Emergence : Natures answer to Specialist vs Generalist debate

This week I was in a series of meetings with my team to decide the strategy for FY21. Our customers were demanding digital transformation in their business and they wanted to move fast. We were excited to improve the customer experience but we realized we were short-staffed and we needed to add new team members. We had a crisis!

We started planning to realign our team along with hiring. But this seemingly simple task split the team into 2 sections. One group said we need to have Specialists for each customer. The other camp said we need to have Generalists. We could not decide. If we did not move fast, we would lose the business and our existence!

Before I tell you about what transpired, lets first understand the meaning of these terms using a dictionary reference & a video

Specialist: A person who concentrates primarily on a particular subject or activity; a person highly skilled in a specific and restricted field.

Generalist: A person who has knowledge of several different subjects or activities.

Generalist & Specialist have pros and cons. Want to know more? Refer to this excellent Harvard Business Review article here.

I rummaged tons of articles on the web trying to find an answer. Like every internet search, I gathered a lot of data but no conclusive answer. I discussed this problem with my peers, seniors, and friends. I received lots of opinions; some dogmatic others equivocal.

I was exhausted and decide to rely on chance rather than on action. A couple of days later, I began thinking of this conundrum again. This is not a problem unique to me and my team. Nobody had a definitive answer. Somebody had to know!

That's when I realized, that there is only one entity out there that has had millions of years to encounter every problem faced by humankind and possibly the answer. Nature! Does nature have an answer?

I started mapping my problem to something around us. What is natures equivalent of an organization? How do large groups maintain balance? How do they counter adversity? The first objective was to find Nature's answer to an Organization. I could think of a beehive, an ant colony, and many more.

If you look closely, an Organization and Ant Colony are similar.

Ants began life on earth along with the dinosaurs and they are still thriving. It is estimated that some 10 quadrillion ants on this planet.

• Both have lots of individuals working for a common goal, both have individuals with roles and responsibilities. In a colony, there are worker ants, soldier ants, care-taker ants & food gatherer ants.
• An ant colony grows by producing more off-springs(organic growth) or by merging with other colonies(inorganic growth). So does an organization.
• An Organization survives storms and calamities like loss of market or pandemics. So does an ant colony.

So how does an ant colony solve a problem like the one my team has? Let's say that the colony is attacked by an anteater. The anteater eats about 25% of the ants. Now the problem is the colony does not know if they have lost soldiers or caretakers or food gatherers(they don't have an HRMS).

The colony needs a defined proportion of ants to survive. If food gatherer numbers drop the colony will starve. If care-taker ants reduce in number, new offspring's will suffer and the queen will not be served. It's a delicate balance. But the ants have a solution to this problem. Each ant can act independently while following the rules of the colony. So how does an ant know its role in the organization?

The colony does not have a central Resource Management System. Rather each ant has his own RMS.

Every time, every day an ant encounters a fellow member of the colony, it registers the count and the type of ant in its database. In a normal scenario, the count of different ant types will align to the baseline percentages for the colony. Any ant will encounter a certain percentage or soldiers, workers & food gatherers. Every ant will know and store an optimum percentage for the colony in its RMS.

However, after an attack, the ant will not meet a certain type of ant; say a food gatherer. The count of food gatherer ants in its database will reduce and reach a tipping point. The tipping points will trigger a change in the ant's behavior. The ant will change its existing role and become a food gatherer(assuming it was not a food gatherer before).

This change is instant and without any supervisory control. Other ants follow a similar role change and soon the colony has a perfect balance of different roles. As a result, the work is streamlined again and the colony survives.

Each Ant has the ability to move from being a Specialist to a Generalist.

Although great, the ants had millions of years to perfect this strategy. On the timescale of earth, humans are new-born and the concept of organization is yet to be invented.

Can we humans working in organizations achieve this ability? Can we change our character based on the stimuli? The answer is yes. But like all good things in life, we have invest now to reap the benefits later(remember millions of years of developments in ants).

The modern organization today has a Mission Statement, Values, a Strategy, and if one is lucky a neatly bound corporate Blue Book. Unfortunately, it's very difficult for individuals in the organization to tie these things together to see the bigger picture. Why is that you ask? Because we humans love complexity. We feel proud when we create something complex and show it to the world. They even have a term for this Complexity Bias.

Alas, even with all our engineering and studies we cannot reach the efficiency of nature. That's because nature loves Simplicity or as scientists and philosophers call it EMERGENCE.

“Emergence” is the ability of individual characters of a large system to work together to form more complex behaviors as a collective. The ant colony is said to be Emergent because a single Ant does not have the ability to manage or develop the colony. It takes all the ants and the collective behavior to run the colony.

Ants & Bees colonies amaze me. In the past, if you had asked me about what would make me proud in the organization, I would have rattled numbers or skills or big projects. I still talk about numbers and goals but deep down I know I would be truly happy when I can develop an EMERGENT team.

P.S.: Wow you have reached this far. Here is a video for you to enjoy