Mini Project 3: Ants

The Simply Complexity of Ant Organization: What Corporations Can Learn
By: Anastasia Pokholok

In today’s ever changing world, the old industrial system of organization is starting to fail. It prevents companies from reaching their full potential in a world of ingenuity and innovation. To help solve this problem, I suggest to look at what may seem as primal, but indeed is an ingenious system of organization that some of the smallest beings on this planet have come up with.

Ants might seem a negligent part of the eco-system of our world, but indeed they are pivotal. The species of ants have lived on this earth for thousands of millions of years, procreated and now inhabit almost every part of our planet. That said, it seems almost natural that we, humans, who think we own the world, can learn something from these tiny workers.

Ants live in colonies that are formed by a queen ant after the mating season. All colonies send out virgin queens during a certain part of the year—these queens mate and then go off, dig a whole and start their own colony. The queens keep producing offspring and populating the colony until they die—usually 15-20 years. When the colony reaches a stable size of about 10,000 ants it sends out new virgin queens to found their own colonies and subsequently dies out when the queen (or queens) stop producing offspring. There is a strong parallel between the behaviour of companies and ants on this level—the ants will only send out more virgin queens when their colony has been stabilized. Much in the same way, a corporation will only look to expand its control only when it has reached a satisfactory level of economic wellbeing.

The organizational system within the ant colony is really quite miraculous. There are several jobs that worker ants perform. There are foragers (ants that go out to collect food), patrollers (ants that patrol the area in which the foragers are going to be collecting food), nest maintenance workers (ants that work in the nest feeding the larvae and cleaning) and midden workers (ants that mark the territory of the colony). These ants that work outside of the colony, however, make up only one fourth of all of the ants that live in the colony. About half of the ants in the colony are full grown ants, but do not work and simply sit inside of the colony and act as the reserves in case of an emergency.

The question then arises of how do these ants know what to do and who directs them. This is the question that will come up in any manager’s mind and this is also the area from which managers of companies should take away some advice. There is no central control in the colony. The queens, despite their elevated position, do nothing but produce offspring their whole lives and do not direct any of the activity of the colony. The ants self organize and that is the greatest secret to their success on this planet.

The workers of the colonies themselves decide what job they do and when to go out. They do this by interacting with each other. Each category of ants has a specific smell based on their job allocation. Each ant also knows roughly how many ants there should be doing each job; the ants interact with each other smell each other and by doing this decide where they are needed most. For example, if an ant encounters less forager ants than it expects it will switch to foraging to help out the colony. Therefore, ants change their jobs within the colony several times in their lives based on where the colony needs them to work. The ants do, however have a system of deciding the pattern in which ants switch positions. The reserves in the colony act as a source of all labour, from the reserves the ants become maintenance workers. If the need arises, the maintenance workers can switch to any other position, but when they do, they can never again be a maintenance worker. In the end, all ants end up being foragers, which is the ultimate position, after which the ants usually die.

In this system, the ants run themselves and decide collectively, but with their independent actions, what is better for the colony. In this way their organizational system is created. The system is not perfect and it is very messy and chaotic; but as the chaos theory suggests: in nature, left to its own devices, order will emerge out of disorder. There is not perfection in the system, but it functions and is very successful. The reason for this is that the ants, that live in this system, can decide and implement more readily the changes that need to be made in order for the colony to be successful than an overseer could.

Humans can really learn much from ants. Ant hills are systems in which all individuals put the collective goals before their own and work selflessly to achieve one common goal—the survival of the colony. When thinking about it, this is once again very much like a company or corporation. The ultimate goal of all the individuals in the company is to see the company do well and prosper. So why is it that they so often do not? Much of it is due to the very strong hierarchical structure of these companies. Managers should take example from the ants in letting the employees run their own affairs more. The employees, just like the worker ants, are more amerced in the immediate surroundings and face the problems that need to be solved so it only seems natural that they should be trusted to make the right decisions and find the right solutions. This way of functioning is more effective, because the workers can more readily implement the changes and problems can be fixed faster when they do not have to go through the long process of requests, approvals and orders that characterize the structure of today’s corporations.

Employees, based on the model of the ants should also be allowed to readily interact and switch roles and tasks within the organization. Working on projects should be done the same way as ants build their homes. When ants collect materials to build the nest, each ant acts as an engineer and a worker at the same time and this way they are able to be more productive. Employees should not be asked to specialize in only one thing, but instead given the option to partake in several operations. This way, workers have a more general outlook and focus on the bigger picture rather than the problems that solely apply to their field. By having this outlook the workers can come together and form a ‘global brain,’ put all their knowledge together and come up with more innovative solutions. An individual ant does not have much of an impact, but when they come together they can achieve remarkable things—the same can be said for the employees of a company.

These rules for success that are set out by ants are already starting to find their way into the human work field and indeed have proven to be very effective and allow companies to grow and prosper at unbelievable rates. One such company is Google. Google gives their employees an unbelievable amount of freedom to operate and work on their own projects. The employees are given a task to complete, but they are not forced to do it by a set of strict guidelines and therefore they are able to self organize and find the way in which they are able to perform most efficiently and get the task done.

The organizational behaviour of ants can teach us much about more efficient ways to organize our companies. The characteristics of self organization, collective thinking and cooperation are more important in today’s interconnected world than ever before. From the behaviour of these small insects we can learn how to build something bigger than even ourselves and collectively progress into the future.