Adapted from The Hive Mind at Work: Harnessing the Power of Group Intelligence to Create Meaningful and Lasting Change by Siobhan McHale
Making the Critical Change Decisions
When a bee colony becomes overcrowded, those who will populate the new hive fly to a nearby branch. Scout bees leave the staging area to search for promising real estate. Once a scout finds a potential new home, she returns to the branch to deliver her report in the form of a highly animated dance. A favorable report will convince her companions to follow her to the site to conduct a group inspection.
The convocation buzzes with agreements and vetoes. While an excited dance prompts action, a more sedate one suggests the bees look elsewhere for a new home.
From all this hectic dancing, one choice emerges as the best possibility. As daylight wanes, roughly 80 percent of the scouts have voted for the new home in an oak tree cavity next to a grassy knoll at the edge of Wombat Forest.
Emerging Change Solutions From the Hive Mind
The bees’ house hunt involves hundreds of individuals, each one capable of influencing the final decision. Having pondered ten alternatives, the Hive Mind has selected the spacious tree cavity on the edge of Wombat Forest. The bees do not get bogged down in the past or make a hasty decision.
James Dyson, founder of the British technology firm Dyson Group, paid attention to his “scouts” when he decided to build a better hair dryer. Dyson had become a household name with its vacuums, hand dryers, fans, and air purifiers. Why not redesign the bulky hair dryer that had not changed since the 1960s?
Dyson’s Hive Mind included a hundred engineers, scientists, and trichologists (hair and scalp experts), who worked alongside British Hairdresser of the Year Akin Konzi at the firm’s R&D facility in Malmesbury, England. It was a state-of-the-art $53 million hair laboratory.
The design team ransacked every possibility. They even bought $60,000 worth of natural tresses to test their dryer on real hair, a purchase that led to a global shortage of wig-quality hair.
Four years and $71 million later, the company announced the Dyson Supersonic, a high-end handheld dryer packed with such technology as the Air Multiplier, a digital motor, and heat sensors.
By 2017 the product had become a bestseller in the UK, and by 2021 it had won numerous awards for its design, quality, and effectiveness. James Dyson’s ability to activate the Hive Mind to emerge solutions during change has made him one of the wealthiest businessmen in Britain, with a net worth of $23 billion.
You may not be familiar with the word emergence, a term I have borrowed from the vocabulary of evolutionary theory. It expresses the idea that you cannot rely on existing conditions to fully predict or explain changes in an ecosystem.
In other words, successful change does not result from the actions of individual components of an ecosystem but from the interaction of all its parts. The group, not the leader, makes it happen.
Ask any bee. She knows all about emergence. While each scout contributes vital information, it takes a whole hive to find the right solution.
Despite this rule, some managers act as if they can force change by controlling each part of the organizational ecosystem. Fix Finance, fix Human Resources, fix Marketing, fix Manufacturing, and, voilà, the whole organization starts humming like a well-oiled machine. That approach almost always backfires because it ignores how systems function and the interaction between the parts of the group.
Let’s suppose you want to build the world’s best smartphone. To ensure success, you mix and match product features from Samsung, Apple, Google, iQOO, and OnePlus, choosing your favorite design, processor, screen size, display, operating system, RAM, camera, storage, and battery.
But when you assemble all these features and switch on the device, it vibrates and hums and lights up, but it doesn’t work as well as its competitors. Why? It’s the way that the components work together that makes a phone great.
Any sports coach will tell you that simply improving individual skills will not put a championship team on the field. The magic happens when the players’ efforts harmonize in a way that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Leaders with group intelligence focus on both the dancers and the dance to get the Hive Mind buzzing as a whole.
Going it alone, on the other hand, can lead to disaster, as Alitalia Airlines discovered in 2006, when, rather than seeking group advice, an employee at the Italian carrier made one of the most expensive typos ever. It involved two little zeros.
The staff member mistakenly priced a new deal on a business-class flight from Toronto to Cyprus at $39, rather than $3,900.
By the time the company discovered the error, more than two thousand passengers had already booked flights at the impossibly low rate. Alitalia Airlines decided to honor the fare rather than incur the wrath of travelers and an explosion of bad press.
The bargain basement price ended up costing the company $7 million, all for want of two zeros. It would not have happened if the typist had followed the old adage, “Many pairs of eyeballs are better than one.”
During a change initiative, it pays to get lots of eyeballs and hands and brains involved. Different people bring different perspectives to the undertaking, the accumulation of which leads to the best decisions.
It takes a village. Smart leaders welcome all perspectives and take them seriously. By harvesting all views and opinions, they overcome the silo effect where those working in one part of the organization know little about the effects of their work on other parts.
Here’s another word I suggest you add to your vocabulary: humility. A successful change leader knows that she does not know it all, does not possess the one right answer, and must invite and respect opinions that may radically differ from her own. She feels perfectly comfortable with the fact that she is not perfect and cannot just tell the hive what to do. She must remain humble as she helps the Hive Mind emerge the best solutions. She never dictates; she facilitates. And she never falls victim to flawed top-down decision-making.
The Hive Mind at Work presents a new model for understanding how organizations really operate and implement changes that get real results. You can order your copy today.