What Your Business Can Learn from the Ants and the Bees

by Syd Stewart

Published on this site: February 8th, 2004

Foraging and Making Errors to Succeed

Scout or forager bees search out new food sources randomly and report their findings through a waggle dance to others who will follow their lead. Surprisingly the followers are bad at following the waggle dance instructions and get lost and in the process sometimes find some other new food sources.

So you need to train your staff to recognise they have made mistakes and look out for the new opportunities that can arise out of mistakes. They also need to signal to the colleagues or team-mates the mistakes they have made.

Ants lose a pheromone trail with regular error rate, but they then switch to random search mode, and so again find new food sources. An error at the individual level can translate into group adaptive behaviour.

By foraging and making errors bees and ants succeed in adapting to their changing environment. The only thing that is certain in business is change.

So who are the pathfinders or foragers in your business?

Thomas Watson Jr., of IBM, who continued his father's work in creating this highly successful computer and software company (IBM provided over 60% of the World's Computers in the 60's to 80's), promoted only those razor-sharp, irritating, abrasive, unpleasant people who see and tell you about things as they really are. They were his foragers with powerful pheromones.

So who gets out there in your business and finds the hot areas and signals back to base, so as to divert resources to this new and exciting find.

Astonishing feats of teamwork emerge from a large number of unsupervised individuals following simple rules - e.g. "if you find some good food source waggle your tail".

To usefully manage all this information feedback, you need to find a minimum or critical amount or density of interactions (patterns) on a topic to stimulate or trigger an action or decision. This is sometimes called swarm intelligence.

So give your staff simple instructions to start foraging and to report back any problems, successes, and opportunities to you. It's then your job to synthesis and analyse these bits of information into patterns that enables you to take adaptive action with confidence. I have found in my company that when I receive three to five messages or bits of complementary intelligence on a topical area that is when and only when I take action.

Adopt these simple principles of nature and you'll make better decisions. As a result you'll create a great world beating business that constantly adapts to its environment.

Syd Stewart is the author of "Smiling Owner How to Build a Great Small Business An Evolutionary Business E-Handbook". He has been an owner and manager for over 30 years. He Knows What Works and What Doesn't. Visit his site to find out how you can 'Build a Great Small Business' at http://www.smilingowner.com.