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Save the Queen! Lose the Supervisor.

By Peter Lloyd

If ant-colony organizational genius can teach us anything about getting things done, it's this: Spontaneity Rules! That is, if everyone is genuinely inclined toward success of the colony.

Okay, so there's this one, enormous queen ant and all the other ants dote on her. Naturally. She's the source of the relief shift and defense reinforcements. But she's no supervisor. It could be argued that she works harder than any other ant.

So who gives the orders? Who maximizes worker efficiency? Who does the work-motion studies? Who's the chief innovation officer?

According to the Innovations Report, Albert Douma, a researcher at the University of Twente, in Enschede, Netherlands, the ants might have something to teach us about organizational management.

He theorizes that the port of Rotterdam in particular might do better letting the captains of inland barges organize themselves. That's right, without top-down management. Douma calls his ant-inspired system the multi-agent approach. He says it could reduce considerably the time barges spend in port.

So how do ants do it? According to WikiAnswers, "This question has not been answered yet." So much for human crowdsourcing having all the answers.

Audrey Dussutour, a University of Sydney entomologist, says in Wired Science that ants never get stuck in traffic. He goes so far as to advise, "We should use their rules. I've been working with ants for eight years, and have never seen a traffic jam—and I've tried."

What rules? Do ants follow rules? It seems they do. Incoming ants carrying food have the top right of way. Outgoing ants step aside and incoming ants without a load follow patiently behind food-bearers.

Dussutour calls this counter-intuitive, but don't you think it makes perfect sense? So why do we all pass semis? If we were as smart or as courteous as ants, we might not need lines down the middle of our roads. Following ant rules, we'd get where we were going sooner.

Would this require us to check our human drives at the corner? Would we have to surrender our autonomy to some centralized intelligent agent, who would conduct all our vehicles according to ant-archy? We certainly won't do it voluntarily.

I'm afraid we would have to suppress something fundamentally human to work the way ants do, and we're already beginning to.

Crowdsourcing, a very colony-like process is turning out to be one of our most powerful tools for getting the information and things we need, when we need them. If we want it to work as smoothly and efficiently as an ant colony, we'll just have to let go and let it happen.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.