Flat hierarchies the organisation of insect societies lessons for business

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Flat hierarchies - the organisation of insect
societies - lessons for business?

• Carl Anderson
• Zoology Institute, Regensburg University
• carl.anderson_at_biologie.uni-regensburg.de

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Insect societies

• Colonies of ants, bees, wasps and termites
• Model systems for complexity research
• easy to keep whole colonies in the lab.
• easy to manipulate conditions and test ideas
• many areas of social insect biology are well
  understood

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Outline

• Organisation of insect societies
• Decentralised paradigm
• Why flat?
• Why hierarchical?
• Lessons for business?

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How are insect societies organised?
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Not like this!
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Centralised control?

• A Dorylus army ant colony may contain 20 million
  workers
• Queen may be physically confined to one small
  part of the nest
• Many tasks to be performed concurrently it would
  be impossible to schedule or forecast

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Decentralised paradigm

• Simple and cheap processing units
• Operate on local information
• Use simple heuristics
• Network of positive and negative feedbacks
• System robustness
• Complexity, i.e swarm intelligence, emerges at
  level of the group

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Flat hierarchies?
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Why flat?

• Except in the smallest colonies, the queen is not
  in control
• Workers make their own individual decisions about
• what needs doing
• when to switch tasks
• when to ask for help (i.e. recruitment)
• Use simple rules using local information

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Nectar collection in honey bees
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Individual forager rule
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Individual forager rule
Recruit more receivers
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Individual forager rule
Recruit more receivers
Recruit more foragers
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Individual forager rule
Recruit more receivers
Recruit more foragers
Do nothing
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Simple individual rule

• If I wait a long time recruit more receivers
• If I wait a short time recruit more foragers
• If I wait an intermediate time do nothing
• No need to know anything about
• supply and demand
• rate of arrival
• number of other bees queueing
• But they can track a fluctuating and very
  unpredictable environment

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collective wisdom arising from poorly-informed
masses
(Seeley 2000)
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Why hierarchical?

• Flow of information across different levels
• among individuals in a network
• not up and down a chain
• from group to worker
• often from collective work
• using cues
• group to group and worker to group
• mass communication

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Leader
Self-organized
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Hierarchy sense I
(Pattee 1973)
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Teams in insect societies
Hierarchy sense II

• Leaderless
• Situation in which different things must be done
  at the same time in order to complete the task
• Dealing with intruders in Pheidole pallidula
• Huge amount of redundancy in insect societies
  dynamic membership, individuals switch between
  tasks / teams

(Anderson Franks 2001)
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Heterarchy
An ant colony is a special kind of hierarchy,
which can usefully be called a heterarchy. This
means that the properties of the higher levels
affect the lower levels to some degree, but
induced activity in the lower units feeds back
to influence the higher levels
(Wilson Hölldobler 1988)
Feedback between micro and macro level -
bidirectional flow
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Lessons for business?
1 empower your workers
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Worker empowerment

• In insect societies, workers on the shop floor
  make the decisions using relevant up-to-date
  information
• No need for a higher level decision maker
• Example in Ford s Edison (NJ) automobile
  assembly plant, each worker was given a button to
  stop the whole assembly line

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Worker empowerment

• They used these buttons 20-30 times a day!
• But total downtime per day was only 200-300
  seconds
• They used the button when they saw a small
  problem
• Number of defects decreased from 17.1 to 0.8 per
  car (Peters Austin 1987)
• Higher production rate

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No one is as smart as everyone
Larry Keely Doblin Group
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Lessons for business?
2 listen to your workers
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Value the opinion of your workers

• Workers on the shop floor have the best, most
  relevant, and up-to-date information
• They probably understand the problems far better
  than youthey are working on that machine for 8
  hours a day
• Even very simple ideas such as suggestion boxes
  can pay great dividends

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Wednesday, April 18, 2001. p. C1
IDEA Hang brushes near gear cutters so employees
dont have to sweep away steel shavings
with their gloves COST About 10 a brush DATE
SUBMITTED Feb 2000 carried out the day it was
made RESULT prolonged life of gloves and
prevented hand cuts SAVINGS About 1000 annually
IDEA Get machines running at speeds that reduce
wear and tear COST About an hours work by a
company engineer DATE SUBMITTED Nov 2000 carried
out the same month RESULT Machines cycle time
was reduced to 21 minutes from 90 minutes -
improving production and minimizing parts
wear SAVINGS About 60,000 so far
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Decentralised

• Kodak13 management levels to 4
• Fordeach worker had power to shut down assembly
  line
• Accept loss of direct managerial control
• Think like an antfor the good of the company
  better for you

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Lessons for business?
3 think more long term
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Timescale

• Insect societies do not appear to use strategies
  that optimise minute-to-minute operations.
  Instead they have strategies that are very
  efficient on a longer timescale
• E.g. adaptive errorants that get lost find new
  food sources
• Perhaps companies can utilise suboptimal
  strategies to increase strategic flexibility

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Error in management

• Experiments may be planned, but they may also
  occur spontaneously as errors, i.e.
  perturbations. Leaps in the knowledge development
  of a company typically stem from events that the
  firm has neither planned nor hypothesized
  (Vicari et al. 1996)
• 3M employees are encouraged to spend 15 of
  their time on projects these choose

Result Post-It notes !
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Summary

• Insect societies are very far from the
  regimented, hierarchical, chain-of-command
  organisational structure. However, they are
  extremely successful
• Enhance companys strategic flexibility by
• appropriate increased worker empowerment
• get the best information (from the workers?)
• think more long term

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Lessons for business?
4 embrace the swarm!
(Kelly 1998)
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To design the organization for the purpose of
evolution with the changing environment, to
design for emergence by avoiding the rigidity of
bureaucratic hierarchy
(Coleman 1999)
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Its not something you can start on Monday
morning. Its behavior you have to stop doing on
Friday
(Coleman 1999)
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A company that is pure network is

• Distributed
• Decentralised
• Collaborative
• Adaptive
• You cant understand them
• You have less control
• They dont optimize well

but
always need managers!
(Kelly 1994 Anderson Bartholdi 2000)
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Go to the ant, thou sluggardConsider her ways,
and be wise.
Proverbs 6 6
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Many thanks to

• Regensburg University
• The conference organisers
• www.duke.edu/carl
• This presentation ( reference list)
• Anderson Bartholdi 2000