Feature 1: Team Led

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Posted by Justin Long ⋅ July 13, 2008 ⋅

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We lead each other toward the goal.

If you are near an ant colony, you can try this. Put something sweet out: a bit of candy or a piece of fruit. It won’t take long for the first scouts, walking around randomly, to find it. Once they do, they’ll turn around and head back to the ant hive. You won’t be able to see it, but all along the path they will be dropping a little bit of scent along the path.

Any ant who happens along will know what that scent it means: “Follow this to food”—which he immediately will. When he finds the food, he won’t stop to ask if he can help. He’ll just pick up whatever he can carry, turn, and start hiking back to the hive, dropping scent markers along the way to strengthen the trail. Soon dozens of ants will be on the path. Finally, one will pick up the last piece of food. When he does, the others arriving will find nothing. There will be no committee or investigation: they will simply head off in other directions—but this time they won’t leave any scent. Slowly, over a few minutes or hours, the trail will evaporate and no more ants will go to where the food was.

Yet if you were to shove a stick into an ant hive—or worse, a nest of wasps or bees—you would see swarming of an altogether different kind: “follow this and attack.” Individual ants and bees are not very powerful, but when they work together a swarm can kill even very large creatures. Ant swarms, for example, can kill elephants.

Swarms are empires without emperors: they have no ‘bosses’ or ‘chiefs’ or ‘kings.’ This does not mean anarchy: each person exercises leadership. While no single person is responsible for everyone, all members of a swarm take responsibility for each other. Every member is social (connected to other members) yet autonomous (free to act) and flexible (adaptive). Members are capable of proactive action (heading toward a goal), in response to the environment around them. The swarm has a goal and tasks to achieve in order to reach the goal—but there is no single individual who tells the swarm how to do the tasks.

Measure how team-led you are by the following properties:
• Decentralization: anyone can lead, and everyone will lead at some time
• Shared Intelligence: sharing information and insights
• Permissive Responsibility: do what you should without being told

Collective or team intelligence is a key feature of biological teams, such as ant colonies. Perhaps surprisingly, humankind is the only species that operates ‘leader intelligence’–the trust that a small group of leaders knows best for the whole group. Traditionally, human-team management is classic command and control–good for warfare or civil engineering, but poor for organizational teams, especially when distributed, mobile, semi-formal and with ill-defined structures and boundaries. Biological teams are ‘self-organizing’. Instead of relying on a few leaders, every member has the potential to be a leader in some domain and at some time. How can organizations learn to become more like these biological teams?
–Ken Thompson, Inside Knowledge, March 2007

Case studies
• The International Campaign to Ban Landmines
• The Celtic Missionary Movement
• The Antiglobalization Movement

Key readings

Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (1993). The wisdom of teams creating the high-performance organization. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press.

Johnson, Steven (2002). Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software. Scribner.

Strogatz, Steven (2003). Sync: the emerging science of spontaneous order. Hyperion.