Swarm Intelligence: think about business like social insects do

As technology flood our lives filling every interstice, it has brought to us a new way to relate with each other and has opened a new box plenty of possibilities for business, all in all a new way to think about it.

This technology is intended to help everyone of us to play in a technological social world (linkedin, facebook, twitter, etc), with minimum effort (no deep thinking needed), where, in an ubiquitous manner (say through smart phones), each of us contributes to a whole, follows simple rules and finding exciting ways to solve complex problems, and makes his or her work in a free non-controlled way.

If we summarize all above, we will reach a conclusion: we are becoming social insects.

All kind of social insects (like bees and ants) have been studied by scientists since long ago because their amazing efficiency. Since a decade, big companies are actually putting that research to work: the outcome is impressive!

"Southwest airlines company turned to an unlikely source, ants, to solve cargo problems looking how they forage: using simple rules, always found efficient routes to food resources. This knowledge applied to this artificial environment resulted in an improvement of 80% in transfer rates and an important workload decrease. Other examples include Unilever, HP, Xerox, McGraw-Hill, etc… (Harvard Business Review, May 2001)"

The key for social insects is the teamwork that is largely self-organized, coordinated primarily through simple rules, which allow solving complex problems (like find the shortest path to forage) due to three important characteristics any company would like for itself:

• They can adapt to their changing environment with impressive flexibility; 
• The group can still perform its tasks, even when one individual fail, maintaining robustness; and 
• No need of central control or supervision for activities, they are capable of self-organization.

If we translate this ideas to an organization, we will realize that the trend of technology and organization behavior take us to a scenario of collaborative team work, where controlled chaos represented by self-organized workers can give a company the capabilities to be so much flexible and robust to cope the economic fluctuating reality.

To do this possible a system composed by multitasking self-managed workers is needed; everyone should be specialized in one aspect, but capable to perform any sort of task in the organization, giving this the required flexibility and robustness.

In this way the organization chart should be flat and leadership will be distributed along the members’ interactions and its main task will be the empowerment of characteristics said (See figure 1 against 2).

So, to this point, Management should see clearly that the endowing of enterprise with these tools is actually the one solution we (and Nature) know to face up this complex reality, where the change and uncertainty are the only and invariable truth.

As a last word it must be said it’s great we start to work like bees do, it’s great our organizations and relationships become collaborative, and flexible and robust, but every one of us should be alert not to become as meager in intelligence as a bee or ant alone are.