Certain Uncertainty

13Is Your Company Alive?

Mehran Gul

The science of complexity is changing our understanding of what organizations are and how they should be run.

An army ant is a simple being. Perhaps the simplest. It is nearly blind and minimally intelligent. If a hundred of them are placed on a flat surface, they will move aimlessly in circles until they die of exhaustion. But when half a million come together in a rainforest, they organize into a coherent army—an aggressive swarm that can devour all prey in its path, capable of destroying edible life over a dense forest the size of a football field in the course of a single day.

It's not all fire and fury. Ants exhibit their nurturing, altruistic side by building ant colonies which increase the survival probability of the community. An individual ant cannot regulate its body temperature; ant colonies can control their climate. An ant's memory is almost nonexistent; ant colonies can retain memories longer than the entire lifespans of their members. Individual ants die off every year or so; ant colonies can thrive for decades.

It seems that, like many of us, ants lead dual lives. A solitary ant has a distinct physical individuality. But it can also aggregate with other ants to merge into something larger than itself. Edward Wilson,¹ a biologist at Harvard, thinks that ant colonies are superorganisms; living, breathing entities that possess collective intelligence and intention. A whole far greater than the sum of its parts. The collective ...