Of Ants and Men: Self-Organized Teams in Human and Insect Organizations

Anderson C.

Self-organization is a concept and phenomenon whereby system-level patterns spontaneously arise solely from interactions among subunits of the system. Focusing on self-organization at the organismal level, I ask the question: are the boundaries to self-organization indistinct? After reviewing a number of published definitions of self-organization, I explore the conceptual boundaries among self-organization and two similar concepts, stigmergy and self-assembly. I highlight borderline cases that may blur the distinction among these and suggest that they may indeed be conceptually indistinct and difficult to separate in practice. Consequently, I propose a classification scheme based upon three aspects: whether the stimuli to which individuals respond are quantitative or qualitative, whether positive feedback is involved, and whether interindividual interactions are direct or indirect (stigmergic). In addition, I consider several other issues about self-organization, including (1) could a self-organized system use global information? (2) what is the role of the degree of correlation of activity among individuals? and (3) what is the role of positive feedback?

Brodbeck P.W.

Argues that efforts to adapt to increased volatility and uncertainty are still plagued by the traditional wisdom and domination of command‐and‐control hierarchies. In highlighting over two decades of intimation for appropriate organizational structural fit, identifies recurring barriers to change. In an effort to achieve organizational adaptability and improve change initiative success, proposes the creation of pockets of excellence. These self‐organizing team structures are positioned as a resource to developing internal efficiencies and business opportunities as a means to enhance productivity and provide a measure of sustainable competitive advantage. The proposed team structure is informed by the developing field of complexity theory and evaluated through focus group discussions.

Anderson C., McShea D.W.

Insect societies function at various organisational levels. Most research has focused on one or other organisational extreme. At one extreme, it is the adaptive behaviours at the individual level, the behaviour of workers, which is of interest. At the other extreme, colony-level adaptive behaviour and swarm intelligence is the focus. However, between these two extremes, numerous functional adaptive units, or "parts," exist. These intermediate-level parts include the behavioural properties of "groups" or "teams" in which the functionality only emerges at the group-level and not within the individuals themselves, and also the structural properties of "self-assemblages" in which individuals link themselves together to form an adaptive configuration, such as a living bridge. We review another type of intermediate-level part in insect societies: these are the physical structures that ants build away from the nest. The structures, that are larger than an individual worker but smaller than the colony (hence intermediate), include cleared trails, walled trenches, arcades, tunnels, outstations, shelters, protective pens, shelters over nectaries, food coverings on foraging trails, elevated corridors, and bridges. They are found in a diverse range of species, and are constructed using a variety of materials. We detail the structures built by ants focussing chiefly on the adaptive benefits these structures may confer to the colony.

Franks N.R., Sendova-Franks A.B., Anderson C.

In army ants, prey items are often retrieved by cooperative teams of workers rather than by single porters. We used experiments and randomization tests to explore the division of labour within such teams in the New World army ant Eciton burchelli , and the Old World army ant Dorylus wilverthi . We evaluated these teams in the light of a recent proposal that teams should be defined in terms of the concurrent performance of different subtasks by their members. This is a broader and more useful definition of teams than a previous one in which teams were defined by a membership necessarily involving different castes. Within army ant teams there is a front runner who initiates prey retrieval and one or more followers. Hence, there are two qualitatively different subtasks that must be performed concurrently during such teamwork. Previous work has shown that these teams are superefficient: the combined weight of the prey retrieved by the team is greater than the sum of the maximum weights the team members could carry when working singly. Here we show, for both species of army ant, that such teams have a nonrandom composition of members. The front runner is typically unusually large and the second-largest ant in a team is typically unusually small. These analyses are based on worker dry weights rather than assigning workers to discrete caste categories. Our analysis also suggests that the behaviour of army ants is more sophisticated then previously suspected. Our data imply that if an unnecessarily large supplementary ant (follower) tries to help the front runner to move a large prey item, but finds that the remaining work is too slight to use her full efforts, she does not join the team. One or more smaller ants whose efforts become fully employed become involved instead. This suggests that army ants engaged in teamwork have both upper and lower workload thresholds.

Anderson C., Franks N.R., McShea D.W.

To understand the functioning and organizational complexity of insect societies, a combination of different approaches is needed. One such approach, which we adopt in this study, is to consider tasks in insect societies not based upon their function, as is traditional, but upon their structure. Four types of task in insect societies have been proposed: individual, group, team and partitioned tasks. We examine the relationships among these four task types and consider ‘task complexity’ to mean the degree of cooperation and coordination required to complete a particular task successfully. In this respect, individual tasks are considered the simplest (low complexity), group tasks are more complex (medium), and team and partitioned tasks the most complex (high). We decompose tasks into their component subtasks to understand how the demands of a task influence how workers must work together to complete it successfully. We describe a simple method to measure the complexity of tasks using task deconstruction. Points are assigned to each subtask within the task and summed to give a total score. This measure, the task’s score, allows objective comparison of tasks (different tasks may be ranked in order of their complexity) within and between species, or even higher taxa, and we hope it will be of practical use to researchers. We propose that both team and partitioned tasks may contain individual, group, team and partitioned subtasks. We examine each of the possible task–subtask relationships and provide examples from known social insect behaviour.  2001 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour

Anderson C.

We review the existence of teams in animal societies. Teams have previously been dismissed in all but a tiny minority of insect societies. ‘‘Team’’ is a term not generally used in studies of vertebrates. We propose a new rigorous definition of a team that may be applied to both vertebrate and invertebrate societies. We reconsider what it means to work as a team or group and suggest that there are many more teams in insect societies than previously thought. A team task requires different subtasks to be performed concurrently for successful completion. There is a division of labor within a team. Contrary to previous reviews of teams in social insects, we do not constrain teams to consist of members of different castes and argue that team members may be interchangeable. Consequently, we suggest that a team is simply the set of individuals that performs a team task. We contrast teams with groups and suggest that a group task requires the simultaneous performance and cooperation of two or more individuals for successful completion. In a group, there is no division of labor—each individual performs the same task. We also contrast vertebrate and invertebrate teams and find that vertebrate teams tend to be associated with hunting and are based on individual recognition. Invertebrate teams occur in societies characterized by a great deal of redundancy, and we predict that teams in insect societies are more likely to be found in large polymorphic (‘‘complex’’) societies than in small monomorphic (‘‘simple’’) societies.

Holton J.A.

Organizations are increasing their reliance on virtual relationships in structuring operations for a global environment. Like all teams, virtual teams require a solid foundation of mutual trust and collaboration, if they are to function effectively. Identifying and applying appropriate team building strategies for a virtual environment will not only enhance organizational effectiveness but will also impact positively on the quality of working life for virtual team members.

ANDERSON C., McSHEA D.W.

Insect societies colonies of ants, bees, wasps and termites--vary enormously in their social complexity. Social complexity is a broadly used term that encompasses many individual and colony-level traits and characteristics such as colony size, polymorphism and foraging strategy. A number of earlier studies have considered the relationships among various correlates of social complexity in insect societies; in this review, we build upon those studies by proposing additional correlates and show how all correlates can be integrated in a common explanatory framework. The various correlates are divided among four broad categories (sections). Under 'polyphenism' we consider the differences among individuals, in particular focusing upon 'caste' and specialization of individuals. This is followed by a section on 'totipotency' in which we consider the autonomy and subjugation of individuals. Under this heading we consider various aspects such as intracolony conflict, worker reproductive potential and physiological or morphological restrictions which limit individuals' capacities to perform a range of tasks or functions. A section entitled 'organization of work' considers a variety of aspects, e.g. the ability to tackle group, team or partitioned tasks, foraging strategies and colony reliability and efficiency. A final section, 'communication and functional integration', considers how individual activity is coordinated to produce an integrated and adaptive colony. Within each section we use illustrative examples drawn from the social insect literature (mostly from ants, for which there is the best data) to illustrate concepts or trends and make a number of predictions concerning how a particular trait is expected to correlate with other aspects of social complexity. Within each section we also expand the scope of the arguments to consider these relationships in a much broader sense of'sociality' by drawing parallels with other 'social' entities such as multicellular individuals, which can be understood as 'societies' of cells. The aim is to draw out any parallels and common causal relationships among the correlates. Two themes run through the study. The first is the role of colony size as an important factor affecting social complexity. The second is the complexity of individual workers in relation to the complexity of the colony. Consequently, this is an ideal opportunity to test a previously proposed hypothesis that 'individuals of highly social ant species are less complex than individuals from simple ant species' in light of numerous social correlates. Our findings support this hypothesis. In summary, we conclude that, in general, complex societies are characterized by large colony size, worker polymorphism, strong behavioural specialization and loss of totipotency in its workers, low individual complexity, decentralized colony control and high system redundancy, low individual competence, a high degree of worker cooperation wher tackling tasks, group foraging strategies, high tempo, multi-chambered tailor-made nests, high functional integration, relatively greater use of cues and modulatory signals to coordinate individuals and heterogeneous patterns of worker-worker interaction.

Bonabeau E., Théraulaz G.

Bonabeau E., Dorigo M., Theraulaz G.

Social insects--ants, bees, termites, and wasps--can be viewed as powerful problem-solving systems with sophisticated collective intelligence. Composed of simple interacting agents, this intelligence lies in the networks of interactions among individuals and between individuals and the environment. A fascinating subject, social insects are also a powerful metaphor for artificial intelligence, and the problems they solve--finding food, dividing labor among nestmates, building nests, responding to external challenges--have important counterparts in engineering and computer science. This book provides a detailed look at models of social insect behavior and how to apply these models in the design of complex systems. The book shows how these models replace an emphasis on control, preprogramming, and centralization with designs featuring autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning. These designs are proving immensely flexible and robust, able to adapt quickly to changing environments and to continue functioning even when individual elements fail. In particular, these designs are an exciting approach to the tremendous growth of complexity in software and information. Swarm Intelligence draws on up-to-date research from biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, operations research, and computer graphics, and each chapter is organized around a particular biological example, which is then used to develop an algorithm, a multiagent system, or a group of robots. The book will be an invaluable resource for a broad range of disciplines.

Appelbaum S.H., Bethune M., Tannenbaum R.

This article explores the effects of downsizing and the subsequent emergence of self‐managed work teams. Continuous and accelerated change has resulted in massive downsizing activities by organizations. A classical model for the planning ‐ implementing ‐ and design of the downsizing process is presented. Group structure and typology is presented in terms of formal versus informal groups. The impact of groups and group dynamics, the stages of group development, and impact upon effectiveness, environment, design and learning processes will be included. Attention is given to the survivors of downsizing who form the foundation of the self‐managed team. Leadership demands are presented in terms of leading the survivors, ensuring commitment and managing the future. The emergence of the SMT in terms of productivity, expectations and the management of conflict complete this exhaustive review of empirical data required for action‐driven organizations in a turbulent environment.

Coleman, Jr. H.J.

Bonabeau E., Theraulaz G., Deneubourg J., Aron S., Camazine S.

Self-organization was introduced originally in the context of physics and chemistry to describe how microscopic processes give rise to macroscopic stuctures in out-of-equilibrium systems, Recent research that extends this concept to ethology suggests that it provides a concise description of a wide range of collective phenomena in animals, especially in social insects. This description does not rely on individual complexity to account for complex spatiotemporal features that emerge at the colony level, but rather assumes that intractions among simple individuals can produce highly structured collective behaviours.

Franks N.R., Tofts C.

Lewin R., Bak P.

Put together one of the world's best science writers with one of the universe's most fascinating subjects and you are bound to produce a wonderful book. . . . The subject of complexity is vital and controversial. This book is important and beautifully done. Stephen Jay Gould [Complexity] is that curious mix of complication and organization that we find throughout the natural and human worlds: the workings of a cell, the structure of the brain, the behavior of the stock market, the shifts of political power. . . . It is time science . . . thinks about meaning as well as counting information. . . . This is the core of the complexity manifesto. Read it, think about it . . . but don't ignore it. Ian Stewart, Nature This second edition has been brought up to date with an essay entitled On the Edge in the Business World and an interview with John Holland, author of Emergence: From Chaos to Order.

Gasteratos G., Vlachou E., Gratsanis P., Karydis I.

The flipped classroom model has become increasingly popular in recent years as it supports students’ collaboration leading to co-creation of knowledge. Swarming is a nature-based collaborative solution for complex problems, wherein actors’ “collective intelligence” emerges significantly more advanced than the sum of its units. The knapsack problem attempts to select the subset of items with maximum desirability while satisfying a constraint on the selected items. Educationally, the knapsack problem may be mapped as the selection of a subset of literature from a large corpus that is most relevant to a research query, while maintaining some constraint such as time availability, content complexity, etc. In this work we propose a framework that models a generic educational task and maps it to the Knapsack problem to be solved using the Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) swarming algorithm to take advantage of the co-creational characteristics of the flipped classroom paradigm. Experimentation with alternative solutions to the Knapsack problem indicate their inappropriateness to the requirements of the proposed framework, while experimentation with ACO’s key parameters indicates ACO’s suitability to the proposed framework.

Rimbeck M., Reil H., Stumpf-Wollersheim J., Leyer M.

As a result of the increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) systems in industrial organizations, the way in which teams are composed is changing. Specifically, forms of collaboration in various working environments are subject to transformation, leading to unstable membership within teams (i.e., fluid teams). Drawing on the theory of affordances, we aim to investigate the relationship between IoT implementation and the prevalence of fluid teams. The results of an experimental vignette study featuring 1001 respondents indicate that (1) the degree of IoT implementation has a highly significant impact on the utility of creating fluid teams and (2) the type of task in question does not moderate this relationship. Our study has relevant theoretical implications fostering an integrated understanding of the interplay of IoT systems and the resulting changes at the team level. In this context, we contribute specifically to improving the understanding of affordance existence and affordance perception, as we consider IoT-specific attributes with respect to their impact at the ‘meso’ level.

Salameh A., Bass J.M.

The role of software architecture in large-scale Agile development is important because several teams need to work together to release a single software product while helping to maximise teams’ autonomy. Governing and aligning Agile architecture across autonomous squads (i.e., teams), when using the Spotify model, is a challenge because the Spotify model lacks practices for addressing Agile architecture governance. To explore how software architecture can be governed and aligned by scaling the Spotify model, we conducted a longitudinal embedded case study in a multinational FinTech organisation. Then, we developed and evaluated an approach for architectural governance by conducting an embedded case study. The collected data was analysed using Thematic Analysis and informed by selected Grounded Theory techniques such as memoing, open coding, constant comparison, and sorting. Our approach for architectural governance comprises an organisational structure change and an architecture change management process. The benefits reported by the practitioners include devolving architectural decision-making to the operational level (i.e., Architecture Owners), enhancing architectural knowledge sharing among squads, minimising wasted effort in architectural refactoring, and other benefits. The practitioners in our case study realised an improved squad autonomy by the ability to govern and align architectural decisions. We provide two key contributions in this paper. First, we present the characteristics of our proposed architectural governance approach, its evaluation, benefits, and challenges. Second, we present how the novel Heterogeneous Tailoring model was enhanced to accommodate our architectural governance approach.

Hoda R., Noble J., Marshall S.

Self-organizing teams have been recognized and studied in various forms-as autonomous groups in socio-technical systems, enablers of organizational theories, agents of knowledge management, and as examples of complex-adaptive systems. Over the last decade, self-organizing teams have taken center stage in software engineering when they were incorporated as a hallmark of Agile methods. Despite the long and rich history of self-organizing teams and their recent popularity with Agile methods, there has been little research on the topic within software wngineering. Particularly, there is a dearth of research on how Agile teams organize themselves in practice. Through a Grounded Theory research involving 58 Agile practitioners from 23 software organizations in New Zealand and India over a period of four years, we identified informal, implicit, transient, and spontaneous roles that make Agile teams self-organizing. These roles-Mentor, Coordinator, Translator, Champion, Promoter, and Terminator-are focused toward providing initial guidance and encouraging continued adherence to Agile methods, effectively managing customer expectations and coordinating customer collaboration, securing and sustaining senior management support, and identifying and removing team members threatening the self-organizing ability of the team. Understanding these roles will help software development teams and their managers better comprehend and execute their roles and responsibilities as a self-organizing team.

Kasimova R.G., Obnosov Y.V., Baksht F.B., Kacimov A.R.

An anthill is modelled as a paraboloid of revolution, whose surface (dome) dissipates heat from the interior of the nest to the ambient air according to the Robin boundary condition, which involves a constant coefficient, given temperature jump and dome's area. The total heat loss of the net is one (integral) component of ants’ colony expenditures of energy. Ants, populating the paraboloid, spend also energy individually, by hoisting the load from the ground surface to a certain elevation within the paraboloid and by overcoming a Coulombian resistance, proportional to the trajectory length. In order to count the gross colony expenditures for these mechanical activities all trajectories are integrated over the volume. Ants are assumed to move along the shortest straight lines of their regular sorties between the nest and forest. The three-component energy is mathematically expressed as a closed-form function of only one variable, the paraboloid height-to-width ratio. The minimum of this function is found by a routine of computer algebra. The proposed model amalgamates into a single and relatively simple function, tractable by standard calculus, the property of the whole structure (dome area) with labouring of insects-comrades. The ants are sociobiologically analogized with Bejan's builders of ancient pyramids and contemporary designers of man-made “dream-houses” or “dream-prisons”.

Johnsson M.C., Boud D.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge models of workplace learning that seek to isolate or manipulate a limited set of features to increase the probability of learning. Such models typically attribute learning (or its absence) to individual engagement, manager expectations or organizational affordances and are therefore at least implicitly causative. In contrast, we discuss the contributions of complexity theory principles such as emergence and novelty that suggest that learning work is more a creative and opportunistic process that emerges from contextualized interactional understandings among actors. Using qualitative case study methods, we discuss the experiences of workers in two organizations asked to ‘act up’ in their managers’ role to ensure work continuity. We believe the differences in how workers take up these opportunities result from a complex combination of situational factors that generate invitational patterns signalled from and by various understandings and interactions among actors doing collective work. Rather than a deficit view of learning that needs fixing, an emergent model of learning work suggests that learning develops as a collective generative endeavour from changing patterns of interactional understandings with others. This re‐positioning recognizes that although invitational qualities cannot be deterministically predicted, paying attention to the patterns of cues and signals created from actors interacting together can condition ways of understandings to expand what is possible when work practices also become learning practices.

Nouyan S., Gross R., Bonani M., Mondada F., Dorigo M.

Swarm robotics draws inspiration from decentralized self-organizing biological systems in general and from the collective behavior of social insects in particular. In social insect colonies, many tasks are performed by higher order group or team entities, whose task-solving capacities transcend those of the individual participants. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of such higher order entities. We report on an experimental study in which a team of physical robots performs a foraging task. The robots are "identical" in hardware and control. They make little use of memory and take actions purely on the basis of local information. Our study advances the current state of the art in swarm robotics with respect to the number of real-world robots engaging in teamwork (up to 12 robots in the most challenging experiment). To the best of our knowledge, in this paper we present the first self-organized system of robots that displays a dynamical hierarchy of teamwork (with cooperation also occurring among higher order entities). Our study shows that teamwork requires neither individual recognition nor differences between individuals. This result might also contribute to the ongoing debate on the role of these characteristics in the division of labor in social insects.

Koch R., Leitner K.

This paper studies the functions, impacts and dynamics of self-organization in the fuzzy front end of innovation. Based on a case study approach, the new product development processes of five Austrian semiconductor companies are analysed. We adopt a complexity science perspective which stresses that self-organization and emergence are key elements of the new product development process. We found that self-organization mechanisms occur in two ways. First, self-organizational activities support formal and top-down managed new product development processes. In this way, they contribute to the acceleration and adaptation of the new product development process and are also a way to overcome bureaucratic structures. Second, we found evidence for the existence of purely emergent bottom-up processes in many cases. In this context, employees intrinsically and without any explicit order or strategy took initiatives to innovate. Such activities run in parallel to or precede formal new product development processes and employees deliberately bypass and even ignore formal processes such as financial incentive systems, suggestion schemes and patenting rules in order to promote their ideas. These activities are often secret until they are mature enough to be presented to the management, when they are then, if evaluated positively, incorporated as official projects in the new product development process.

Anderson C., Franks N.R.

Teamwork is common in the social interactions but is not restricted to humans. Animals, from ants to whales, also work in teams. This chapter focuses on working as a team in fields such as robotics, management, and sociobiology. The chapter explains the structural organization of tasks, that is, a classification of task types and examines teamwork in insect societies, in other (non-human) animal groups, in robotics, and in humans. The fundamental task types based upon the interrelationship between subtask types are individual task, group task, partitioned task, and team task. This classification helps to rank different tasks from different systems objectively, to correlate a particular task's complexity with organization size or evolutionary history, or to follow how a particular task is tackled in a more complex, collaborative manner than at other times. The chapter draws attention to a number of misconceptions about teamwork, objectively and rigorously tests for teamwork, and distinguishes it from related phenomena such as group work.

Groß R., Nouyan S., Bonani M., Mondada F., Dorigo M.

In social insect colonies, many tasks are performed by higher-order entities, such as groups and teams whose task solving capacities transcend those of the individual participants. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of such higher-order entities using a colony of up to 12 physical robots. We report on an experimental study in which the robots engage in a range of different activities, including exploration, path formation, recruitment, self-assembly and group transport. Once the robots start interacting with each other and with their environment, they self-organise into teams in which distinct roles are performed concurrently. The system displays a dynamical hierarchy of teamwork, the cooperating elements of which comprise higher-order entities. The study shows that teamwork requires neither individual recognition nor inter-individual differences, and as such might contribute to the ongoing debate on the role of such characteristics for the division of labour in social insects.