Swarming – Beyond collaboration
The clock speed of the digital economy is such that a centralised leadership model just doesn’t work. Opportunities slip away from those organisations whose workers need to gain permission from their superiors to act.
The move to collaboration is a step in the right direction. Workers can now collaborate across the hierarchy. Temporary task forces can collaborate to consider a response to a given opportunity or threat where a resolution doesn’t fit neatly into the organogram. They may even be given authority to take action on their findings.
But even this has a clunky feel to it. The emerging business model reflects the swarming behaviours of animals such as ants, bees and sardines. This swarming behaviour enables decisions to be made in real-time for the best interests of the group without anyone in charge as such.
Using what are in effect simple statistical analysis / pattern recognition models (eg. bee wiggle dance) members of the swarm will act instinctively. It turns out ants and bees are not particularly intelligent but thanks to evolution they have developed a few simple rules that enable the colony to achieve sophisticated outcomes despite the limited intelligence of the individual insect.
So smart organisations looking to mimic this swarm behaviour will develop a minimal set of rules for each role and ensure they are deeply programmed into the workers.
Might be a tricky one to sell to the unions. However done well it might enable more people to enter the workplace as the ability to act appropriately on a given ‘stimulus’ will be more important than experience / qualifications.
Though if the rules are relatively simple this might work even more efficiently using, dare I mention it, robots.