Book review: Smart Swarm, by Peter Miller

On a grand scale, Stephen Hawking is changing the paradigm into a post-religious world. On a smaller scale, but with an equally fascinating critique, Peter Miller has alighted upon some revelatory behavioural models that could also shift our thinking into brave new areas.

His findings will alarm some bosses and delight others. The control freaks will bridle at his proposition in Super Swarms that a little knowledge held by a multiplicity of creatures goes such a long way that leadership is actually redundant.

Termites build edifices of such magnitude and complexity that the air conditioning can reap the wind and adjust the temperature minutely. Savage calamities, like a scratching predator breaking through, create a calm, orderly yet hyper-efficient response.

None of this is done with a plan, a leader, a project manager or a delegation of duty. Termites follow a few simple back-of-a-termite-envelope instructions about behaviour and respond as one. Ants too. Bees find a new home by a process of meetings, none co-ordinated but all of them orderly. Also, they always tend to make the right decision, unlike committees with which we are familiar.

Those starlings which flick and wheel like silk ribbons twist at twilight? They are simply responding to their neighbours' movement.

Like the rest of evolution, these are simple rules magnified to such a grand scale and with such beautiful results there is a perception of design.

So, if such techniques could be applied to the corporate world (and some have been) it would mean the "wisdom of the crowd" superceding the control freakery and micro-management of all-powerful chief executives.

For middle management its death for decentralised co-ordination requires no tweaking or leadership. For factory floor workers, there's a heeded voice (to sweeten the pill of blind slavery).

In this readable and absorbing study, Miller creates four principles of Super Swarms: adaptive mimicking (copying your neighbour); self-organisation (nobody's in charge); diversity of knowledge (committees - only efficient and that make good, quick decisions) and indirect collaboration (responding to the previous actions of another).

Miller cites how some organisations have deployed swarm techniques among their employees to find the best solutions to problems (don't tell the consultants).

The joy of this book is not his sometimes laboured pitch to the corporate market but in his trawl through the wonders of nature to explain, in simple terms, what appears close to magic.

As always, nature got there first and does it better. The lessons are seismic and plentiful and show how nature works for the greater good rather than the benefit of individuals.

Our probable response? We'll set up a few committees, put together a project team, employ an outside consultant and make a top-down decision about how to implement the recommendations, I suppose.

– From September 2010