Ants and human societies are similar in many ways.
They live in communities numbering from just a few individuals
up to many millions.
They can build vast empires that span the world.
They conduct diplomacy with neighbouring settlements.
And they can even go to war with each other.
All the ants have just one single intent on their mind,
and that’s the reproductive success of the colony.
Everything that they do is directed towards that one aim.
Most ant colonies consist of just one reproductive individual -
the queen - and many non-reproductive workers.
And the workers are actually all female.
So they’re a vast sisterhood who does all the work.
Now the title 'queen' seems to imply some kind of political authority -
that the queen is telling the workers what to do at any one moment in time,
but in fact it's completely self-organised.
In a colony of ants, there are no fixed managers.
There are no CEOs or presidents.
Everyone is working towards the common goal.
If one ant finds a trace of food,
that ant will become, in that moment, a leader,
and get everyone else to come into that food source.
But the modern organisation is obsessed with hierarchy.
Obsessed with managers and where you are up on the scale,
which number or paygrade you are.
And what happens is lots of people lower down
spend all their time trying to guess what their manager wants,
or their manager's manager wants,
rather than what's going to work for the organisation
and the people they serve.
When an ant encounters a food source, for example,
what it can do on the way back to the colony
is lay a trail using pheromones -
and these are just chemicals that they can lay on the ground
so that when others ants come along and encounter that trail,
they know to follow it all the way to the food.
So this simple process of positive feedback
is surprisingly effective at finding the shortest path.
The idea, borrowing from the ant world,
of actually getting the data,
making sure you’re capturing it
from the very people who are on the coalface,
so to speak, makes tons of sense,
because they’re the ones with the rich qualitative data
to be able to feed that back into the decision-making.
We have to be self-organised.
We have to allow people to have their own intelligence and wisdom
and organize around a problem or a project themselves,
rather than always waiting for someone else to tell them what to do,
or for a three-year business planning cycle to take effect.
Just as ants respond immediately to changes in their environment,
say the diminishing of a foraging patch,
and adapt really quickly to that change,
organisations must be able to do the same.
If, by looking at ants for instance,
it stimulates our thinking
about how we might try to do things differently,
then that’s worth it in and of itself.
I just think you probably want to start experimenting
in a quite small and bounded way - but yeah, why not?
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