What Kind of Unkind God Designed the Bat? (And What It Means for Leadership)
I am loving spending time in Somerset at the moment. Dusk is a special time as the countryside slows down and the nocturnal animals take over. A couple of weeks ago, I joined a local bat walk equipped with specialised bat detectors and real-time frequency identification software. As I stood in the twilight watching a large Serotine bat swoop overhead—its ultrasonic calls popping and clicking through our handheld monitors—I couldn’t help thinking what an amazing creature the bat is.
Serotines are one of the UK’s largest bat species and they navigate the dark with pinpoint echolocation as they hunt over pastures and woodland edges. But when you look a little closer at the physical mechanics of a bat, and a different thought strikes you: what kind of unkind god would design it like this?
The mammalian solution to flight is much clunkier than the solution birds ended up with. Bats’ wings are mammalian hands, with impossibly elongated fingers and skin stretched between them. And, because evolution can only tweak what already exists, bats carry an absurd amount of evolutionary baggage: their knees point backwards, they can barely crawl on flat ground, and their legs are too weak to launch them into the air—forcing them to hang upside down just to take off.
It is an incredible aerial display, but an undeniably messy workaround.
Serotine bat. Learn more about these remarkable British flying mammals and woodland conservation via the Woodland Trust.
The Myth of the "Ruthless" CEO
We often imagine nature as a ruthless CEO—swiftly cutting inefficient processes and liquidating whatever doesn't yield a profit. But evolution is actually a terrible manager. It never redesigns from scratch, and it certainly doesn't optimise for perfection.
Nature optimises purely for "good enough to survive." As long as a messy, awkward workaround doesn't literally cause extinction before reproduction, evolution leaves it in place forever.
In corporate life, we fall into the exact same trap through survivorship bias. We look at a functioning department or a long-standing workflow and assume it was intelligently engineered for maximum efficiency. In reality, most organisations are full of "bat-wing" processes—awkward workarounds accumulated over years simply because the company hasn't collapsed under their weight:
Ghost Governance: Approval steps created for a manager who left five years ago.
Workaround Spreadsheets: A complex sheet built to bridge two systems that were supposed to be integrated in 2020.
Fear-Based Armour: A 10-point checklist introduced after a single, isolated mistake that occurred three years ago.
When we fail to audit these habits, we aren't managing—we are just letting natural selection run wild, cluttering our organisations with evolutionary debt.
We Are Not Bound by Natural Selection
Here is the crucial difference between biology and business: nature is stuck with its evolutionary history, but we aren't.
Bats are trapped with backward knees forever. But in organisational life, we have the agency to look at an awkward, friction-heavy process and say: "If we were designing this from scratch today, we would never build it like this."
Correcting these awkward bits isn't just about operational efficiency—it requires psychological safety. In an insecure culture, people protect vestigial processes because busywork feels safe; it looks like productivity. But when leaders create a culture where it is safe to question legacy habits, teams gain the freedom to prune the dead weight.
In Scrum and Agile frameworks, retrospectives shouldn't just be about adding new tasks to the backlog. Their true power lies in acting as an evolutionary audit—giving your team explicit permission to prune the messy, awkward workarounds and redesign the workflow for the world as it exists today.
3 Ways to Spot "Vestigial Baggage" in Your Team
Run the "Clean Sheet" Test: Ask your team, "If we started this project from scratch today, would we include this step?" If the answer is no, stop doing it.
Trace the "Ghost Manager": Look for sign-offs or reports whose original owner or rationale no longer exists.
Celebrate the Pruning, Not Just the Building: Publicly praise team members who identify and eliminate unnecessary steps. Removing friction is just as valuable as launching a new feature.
💬 Join the Conversation
What "vestigial baggage" or awkward workarounds have you uncovered in your organisation recently? How do you spot and prune them?
👉 Join the discussion over on my LinkedIn post here to share your thoughts and see what others are uncovering in their teams.
