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We need more sex in the workplace.

In some cases, much more.

Not among co-workers, for heaven’s sake. That’s their business, and if you’re very lucky they won’t make it your business.

No, this column is about sex in its biological sense — as a dramatic accelerator of adaptive evolution.

To understand the significance of sex, compare it to evolution in asexual populations. Imagine the offspring of an asexual creature contains a random, beneficial mutation. If it’s beneficial enough, eventually the population will consist entirely of that organism’s descendants. Then, a member of that future generation might have an offspring that contains another random, beneficial mutation. The process repeats, and with excruciating slowness the population will evolve.

Compare that to sexually reproducing organisms. Two parents give rise to an offspring containing a random, beneficial mutation. More of its offspring survive to reproduce than average, so the beneficial gene spreads.

Meanwhile, in another part of town, another beneficial mutation occurs elsewhere in the population. Among asexual organisms, the two beneficial mutations would compete. But these organisms reproduce sexually, which means two organisms, each having one of the mutations, can mate, giving rise to offspring that have both. The word is recombination. It’s what lets sexual evolution take place at a vastly faster pace.

Now, imagine a business with branch offices — maybe it’s an insurance company with agencies, a retailer with stores across the country, or a manufacturer with a number of local distribution warehouses.

The company could plan all innovations at headquarters. This is neither sexual nor asexual. It’s an attempt at divine creation. As few business leaders are divine, the odds of anything useful happening are limited, proportional to the number of former branch employees working at headquarters.

The company could, instead, encourage each branch office to innovate — to run itself as an independent business. This will encourage innovation, and innovation that fits local circumstances. But if that’s all the company does, it’s asexual. The branch offices will diverge, and because each will have to reinvent each others innovations, progress will be slow. Another disadvantage is that IT gets the miserable job of supporting as many different ways of doing business as there are branch offices.

Add sex. On a regular basis, bring the independently innovating branches together to compare notes and spread the best innovations back among the remaining branches. It’s recombination. But it isn’t as easy to accomplish as it sounds.

Among the barriers: It’s natural for the people in each branch to think their circumstances are unique, allowing them to ignore what the others do. Another: Designing an incentive system that, with the best of intentions, creates a barrier to adoption. If for example, you give a bonus to managers whose innovations are used elsewhere, everyone will focus on selling the benefits of their great ideas while denigrating those of the others.

This misses the point entirely. You want your managers to be the brokers of great ideas, not their originators. Give bonuses to the employees who suggest the successful innovations, and to the managers who adopt and implement as many innovations as possible, wherever they come from.

IT’s role in all of this is difficult. Not as difficult as supporting diverse ways of doing business, but still more difficult than if all innovations are designed at headquarters. You’ll need to create a systems architecture that supports multiple parallel innovation. Version control, change management and regression testing become challenges as well.

One solution: Create an environment that encourages IT innovation through end-user tools that link to the standard core systems. For those that spread sexually (DON’T SAY IT!), institutionalize them by rebuilding them into the core applications using enterprise-grade tools.

This isn’t a solved problem, by the way, which is just one of the aspects to branch innovation that makes it fun.

If you compare the benefits of branch innovation coupled with recombination to any of the alternatives, the advantages are clear: The business gets to try lots of experiments. It finds out which ones work and which ones don’t at modest risk, never betting the whole company.

It’s how nature works, and while evolution did give us the platypus, it has also led to a tremendous panoply of amazingly diverse creatures, each exquisitely adapted to its particular set of circumstances.

It’s a very sexy way to run your business.

Violence, as last week’s column suggested, is the first refuge of the incompetent. Physical violence is, of course, frowned upon in business, but disciplinary actions of various kinds — close relatives of physical punishment — are all too commonly the first response of business leaders. The obvious, syllogistic conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.

Disciplinary action is a tool corporations use in a variety of circumstances, from employee performance management to enforcement of policies and procedures, and it’s a necessary one. In the end, some things just can’t be optional. Disciplinary action should, however, be the option of last resort, not the first.

You’re in IT, which among other roles and responsibilities is a purveyor, or at least a collaborator in the purveyance of standards and policies. If they’re truly to be standards and policies you must be willing and able to enforce them.

Now that we’ve agreed on this point, can we also agree that every time IT has to enforce a standard, it’s a failure?

An instinct toward enforcement has three undesirable consequences. One at a time …

First: If your instinct is to enforce, you’ve made yourself responsible for something that should belong to others. If you start the conversation by saying “comply or else,” it means my sole reason for complying is the consequence of failing to do so. That makes it your standard, not mine, and I have no stake in it.

But what’s the point of an IT standard? It’s a choice among alternatives — a decision that of the many different ways of addressing some situation or other, we’ll use only the ones the standard allows.

A standard is, in other words, a decision about how a company will conduct its business, presumably to improve how it conducts its business. If that’s the goal, then IT’s responsibility should be limited to setting standards that have this potential. The responsibility for achieving the desired effect rests with those who make use of the standard. None of them will accept this responsibility if their sole reason for embracing it is the consequence of failing to do so.

That leads to the second consequence: That an enforcement instinct leads to poorly chosen standards. Here’s an easy way to demonstrate this point: Imagine you lack the authority to enforce the standards you set. What can you do instead?

Envision every standard you have to set as a decision delegated to you by those who will have to live with it once you’ve set it. They know the company needs a decision, and while they have the authority to make it, they’ve decided you have sufficient expertise that they’d like your recommendation.

Would thinking about standards this way change how you go about setting them?

It shouldn’t. Your goal is to set standards that make the business more effective. Who is the final authority on that subject? Those who operate the business. Until you’ve explained your proposed standard and they agree it will make the business more effective, all you have is an untested hypothesis.

You sell recommendations on their merits, where enforcement is a demonstration of authority. Which brings up the third reason enforcement should be your last resort rather than your first.

“Because I said so,” is a phrase used by parents when facts and logic prove ineffective at changing a young mind. Parents have to be willing to say this, because it’s their responsibility to add notions like responsibility and morality to creatures who arrive in their care with no ethical imperative beyond “It’s all about me!”

Businesses work best when employees act as adults, taking personal responsibility for the organization’s success. Every time a manager resorts to enforcement, he or she is saying, “Because I told you so,” to an employee, which defines their relationship as an adult interacting with a child.

So think long and hard before you use enforcement as the starting point of any conversation, let alone one about accepting standards you’ve decided to set. It’s a bad idea.

There should, after all, be more to leadership than assigning chores and withholding dessert if they don’t get done.