Why penguins have no commanding officer

by Ken Thompson

Humankind is the only species that places its trust in a small group of "leaders" to determine the best direction for the whole group. In his follow-up article to 'Did ants invent the perfect system for communicating via mobile technology?' Ken Thompson, explores whether we can learn a thing or two about leadership from nature's most successful teams.

In my previous article, I introduced the concept of Bioteaming - building organisational teams, which operate on the principles that underpin nature's most successful teams. These range from the smallest single-cell organisms and social insects to forests and ecosystems.

In the article we looked at pheromone messaging - in this article we will explore what is meant by Collective Leadership.

Collective Leadership - any group member can lead

Many people have been enchanted by the amazing video "The March of the Penguins" and most know that in the film the penguins have no leader. However, few people go on to ask the obvious next question: "If they have no leader then how do they know where to go?"

This is a very important question because it is right at the heart of the difference between traditional human teams and nature's teams. The answer is, of course, no one penguin knows entirely where to go, but collectively they work it out. In other words, no single group member may know the whole route - perhaps only fragments - but if you add all those fragments together then the group is able to navigate the way.

This is known as 'collective leadership' and is a key feature of other biological teams, such as ant colonies and bird flocks.

Geese are smarter than they look

When geese migrate, it is well known that the goose leading the 'V' formation rotates during the flight. However, this is not just because it gets tired and needs to fly in another goose's slipstream for a while. It's because no one goose knows the whole migration route.

One goose leads the part of the journey where it knows the way and when it no longer recognises the route, it flies back into the V and waits for another goose to take over. Between them they know the way, but they can't do it on their own.

Collective leadership means the right leader for the right task at the right time

Nature's groups are never led exclusively by one member; different group members lead as needed. In fact, humankind is the only species that places its trust in a small group of "leaders" to determine the best direction for the whole group.

Human team-management is classic 'command and control' leadership - great for warfare but lousy for organisational teams, especially when they are distributed, mobile, semi-formal or have loose boundaries.

Biological teams use a style known as "self-organising teams," where instead of relying on a few leaders, every member of the group has the potential and capability to be a leader in some domain, at some time.

This does not mean that they are leaderless teams - nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, they are teams with many leaders, all interacting together in a highly co-operative and effective way - in different domains. Multi-leader teams possess much greater agility, initiative and resilience than groups that are led by a single exclusive leader.

So how do you create collective leadership?

First, you need to decide if it is right for a particular team or group - in some cases "command and control leadership" is still the best. For example, who would want to be travelling on a jumbo jet under the collective leadership of the whole crew rather than just the pilot?

Second, you need to explain what collective leadership means to the team and reinforce that it's not about having a leaderless team. Neither is it the same as the "wisdom of crowds". Collectively-led teams are not a democracy of leaders.

I believe it's possible for collective leadership to be demonstrated by a small number of key behaviours, which are encouraged in the team. Here is my suggestion of seven key behaviours for collective leaders (i.e. all team members). They are easy to remember - if you take the first letters it spells ORGANIC:

• Outgoing - get to know any members of the team you don't already know by talking to them and finding common interests.
• Recruit - when you meet a new team member or customer introduce them to another team member with a common interest.
• Go - network widely inside and outside the team and constantly expand your field of operations.
• Ask - ask for help from others in the team whenever you join a work group. Pay it forward too - offer help to other team members.
• Note - keep yourself aware on a daily basis of overall team priorities and issues, and reflect on these in your team activities.
• Investigate - when you see something "interesting", investigate, communicate and discuss it with at least one other team member.
• Collaborate - join and work in at least one team work group or special interest group, which is interesting to you but is outside your normal role.

About the author

Ken Thompson, based in Belfast, is an expert on team dynamics and virtual collaboration. Under the pen-name of The BumbleBee, Ken is the creator of the influential Bioteams Blog, which explores the numerous ways human teams and groups can take advantage of the mechanisms used in nature's best teams including ants, bees, geese, dolphins, wolves and songbirds.

Ken has recently published a new book "BIOTEAMS: How to create high performance teams and virtual groups based on nature's most successful designs".

About Bioteaming

NESTA Connect has recently launched a new project, Swarmteams, to explore how bioteam communication can be used by UK music bands within their fan communities. For further information on bioteaming, please visit www.bioteams.com.