We (humans) think we’re a clever bunch, and always assume we’re the fonts of innovation and inventors of new solutions to problems – whether that’s a new technology or a new theory.
However, often it’s the case that we’ve been beaten to it. Beaten to it by nature. And so it’s been interesting reading a new book called Smart Swarm – by Peter Miller – which looks at how humans can learn from the swarm intelligence of the animal kingdom; taking learnings from the behaviour of Honeybees, Termites and a whole host of other animals and applying them to to everyday human behaviour – in particular as to how humans can crowdsource more effectively.
As in his book, Miller delves into how humans can learn from the likes of Honeybees in how to optimise a group’s collective intelligence in problem solving. After all, if a swarm of 1000′s of bees can self-organise and achieve a constructive (and impressive) end goal, then surely a swarm of humans can do the same!
Smart Swarms looks at a whole host of different load of different characteristics of the crowd (or the swarm), and pulls out useful learnings and insights. One particularly interesting characteristic Miller looks into is the qualities of the individual components of swarms, and picks out three critical characteristics to a successful swarm:
- Diversity: ensuring there’s a broad range of characters, levels of experience and expertise.
- Independence: ensuring the individuals are empowered to make up their own minds.
- Combinations of perspective: ensuring a range of voices are considered across the diverse swarm.
From these basic honeybee swarm characteristics, the book then goes on to pull out three main principles/rules behind running an effective crowd-sourcing process:
- Seek a diversity of knowledge
- Encourage a friendly competition of ideas
- Use an effective mechanism to narrow your choices
The book then looks at how these rules have been applied to a whole host of different scenarios, including the airplane company Boeing and the government of Vermont (USA).
I’d definitely recommend a read if you haven’t already, as Smart Swarms gives a really good insight into the power of the crowd from an alternative natural perspective – a kind of Kate Humble view of crowd-sourcing : – )
