What makes a flock of birds or a school of fish move as if they are a single entity? What makes them all suddenly rise, turn and accelerate at the same time? There is something more subtle at work here than just a leader bird or a captain fish telling all the others what to do. What can we learn from the dynamics of flocks and swarms that is relevant to the way we structure and operate a real-time business?

There seems to be some kind of instantaneous and all-pervasive communication at work when we observe the sudden twists and movements of a flock of birds or a swarm of fish. Whatever the mode of communication that may be at work with birds and fish, many of us now own an item that is capable of producing swarming behavior in us. That item is the mobile phone. And that item is evolving before our very eyes because so many people are using it for so many different but related forms of communication. In its latest incarnation, the item is a combination phone, digital camera, Web browser, and instant messaging device.

Think like a kid and write down a list of 20 cool things you could do in your organization if everybody in it had a current-generation mobile phone (and in many organizations everybody already does). In other words, think about how the business could operate differently and more profitably if everyone had instantaneous voice, data, and video communication as well as Web access, e-mail and instant messaging. If you choose not to do this at least admit that your competition may be doing it and at some point they are going to come up with something very powerful that will catch you way off guard.

For starters, consider this. It is easy to combine global positioning system (GPS) data with data from mobile phones. An organization whose members all have current-generation mobile phones can now create a single big picture view or map of their world that is created from the eyes of all the people in the organization. This view can be updated in real-time to reflect changes in that world. People can access relevant parts of the big picture to get the information they need to make their next move. As long as people all have a common understanding of what they are trying to accomplish, everyone will act with a common purpose without needing to be told what to do. This is swarming behavior. It is fast, powerful, and continuously responsive to change.

The very existence of the agile, real-time organization is based on everyone in the organization having the same big picture view of their world. Everyone does not need access to all the detail, but everyone does need access to meaningful summaries and indicators of business activity and performance in each area of the company. And this information needs to be kept current, hour-by-hour and day-to-day.

When everyone knows what their objectives or performance targets are and when they can see moment to moment what is going on and whether those operations are on target or off target, then something powerful starts to happen. Swarming behavior emerges as people learn how their individual actions combine to create larger effects. Those larger effects are organizational responses that move their organization toward achieving its performance targets even as the world continues to change. No one person can do it alone no matter how powerful or all-knowing they may be because they then have to do the thinking for everyone else and tell everyone what to do and it just takes too long. But swarms of people can cause an organization to become alive. Just as our bodies are swarms of cells that continually sense their enviornment and act on their own without waiting to be told what to do.

People using swarming techniques can bring about organizational behavior that yields continuous efficiency and profitability from a thousand small adjustments and a few occasional big wins. When customer service people start working more effectively with sales people, when sales people start working more effectively with credit and accounting people, when those people start working more effectively with marketing people, and when IT people start working more effectively with everybody, then amazing things happen.

Swarming behavior depends on decentralization of information and that is accomplished by giving everyone in the organization a common big-picture view of the whole organization. In addition to the big-picture view people also need access to the relevant detail information to support the particular activities they are responsible for. This allows them to see how their individual activities relate to the performance of the company as a whole.

Decentralization of control is accomplished by giving everyone a clear set of performance targets that they are motivated to achieve. Those performance targets define the results that are expected but then people figure out for themselves how to deliver the results. The speed and efficiency demanded of real-time organizations can occur only if people think for themselves and control their own actions (as in massively parallel computing in distributed networks). The notion that some central person (or computer) can do all the thinking for everybody else is a quaint idea from the days when we thought an absolute monarchy or a central dictatorship was the most efficient form of government.

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