The Red Queen Rule

Several months ago, I downloaded a copy of Lewis Carroll's book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel, Through the Looking Glass.  I found out fairly quickly that there is a lot more to these books than what was portrayed in Disney's animated movie of the same name.  As it turns out, Lewis Carroll is actually a pen name - Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was actually a mathematician before he was a writer - the original story of Alice in Wonderland actually came from a story that Dodgson told to the three daughters of Henry Liddell, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and Dean of Christ Church during a boat ride on July 4, 1862.  The book is a great example of what is known as "literary nonsense" (for other examples, see Carroll's famous poem Jabberwocky (found in Through the Looking Glass).  One of the cardinal features of this genre is that these stories and poems are packed with symbolism and meaning - even if they appear on the surface to lack a lot of sense.

There is one passage in Carroll's Through the Looking Glass that I particularly enjoyed that involves the Red Queen (notably, the Red Queen is often confused with the Queen of Hearts, another character in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but they are two different characters - Disney may be to blame here, as the two characters are combined in the animated film).  The Red Queen explains the rules of chess to Alice concerning promotion - she must start out as a pawn and will eventually be promoted to Queen if she reaches the eighth square at the opposite end of the chess board.  There is a specific incident later in the book where Alice is constantly running but remains in the same spot without appearing to move forward:

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen.  "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Sound familiar?  Have you ever found yourself trying to catch up, say at work, and it ends up feeling like you are running in place and never making any progress?  As it turns out, there is a well-described phenomenon in evolutionary biology called the "Red Queen Effect" (also known as the "Red Queen Rule" or the "Red Queen Hypothesis").  It essentially states this - organisms are constantly adapting and evolving to the world around them in order to survive.  Unfortunately, the world around them is adapting and evolving as well.  So, any adaptation that results in an incremental improvement in survival doesn't last very long.  For example, if a rabbit evolves in such a way that it can outrun the fox, the fox develops some new skill - say, better hearing or eyesight - that allows it to overcome the rabbit's speed.  And so on.  And so on.

We see a similar effect with organizations.  One organization develops a new product or service line that confers a competitive advantage.  The organization uses this new advantage to overtake their competitors.  Unfortunately, at the same time, the competitors are developing new skills (or in some cases, learning how to build the new product or develop the new service line) in such a way that the competitive advantage is lost.  Overall, both competitor organizations end up better in the long run (they have each learned new skills or developed new products), but they are no better than each other.  Any competitive advantage does not last.

It's pretty amazing when you think about it.  A story in one of the classic works of children's literature becomes a metaphor for evolutionary biology AND organizational development and competitive markets.  I mention this all, not because I think it's important for everyone to know the "Red Queen Effect" but because I think it provides yet another example of how reading widely in disciplines outside your own can be incredibly enlightening.  Take the time to learn and read in a discipline outside your own.  You may come across an interesting story like the Red Queen - more importantly, you may learn something that you can adapt to your own line of work.