Details

Learning from ants - without copying them

"Ant", by courtesy of Cornelia Meyer-Sattler, 2009

On earth, an average of four million years passes between the origin of a species and its extinction. Ants have existed for more than 130 million years, and today there are approximately 12,500 species of ants. Their biomass far exceeds that of all people, although the individual ant generally weighs just a few milligrams. Ant colonies can consist of a few hundred to a few million individuals. There are ant colonies with many thousands of anthills and several hundred million ants.

The ants attribute this collective intelligence to their immense adaptability and their far above-average success as a species.

These figures bear witness to an extremely successful species. This is all the more fascinating as the individual ant is completely helpless and can't solve any problems, let alone develop a long-term strategy. And yet, as a collective, ant colonies react rapidly, extremely flexibly and efficiently to environmental influences. The ants attribute this so-called collective intelligence or colony intelligence to their immense adaptability and thus their far above-average success as a species.

No individual tells the other what to do. A manager is superfluous. The easier the rules that each individual has to follow, the more flexible the entire collective.

The colony intelligence can also be found in other animal species. It is widespread among the colonising insects such as bees or wasps. But this phenomenon can also be found among migratory birds, mackerels or migrating gnus. Ants stand out here because they exclusively rely on the collective form of intelligence. In general, the principle is always based on the fact that a large number of individuals interact according to very simple rules. No individual tells the other what to do. A manager is superfluous. The easier the rules that each individual has to follow, the more flexible the entire collective.

Thus, it comes as no surprise that people also want to make use of this successful strategy. To plan the routes of lorries, control military robots, develop solutions in parcel logistics and produce flight schedules, the behaviour of ants was converted to a mathematical formula and successfully applied. Not least thanks to James Surowiecki's popular book "The wisdom of crowds. Why the many are smarter than the few", the topic of collective intelligence has become a focus in companies and management seminars. Alone the practical implementation is difficult when it comes to finding strategies or making decisions for companies or organisations.

"The most mystifying thing about decision markets is how little interest corporate America has shown in them". James Surowiecki in "The wisdom of crowds".

The biggest companies in the world such as Wal-Mart with around 2 million employees or Siemens and Volkswagen, each with 400,000 employees, can easily keep up with the ant colonies in terms of the number of individuals. Nevertheless, all large corporations continue to rely on the hierarchical management model with the highest performer at the top. Even if Surowiecki comes to the conclusion that "much of what we've seen so far suggests that a large group of diverse individuals will come up with better and more robust forecasts and make more intelligent decisions than even the most skilled 'decision maker'", he is forced to admit that "the most mystifying thing about decision markets is how little interest corporate America has shown in them".

The software genedecSuite enables companies and organisations to access a healthy portion of collective intelligence for the decision-making process.

It isn't all that surprising when you consider that mammals, with humans at the top, possess the highest individual intelligence and attribute the success of their species to mostly small groups of just a few dozen individuals, led by carefully selected leaders. Thus, we find it difficult today to abandon this success model in everyday life, even though civilisation has so lastingly changed our general conditions that an end to collective intelligence is urgently required.

The software genedecSuite enables companies and organisations to access a healthy portion of collective intelligence for the decision-making process. For individual decisions, clearly composed teams can come together in the working environment provided by the software. With the help of the expert database SkillScout, these are composed from the collective of all experts in a company so that opinion-forming in the team is independent, non-central and diversified. For the decision processes in which they are not a member of the respective team, the management is provided with high-performance tools to subject the processes to efficient monitoring. Each decision is subjected to strict monitoring of standards, which ensures the observation of tax, legal and corporate strategy general conditions. genedecSuite thus enables you to learn from ants without copying them.

Genedec, January 2009