Are you a hunter, or farmer?
Yep. There are only two kinds of people
Let’s indulge in a simple personality classification. Can it help us build better teams?
I think there are two ‘types’ of working people:
Hunters
Farmers
Hunters chase new opportunities and brings the resources to the village. They see the glory in the kill, and the size of the prize. They know they can perform feats that the rest of the tribe can’t. Hunters are often showmen, and make sure everyone knows what they just achieved.
Farmers tend and nurture the turf. They are experts in getting the best from the soil they look after. They see that the tribe needs to be resilient in all weathers and seasons. Farmers do the endless litany of hidden, small thankless tasks to keep the village liveable.
Who can hunt, and who can farm?
Hunting and farming aren’t jobs. They are attitudes and groups of behaviours. Importantly, it is a spectrum. Everyone is a mixture of hunter and farmer.
How do you know if you’re a hunter or a farmer?
If one hand side of this spectrum feels like home, that’s you.
Even though hunting and farming are a spectrum, it’s more efficient to divide labour. People have to pick a lane, and I think hunting and farming correlates with role types.
Curiosity and fear
Hunters and farmers self-select into ways of living and working (their careers), based on intrinsic drive. Drive is the unique combination of fear and curiosity which shapes how they act through the world.
Hunters want to explore the forest to see what happens. Farmers fear the shadows in the woods, and want to stay with what they know. Hunters can celebrate the wins. Farmers know the work is never done.
Hunters find the unknown to be curious. Farming tends to be place of greater psychological safety. This isn’t to say farming is easier, or less skilful. But farming does correlate with roles that have a greater locus of control, where more variables are controlled by the organisation.
The thrill of the next hunt will tend to make you more able, and interested, in hunting. Farming associates with a fear of the unknown, but also an aptitude for care and long-term, incremental nurture.
Know thyself - and others - to help teams flourish
I find the hunting-farming idea is one useful way to think about how curiosity and fear shapes how we act. It suggests what we have a greater propensity to be good at.
Successful individuals are those who know that they are hunters or farmers, but are able to adapt to their inverse side. I work frequently with a great engineer who is a serious hunter - always vocal about powerful, elegant and, better ways to do things. He will admit that less glamorous housekeeping doesn’t interest him naturally. Similarly, I think Steve Jobs was a natural farmer, with a humbling appreciation for detail and craft, but had learned to be as opportunististic as any hunter. (Caveat - Jobs was good at so many things it’s hard to tell, and he may well have been a hunter who learned to farm).
I think the most underrated part of building teams is trying to understand people’s intrinsic motivations. Hunting and farming isn’t everything, and indeed, most people would be baffled if you asked if they were a hunter or a farmer.
But I think it’s worth trying to understand what people like to work on and how, so they can be their most successful.
We should help hunters to keep hunting well, and find a fit in our teams so they can continue to hunt. We should pair them with farmers, so that their strengths are counterbalanced.
Teams are happier and better when individuals hit the sweet spot of their own self-expression and the companies’ most objectives.
Beyond hunters and farmers
What does it mean to do a job well, and work? We spend most of our life at work, and work can be one of the greatest sources of meaning in the modern world.
To build the best teams, we should really think hard about how different people can get meaning out of what they do.
Nietzsche thought that people were "a social structure composed of many souls”. In living we get “feelings of delight in controlling our underwills.” Farmers delight in becoming good farmers, and hunters want to be the best hunters.
A person in a job is “a living being which seeks to discharge its strength - life itself is a will to power.” The will to power is the conscious control of the structure of your own soul, by acting, thinking, feeling. Some have strong wills, some have weak wills. 1
But when we act and work, we are becoming the person we are. We should know our team - if they are motivated to hunt, or farm, and what they will therefore do well. And have enough self-knowledge to be more than this, too.
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Nietzsche’s idea can (and has) been read for good, evil, and ways beyond. It had an unfortunate stint in the annals of social darwinism and Nazism, which Nietzsche himself set off by writing that: “The power to will and to persist, moreover, in a resolution, is already somewhat stronger in Germany, and again in the North of Germany it is stronger than in Central Germany… it would be necessary to free Europe from its greatest danger, but also internal subversion, the shattering of the empire into small states, and above all the introduction of parliamentary imbecility … [Germany should] acquire one will, by means of a new caste to rule over the Continent, a persistent, dreadful will of its own, that can set its aims thousands of years ahead; so that the long spun-out comedy of its petty-statism, and its dynastic as well as its democratic many-willed-ness, might finally be brought to a close”. But Nietszche is a complex guy! And virtually everything he said is contradicted somewhere else, so I don’t think we need to take this too literally.
You can read about the will to power in Beyond Good and Evil, e.g. at Project Gutenberg, here.