innovation, and tolerance.

Between 2009 and 2011, two tribal communities—one in New Mexico and a group of Alaska Native villages in Western Alaska—experienced youth suicide clusters. This involved 25 deaths and numerous attempts. Suicide clusters have been reported in various school communities and other institutional settings, which can be viewed as closed communities.

What all these communities had in common were closely held rigid ideals or expectations, heavy emphasis on conformity, and a sense of cultural isolation. In other words, a group of people who saw themselves as the same within their walls and set apart from those outside their walls—a monoculture. And epidemics love monocultures.

“You are constantly talking about ‘The Bison Way.’ Isn’t that a monoculture?” I can hear you say. No, it is not. Leaders have the option to create community around many different things. One is the aforementioned closed community based on rigid ideals and conformity. The healthy alternative is a community united by a missional ideal that values diversity as an advantage in achieving a vision.

Great leaders have a vision that encompasses and benefits all stakeholders, supported by a mission and values that are specific enough to be effective but not so rigid as to require complete conformity. As an analogy, the culture could be “ice cream.” Everywhere, and for everyone, it’s ice cream—not cookies, not cake, not pie—ice cream.

But it can be any flavor of ice cream: chocolate (my favorite), peach, coffee, vanilla, butter brickle—it doesn’t matter as long as it’s ice cream. The more flavors you have, the more resilient and flexible your community becomes. Like genetic diversity, cultural diversity means we are all Bison; we are just not the exact same Bison.

Leaders believe that everyone is intrinsically and equally valuable—equal but not the same. We don’t want to be. We certainly don’t want to be forced to pretend we are. Healthy communities are filled with unique individuals who agree to support a common mission and vision through shared values. We are not ignoring or suppressing our different views and abilities but living and learning because of and through them—the Bison Way.