Linda Rising on Collaboration, Bonobos and The Brain

Linda Rising made a great impression at the Agile Vancouver conference. She is an excellent presenter.

In her interview to infoQ she makes some interesting parallels between Agile teams and groups of our closest relatives - chimpanzees and bonobos.
It turns out that these ape species have very different social life.
Linda believes that humans are much closer to bonobos than to chimpanzees and this a reason for Agile methodologies to succeed.

She says,
"...suppose you have 2 groups, one group of chimpanzees and one group of bonobos, and you throw a bunch of bananas into the middle of the group. What would happen in the chimpanzees group is that everyone will get very excited and there will be a huge battle, and the alpha male and his supporters will physically beat up on everybody else, and they will get the bananas.

...Suppose we throw a bunch of bananas into the middle of the bonobos. They also get excited about bananas, and they begin jumping up and down, but their immediate reaction would be to have sex. And everyone would have sex with everyone. Males with males, males with females, females with males, young with old. And there will be a lot of sex and then everyone would share the bananas."

Here is the link:
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/linda-rising-agile-bonobos