Off-the-wall Insights - Ant Strategies, Swarm Theory and Law Firms
Posted By Rob Millard - 0 Comments -
Ants achieve great feats together, that are far beyond the abilities of individual ants with miniscule brains. How do such simple individuals achieve so much complex and intricate behaviour as a group? The answer lies in a concept called swarm theory. A key aspect is … nobody is in charge. The “queen” plays no function except to lay eggs. Instead of management, an ant colony relies on countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb.
Mark Thoma at the blog Economist’s View has a post today titled Swarm Theory with an excerpt from an article by Peter Miler of National Geographic on that topic, with a link to the full article.
Miler points out that some companies such as Air Liquide have used swarm theory (“ant-strategies”) to solve complex business problems such as … routing trucks ... or channelling telephone calls across a network.
Which does raise the somewhat “off-the-wall” question: Are there aspects of law firm management that would be far more efficient if they were deliberately self-organized, with a few “rules of thumb,” rather than centrally controlled? (Especially if such central control is unpopular or, worse still, actively resisted.) I suspect the answer to this is not only a “yes,” but one would not be hard pressed to come up with quite a long list of aspects where this is already the case, deliberately or not. The next question would be: what can we learn from swarm theory, at least metaphorically, to improve these aspects?
I have been working with David Terrar, an Enterprise 2.0 specialist based in London, on a concept that we are calling "Brainswarming," that uses swarm theory to solicit firm-wide input into a firm's strategic planning process using a dedicated enterprise blogging platform as a tool. Click here to download a short article by David on this topic. The tool, which is based on the Blogtronix platform is also being used by the brand-new Reuters Interactive, amongst others. It is about to be rolled out commercially. Brainswarming is particularly well suited to diverse and complex organizations that are geographically dispersed across multiple offices. Watch this space!
http://www.robmillard.com/admin/trackback/48963