Insight & The Carnivirous Hippo…

So, apparently we’ve been wrong about the humble hippo for years … rather than being cuddly vegetarians they may actually enjoy a meat feast from time to time … even eating their own kind on occasion. So with all the observation of the hippo, how did we miss this? In a BBC Nature’s Wonders article I read yesterday, it turns out that the main reason this hasn’t been spotted before is that we weren’t looking for it … it’s just been ignored.

As one scientist who is studying this phenomenon says:

“We assume that we know everything about these animals because of centuries of human study and observation but as this phenomenon demonstrates, there are things happening out there that do not meet with what we think we know,”

“This [carnivory] is something that has been going on since there were hippos, it’s not new simply because human beings discovered it was happening only recently. This is the fault of our own ignorance, not the results of some evolutionary leap on the part of hippos in the last two decades.”

For me this brings to mind the Black Swan theory of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in particular the psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to things they don’t expect to see. It’s a wake up call for every insight manager, researcher and strategist to look beyond the things they expect to find and to focus instead on the unusual … the datapoints that don’t fit the pattern and to keep asking what’s really happening.

It’s a reminder that we all need to keep our eyes peeled for the carnivorous hippos…