A Flock of Starlings

I talked about two concepts, self-managed teams (albeit very briefly) and complex adaptive systems (to a greater extent) in my last post, "The Myth of the Ant-Queen".   To recap, an ant colony is a great example of a complex adaptive system, which is defined as a group of semi-autonomous agents or individuals who interact in interdependent ways to produce system-wide patterns.  The behavior of each individual ant in the colony is governed by a few simple rules, yet the behavior of the colony as a whole can be quite complex.  Simple rules lead to complex behavior, in the absence of any centralized coordination or leadership.  The ant-queen is not really a leader at all - all she does is lay eggs to sustain or grow the colony.  Nigel Franks, a specialist in ant behavior, wrote, "The solitary army ant is behaviorally one of the least sophisticated animals imaginable...Yet put a half million of them together, and the group as a whole becomes what some have called a superorganism with collective intelligence."  As it turns out, all insect colonies (ants, termites, bees, etc) behave similarly, in that the individual behavior of each insect is governed by a surprisingly few number of rules, leading to a significantly more complex behavior when considering the colony as a whole.   

Admittedly, insect behavior is not the same as human behavior.  Can groups of higher order animals, even humans, behave in a similar fashion to that of the ant colony?  As it turns out, they certainly can and do.  Witness the incredible beauty, order, and symmetry of a flock of starlings in flight (see a beautiful video here).  It's called murmuration, and it's absolutely fascinating to observe.  

I would argue that starlings are a lot more intelligent than ants, termites, and bees.  However, it would be wrong to assume that starling murmuration is centrally coordinated or orchestrated by the leader of the flock (if there is any such thing).  Individual starlings, like the ants I mentioned in my previous post follow a set of simple rules that produces the complex group behavioral patterns demonstrated in murmuration.

Surprisingly, in the late 1980's a scientist named Craig Reynolds wrote a simple computer program that simulated starling murmuration.  Reynolds called his simulated starlings "boids".  By following three simple rules, the "boids" recapitulated the complex behavior of murmuration (see the video of Craig Reynold's "boids" algorithm here and here):

1. Separation - steer to avoid crowding local boids and other objects

2. Alignment - steer towards the average heading of local boids

3. Cohesion - steer to move towards the average position of local boids

I first talked about starling murmuration in a post from a few years ago (see "Don't be an agent of chaos!").  Scientists have studied the flocking behavior of a number of different animal species, including starlings.  For example, we can observe similar behavior with schools of fish (technically, it's not called murmuration, but rather shoaling or schooling instead).  

These complex behaviors have been worked out mathematically (see "Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move"), and similar processes have even been observed in humans in the laboratory setting (see "Consensus decision making in human crowds").  We are, in fact, part of the animal kingdom.  So, whether our ability to move through crowds or in crowds is our innate "animal senses" or some other as yet unrecognized pattern of human behavior, the fact remains that we can create order out of chaos, in ways very similar to the murmuration behavior of starlings.

Just to finish my point, here's another example of murmuration-like behavior involving humans - maybe now we should avoid the term "murmuration" and label this kind of behavior, self-organization (individuals follow simple rules to produce complex group behavior with little to no centralized coordination or leadership direction).  Hisashi Murakami, a professor at the Kyoto Institute of Technology recently published the results of a series of outdoor experiments performed on the campus of Tokyo University, in which he and his colleagues filmed two groups of students walking down a narrow path about 30 feet long (see "Mutual anticipation can contribute to self-organization in human crowds").  The two groups walked towards each other at a normal walking pace.  Murakami and his colleagues noted that the groups of students effortlessly and spontaneously formed separate channels through the traffic (again, see my post, "Don't be an agent of chaos!" to learn what happened next).

My take-home point from these last two posts is that group behavior, from ants all the way to humans is incredibly complex and follows at least some of the characteristics of complex adaptive systems.  The logical follow-up question is whether organizations today can leverage some of the characteristics of these systems for better operational efficiency.  As it turns out, companies like Morning Star, a U.S. based tomato processing company (see the HBR article "First, Let's Fire All the Managers!") and Zappos (see the HBR article, "Beyond the Holocracy Hype") have embraced, at least for a time, the concept of self-managed teams (see also, the concept of Teal Organizations).  Companies like these (and others, though on a more limited scale) have flattened the traditionally hierarchical organizational structure to run more like an ant colony or flock of starlings.  And interestingly enough, when you start to look at these organizational structures, we start to see evidence of networks!