In the Clothing of Wolves

Exposing Ravening Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

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Breadcrumb

Now the older ways are at the tail end of their life cycle, the rust will come back, but the main damage is to the new idea which is now assimulated into the old way of working. We are seeing this a lot with complexity theory at the moment. I picked up a book the other day making a big thing about the distinction between complex and complicated systems. The solutions are the classic sets of platitudes about leadership, committment and openess to novelty.

No real change is expected, the whole thing is simply dressing up sheep in wolves clothing; pretending to novelty while propviding no real challenge. Other, more serious, attempts to understand complexity fail to come to grips with issues of dispiositionality v causality or the nature of constraints.

Wolves in Government Clothing » a film by David Spady

Instead they hide behind the language of self-organisation and emergence; but all of the proposed practices or changes are heaviliy facilitated workshops in which people agree to be different but in practice do nothing. Now the specific context of that quote related to the way in which the Agile movement in software development has become corrupted by an over constrained, over constructuted approach which gives IT directors the comfort of saying they have changed without really having to do so.

It also plays to the desire of said executives to announce major, costly initiatives that will only exepcted to deliver after that executive has moved on leaving some other poor sod to pick up the pieces.

That has been a depressingly common characteristics of most adoptions of new methods so its not suprise that the SAFe founders played to that weakness in purchasing executives. Now wolves are more scary than sheep, but its nice to pretend to be one, while staying with the flock.

Of course nothing will really change …. When the shepherd noticed this was happening, he hanged the wolf on a very tall tree.

Exposing Ravening Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

On other shepherds asking him why he had hanged a sheep, the shepherd answered: The skin is that of a sheep, but the activities were those of a wolf. Certain elements of this story are to be found in Aesop's fable of the shepherd who raised a wolf cub among his dogs. When it was grown, it secretly reverted to type. If a wolf stole a sheep and the dogs could not catch it, the guardian wolf continued the chase and shared the meal with the marauder.

A sheep in wolves clothing

On other occasions it would kill a sheep and share the meat with the other dogs. Eventually the shepherd discovered what was happening and hanged the wolf. What may be a reference to this story occurs in an anonymous poem in the Greek Anthology in which a goat laments that it is made to suckle a wolf-cub,.

Not by my own will but the shepherd's folly. The beast reared by me will make me his prey, For gratitude cannot change nature. The Greek fable is numbered in the Perry Index. Though the commonest retelling of the story in English follows the version by Abstemius, it is often credited to Aesop.

What does "Wolf in Sheep's Clothing" mean?

Another variant fable by Aesop is number in the Perry Index. Eventually the shepherd comes to trust it and on one occasion leaves the wolf on guard. He returns to find his flock decimated and blames himself for being taken in. In neither case is there the suggestion by Aesop that the wolf disguised itself as a sheep.

Yet another variation on the disguise theme was included in the Cento favole morali " moral fables", of the Italian poet Giovanni Maria Verdizotti. In this the wolf dresses itself as a shepherd, but when it tries to imitate his call it wakes the real shepherd and his dogs. Since the wolf is encumbered by its disguise, it cannot get away and is killed. The story entered the English canon under the title "The wolf turned shepherd" in Roger L'Estrange 's fable collection [10] and in verse as "The Wolf in Disguise" in Robert Dodsley's Select fables of Esop and other fabulists Earlier illustrations of the fable concentrated on the hanging of the wolf.

More recently the emphasis has been on the disguise.

October 2018

A number of recent CDs are titled A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing , although most are references to the idiom and the fable is not mentioned in the words of any of the songs. The same is true of many songs that have the phrase as their title. One exception is the lyric by Tackhead on their CD Strange Things , which uses the fable for a satirical attack on Capitalist entrepreneurs.

Zoologists have repeatedly compared predatory animals which make use of aggressive mimicry to a wolf in sheep's clothing, including jumping spiders , [15] [16] lacewings , [17] ant-mimicking aphids , [18] hemipteran bugs mimicking chrysomelid beetles , [19] bird-dropping spiders , [20] orchid mantises , [20] cichlid fish , [21] [22] and the zone-tailed hawk which flies with and attacks vultures ; [23] these animals have evolved to deceive their prey by appearing as other prey, or like angler fish [23] and snapping turtles [23] lure the prey by appearing as the prey's prey.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Wolf in Sheep's Clothing disambiguation. Adtendite a falsis prophetis qui veniunt ad vos in vestimentis ovium intrinsecus autem sunt lupi rapaces. Rhetores Graeci , London, , Myth 4, p. Cosmophasis bitaeniata , like comparable examples from insects Eisner et al. These predators practise aggressive mimicry by making it easy for prey to misidentify the predator as just another member of a prey group, as though lulling the prey into a false sense of security. The description of a fly resembling jumping spider of the genus Scoturius Simon, Araneae: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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