Ants are incredible features. Apart from various inventions such as farming, war strategies etc they also run the largest running organizations on the planet. We have a lot to learn from them. The focus of leaders today should be develope organizational wisdom in whatever they do!
2. Vs
Highest proportion of brain size Largest brain size
Olympic weight-lifter can do 2-3
Lift 20-30 times of body weight
times body weight at best
Discovered farming about 50 million
Still learning to strike balance
years ago, employ yield
between chemistry and biology
enhancement techniques
Have developed very sophisticated
Still learning…
warfare techniques
3. Ants – 120 million years old species
with several inventions to their name
Psychological
Farming Ranchers
Warfare
Running largest
Bloodless Warfare Slavery
Organizations
4. Lifecycle of Ant’s Organization
Queen ant and male ants get wings
Are sent on mating flight
Queen Ant
Mating Formulate
Flight Colony
Colonies make colonies
Number of Ants Vs Years Colony Individually no ant is capable of
reaches Grow performing any of the following
8
threshold colony functions
6
4 size
2 Scout
for food
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 Knowledge
Transfer Fight Transfer
enemy to nest
Ant colonies live for decades Build
nest
Each Ant does not live for 45-60 days
5. How do ants do it?
Defend
?
Control
mecha
Work nism?
allocati Queen ant –
on? undisputed boss of
the organization?
Where
is the
food?
Feast
&
famine
?
6. Key Learnings
• Simple sub-task and multi-tasking ability
• Knowledge transfer – Oxygen of the
organization
• Decentralized, situational, P2P communication
based decision making
7. Ant Organization is quite similar to corporates
Farming Conquer
•Fulfilment other
colonies
Finding food Getting it •M&A
•Business back
Development •Sales
Role
assignment
•Training
Birth Fighting
•Recruitment enemy
•Stay competitive
Nest Expand
Maintenance colony
•Administration •Geographical
& house keeping Expansion
Waste
Management
•Maintenance
8. #1 : Simple sub-tasks and multi-tasking
Foragers Nest maintenance
Everyone
More
goes
food?
foraging
Patrolling Midden work
Only Midden
More
workers
disturbance?
switch roles
9. Flexibility and multi-tasking makes organization
more adaptable hence successful
Account
Consulting
Management
Research Marketing
10. Flexibility adaptability strength
AMs can take
Research can
on the role of
switch to
project
consulting
Management “Feast”
Period
Overworked Close projects
consulting faster - free
team Organization bandwidth
adapts &
becomes
stronger
Famine
Period
11. Knowledge Transfer is the oxygen of the organization
Lifespan of colony
8
7
Lifespan of
Individual ant Ants in older colonies are no
6
different than younger colonies
5
Yet older colonies perform
much better
4
3
They are able to handle
uncertainties more predictably
2
This can be attributed to some
1
knowledge transfer mechanism that
adds to “Organizational wisdom”
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
12. What is the system for developing
“Organizational Wisdom” ?
Successfully solved Organization
Knowledge transfer
the problem Wisdom
• Learnings? • Others anticipated it
• How to anticipate? • Others avoided it
• How to avoid it? • Others used the
• etc learnings
13. De-Centralized, situational P2P
communication based decision making
De-centralized Situational P2P communication
• No central • Each ant • Chemical
command assesses the signals
• Each ant situation • Each ant
decides what • Based on what communicates
to do other ants are directly to
doing others
14. Leverage the collective brain power of
the team, empower them…
Boss gives the solution; team Team comes up with the solution;
implements it Boss facilitates it
Boss speaks, Team listens Boss listens first, speaks the last
Vertical or hub-spoke Direct, horizontal or lateral
communication communication
15. Leadership Lessons from Ants
What is Leader’s Job?
• Leader’s job is not just to solve the problem
but to Design a system by which the team is
able to anticipate, avoid/ solve the problem
themselves
16. Leadership Lessons from Ants
What is Leader’s litmus test?
• Touchstone of a true leader is training an
individual well enough that she is able to start
the organization at a new location all by
herself
17. Leadership Lessons from Ants
What should be the ultimate goal of a true leader?
• Improve Organizational wisdom… everyday
Offlate I have started thinking about my leadership style a lot. Thanks to Gina, Felicia and her 360 deg appraisal, the process got even more accelerated. Soon I realized that whatever I learnt in MBA is helpful for me to clear job interviews In fact I still remember Kavan had conducted a long IDI on my leadership style before hiring me. but that knowledge is not good enough to be implemented. Here we need examples, we need contextual learning. So I started looking at mother nature. Personally, I am fascinated by nature, we have a lot to learn from it. In our evolution process, we got disconnected from nature…we started fighting against nature, destroying it and with this green revolution we actually realize that we should be protecting it. We should not only protect the nature but learn from it. When I was doing that, I got super-impressed and super-duper fascinated by ants. They are just an amazing species and we have a lot to learn from them especially about how to run our organizations.
As you can see, individually Ant is quite competitive to Man in many aspects. It has largest brain size in proportion to the body, it can lift more weight, it can travel really fast. If you adjust the body size and start a race between man and an ant, man will have to run faster than a race horse to keep up with the ant. But the real power of ant is in their colony, group or team. That is where Ants win hands down… they are just too good as a group. You will be amazed that they discovered farming. The leaf cutter ants who carry the leaves back don’t each the leaves but they store the leaf, ferment them and grown fungus on them and eat the fungus. Not only that they also have some techniques by which they enhance the yield of their crop. The collective intelligence of ants has many more discoveries to their names.
Another accomplishment of ants that I must highlight is they did something which dinosaurs could not…they survived. They walked on earth with dinosaurs and are still there around us…here…now. They survived what dinosaurs could not…Ants also grow other animals for food. The picture shows ants together with an animal called Aphid who secrets honey like material. Ants “milk” aphids and carry back the honey. In turn they protect Aphids from attackers, they are also known to have destroyed eggs of attackers like ladybug to protect their farm animals. Ants are simply amazing at warfare. There are various strategies they use but personally I am impressed by 2 warfare techniques and I am simply amazed how this animal who is barely 5 cm can’t see properly, does not seem to get anything right could invent such things. The first one is psychological warfare….ants in large numbers simply surround the identified target nest and block the ants from doing their work for days…soon attacked ants start running out of food, their midden work is pending and there is confusion all around…that’s when attacker makes a move. Bloodless warfare is another technique which works on show of power – here ants simply “meet” other ants from the chemical smell they know whether the ant belongs to their group or enemy group….they keep doing this for hours – days – weeks. In some cases, a group of ants leaves and gets some allies…and the process continues….till one group accepts the defeat and leaves the territory….millions of ants are involved not 1 ant is killed….
Every ant colony starts with 1 ant….a pregnant queen ant. She digs a small hole in the ground and starts laying eggs. Eggs become larvae, larvae becomes pupae and pupae become ants. First few ants who come out start looking for food, once they find food they start digging for the nest… once the nest is dug queen ant goes in never to return back to the ground…she keeps laying eggs and various ants assume their duties…..of finding food, digging the best, taking care of the young, protecting the nest from attackers etc etc.they overcome obstacles, grow, manage the change all the same time. As the colony becomes older and older their management becomes better and better. The colonies live for 15-20 years…as long as queen ant…but the individual ant lives for less than 2 months …that’s where the knowledge transfer element comes in…ants continuously learn how to manage things and perform for their life span. When the ant colony reaches a threshold size something miraculous happens. On a particular day, the colony sends out a virgin queen ant and a male ant…somehow they get wings and on a fixed day they fly….then they mate…queen ant collects all the sperms she needs for rest of her life and male dies….Pregnant queen ant digs a hole again….
It sounds very simple and intuitive. But consider this, each ant who measures less than 5 cm can not even see things properly, has no ability to grasp the macro environment or to find the food or to anticipate weather changes or even the attack….Their undisputed leader - Queen ant is deep inside the hole laying eggs…. She has zero visibility about what is happening externally….so she can not control behaviour of any ant….there is no other visible leader. So the big question is how do they do it?Well I have the answer but since the organizers decided to make me guest speaker and not give me an opportunity to win another ipad, I would focus on a few important learnings rather than answering the big question…
In many ways our organizations are also similar to ant colonies. Birth is equivalent to recruitment, then we undergo training, then roles are assigned to us and we are sent out. We have to find new business, ward of competition, fulfill the business, maintain our nest….expand to new geographies …. Hunt for consulting engagements, farm GPS clients, appoint distributors and channel partners whom we can milk….look for acquisition targets and fight any aggressive take over bid…..In short our organization are very similar to ant colonies and since they are around for much longer than we can imagine we need to learn from them.
All the complex situation for Ants is divided in 4 simple sub-tasks. Patrollers who leave the nest early in the morning to search for food, find the food and come back…leaving a chemical trail behind. This is picked up by foragers who reach the food and get it back to the nest. Nest maintenance comprises of digging, maintaining the nest, moving larvae, pupae, feeding them, move the food, stack it etc….Midden work team takes the waste out of the nest and stack it near the nest to mark their boundary. But all ants are multi-taskers. If there is more food available then that gets highest priority….all ants become foragers and get the food back to nest. Where as if there is more disturbance near the nest only midden work ants become patroller and foragers and nest maintenance continue with their work. In my own team, I had many resignations from team members who mentioned that they find multi-tasking stressful, they find role switching too demanding…I wish I knew about ants back then and I was able to convince them that even ants could do it why not them?
We have taken some steps to come up simple sub-tasks. This is how our organization is designed. But in practice this is how it looks….Somehow we have very water tight compartmentalization in different functions….different Bus….different geographies. We need to realize that every internal boundary is an hurdle. It stops communication, reduces flexibility and weakens the organization. Only thing constant in our business environment is uncertainty. We struggle to project our business for more than a month, yet we install all these boundaries and reduce flexibility. I am reminded of a saying in my mother tongue which roughly translates as when you have massive floods, big trees are destroyed but the grass survives. Whatever is flexible, adaptable would survive in any uncertain situation… so guys one important leadership lesson I learn from Ants is “Be Flexible, adaptable to survive” Now I can see several question marks on your faces….you kind of agree but you don’t know how to be flexible, right? So let me paint a few scenarios for you.
Scenario 1 is always a good problem to have… You have lots of business…entire consulting team has 120% PMC utilization…NitinBhat says there is nobody in CRT…all interns are giving exams and contractors have gone for vacation….Look for solution inside…. Why don’t you ask research team to go slow on GPS production and wrap research for some of the consulting projects?? why not ask your account manager to multi-task as Project Manager and save that 10% time your consultant is putting on the project. If midden workers can become foragers why can’t AM s becomes PMs…..They can. We have to change our mindset and the way we organize ourselves.
