Smart, A. ( 13 de septiembre, de 2013 ).

Why organizations should

embrace randomness like ant colonies Harvard Business Review (070051)

23/11/2018 Why Organizations Should Embrace Randomness Like Ant Colonies

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Why Organizations Should

Embrace Randomness Like Ant
Colonies
by Andrew J. Smart
SEPTEMBER 13, 2013

Consider the common ant. Each one is by genetic design capable of only a few simple behaviors and
binary choices, making it a pretty dumb, rigid, inflexible being. Yet the collective behavior of an ant
colony is adaptive, flexible and even creative; it’s a highly structured social organization.

Now consider your average human. Most of us are individually adaptive, flexible and very creative.
Yet the large organizations in which we work are often inflexible and incapable of adaptation and
true innovation.

Why are ant colonies so much better than the sum of their parts, while governments and companies
are so often much worse?

I think it’s because of the different ways in which ant and human organizations deal with
uncertainty. In my new book, I talk a lot about how ant societies exploit randomness and
“leaderlessness” to learn and flourish. As a colony is exploring a new environment (such as your
house), forager ants walk around aimlessly until they find something surprising, say a piece of fruit
on the floor. Through random interactions, the location of this new information spreads quickly
Very soon, thousands of ants converge on this food source and begin transporting bits of it back to
the colony. When ants don’t find food, they increase the randomness of their searching. As Deborah
Gordon, an ant biologist at Stanford, points out, “Elegant top-down designs are appealing, but the
robustness of ant algorithms shows that tolerating imperfection sometimes leads to better
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solutions.” Without any central control, “food acquisition strategy” or risk management, ants are
one of the most successful species on the planet, 10 million billion strong, giving them roughly the
same global biomass as humans.

Human organizations tend to take a completely different approach to exploration and have the
opposite response to setbacks. Most try to decrease randomness, with executives conducting
feasibility studies and risk analyses or tightening budgets, introducing more processes,
standardizing operations. When projects come in late or over budget, as so many inevitably do, the
result is “deep-dives” and lengthy PowerPoint presentations about “lessons learned” so everyone
can plan better next time (even though the situation will undoubtedly have changed by then). Even
successful companies have trouble resisting the temptation to reduce uncertainty and fight noise.

What would happen if we stopped resisting, and instead took the terrifying step of embracing
randomness? Organizations would start to learn, just as individuals do when they are surprised.
Scientists have explained it to me like this: When something unexpected happens, the human brain
reacts by focusing attention and increasing stress. A driver swerves in front of you, and for a few
seconds when you’re consumed by avoiding that car, all other thoughts disappear from your
consciousness. The more unexpected the event, the better you will remember, and the more you
will learn from, it.

Surprise is information. So an organization that puts all its effort into planning, tracking, monitoring
and documenting to minimize surprise and the chance of failure prevents itself from acquiring and
spreading information, and consequently from learning. Innovation slows, and the company either
atrophies or gets superseded by more agile organizations.

Some entrepreneurial companies, such as Valve, the entertainment software and technology maker,
and Netflix, the video-streaming service, have obviously learned to relax controls to increase
randomness and make the most of their flexible, creative individual contributors. The rest should
aspire to act more like those ant colonies.

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 23/11/2018
Andrew J. Smart
Why Organizations Should Embrace Randomness Like Ant Colonies
is a human factors research scientist and the author of Beyond Zero and
One: Machines, Psychedelics and Consciousness (OR Books, 2015).

This article is about ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

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Anirban Roy 5 years ago

I do understand the basic premise of the article which says that randomness leads to more innovation but I also see
the need for the "deep-dives” and the “lessons learned" discussions. This is required not to restrict an individual from
randomness but to give a guideline on how to tackle situations which have already occurred before. It is required so
that we do not make the "same" mistake twice.

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