Customer Reviews

The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make UsBetter at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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I loved it and found it captivating.

The book explains how things like ant colonies interact (more interesting than you would think). First thing in the morning the scout ants take off. When they return, the gatherer ants leave but only if there is the right number of scouts returning - not enough or too many at once - danger. And if they find food, they carry it back to the nest and release a scent that other ants follow to find the food. Fascinating.

Ant colonies accomplish great things (especially termites that build termite hills to vent the carbon dioxide from the colony and provide fresh air from the wind).

Although colonies accomplish great things, the individual ants are not too bright.

Case after case in the book (like why birds that flock don't bump into each other) point out the intelligence of the group even if the individuals only focus on the few individuals around them. They are leaderless groups. Even the bee hive does not have a leader. The queen lays eggs but does not decide where they live or where the food is. Specialists each do their job.

So how does this relate to business? Studies have shown that the collective group is more intelligent than the individual.

So what does this say about the CEO or leader? As I always knew - often a leader can hinder decision making. It is incumbent on the leader (whether by formal position or just by reputation/expertise) to make others feel worthy of speaking up. And in many senses, minimizing themselves so the group can make the best decision.

Awesome book - captivating read.

Through a very insightful book, Peter Miller turns to Nature to explain crowd behavior. Leveraging upon numerous scientific studies, Peter elaborates the principles through which even insects with low individual intelligence perform extraordinary feats of brilliance as a group. That too without hierarchy or elaborate rules!

Peter Miller calls this intelligent group behavior - the smart swarm. He then explains how the smart swarm works - using biology to unlock the secrets of collective behavior. The dangers of group behavior are also brought out through the examples of locusts - which is useful to understand how human groups also sometimes turn violent.

What are the principles of smart swarms?

The first principle of a smart swarm is self organization. Through the basic mechanisms of decentralized control, distributed problem solving and multiple interactions, members of a group without being told can transform simple rules of thumb into meaningful patterns of collective behavior. This is explained through the functioning of ant colonies - that is "Though Ant's aren't smart, why Ant colonies are?"

The second principle of a smart swarm is 'diversity of knowledge' - which is basically achieved through a broad sampling of the swarm's options, followed by a friendly competition of ideas. Then using an effective mechanism to narrow down the choices, swarms can achieve 'wisdom of crowds'. The honeybees example of choosing a new nest illustrates this very clearly - and Peter shows how communities and businesses can build trust and make better decisions by adapting this,

The third principle is indirect collaboration. If individuals in a group are prompted to make small changes to a shared structure that inspires others to improve it even further, the structure becomes an active player in the creative process. This is explained beautifully with the example of how termites build huge structures. We also see this in our internet world through Wikis!!!

The fourth principle is adaptive mimicking. With the example of flight behavior of starlings, Peter shows how the basic mechanisms of coordination, communication and copying can unleash powerful waves of energy or awareness that race across a population evoking a feeling of mental telepathy.

The author explains how the above principles will give businesses powerful tools to untangle some of the knottiest problems they face. With examples ranging from Oil, Aircraft manufacturing to Movies, very useful practical situations are given throughout the book.

I would strongly recommend this book all interested in Science & Business.

In today's world of total global competition and global social networks where the future of the world is being discussed, the field of biomimicry is being embraced by leading thinkers in order to capitalize on nature's hard earned lessons. This book brings those lessons to life and provides a basis for better understanding the true impact of our wired world. After you've digested Miller's work, you may want go further and read Ken Thompson's Bioteams: High Performance Teams Based on Nature's Most Successful Designs. Bioteams reveals how business enterprises, supply chains, high-tech ventures, public sector organizations and not-for-profits are turning to nature's best designs to create agile, high performing teams --and provides the human protocols that are needed for successful teams.

This book is a clear, concise exposition of certain behaviors in macro-organisms which consist of many individuals. By themselves, the individuals are not too "smart" but each is programmed with certain simple rules. When gathered together the hive, colony, swarm or flock behaves with more appropriate reactions than each individual can.

Systematic and well written. Understandable almost to the point of being "dumbed down" and organized to sell the lesson. This book couldn't be better for an interested layperson.

`Smart Swarm' is a superb book looking at various swarming animals and what lessons we may learn from their behaviours.

Each chapter focuses on a different animal (Ants, Bees, Termites, Swallows and Locusts, with Fish and Caribou thrown in for good measure) and starts off by exploring their specific behaviour and then relates a human situation where a similar things is done, or could be done. This has plenty of real world examples of various experiments conducted, which clarify some of the points and also includes examples where businesses have improved their organisations based on the ideas put across here.

I found the first two chapters, on Ants and Bees, the most fascinating and can see future real world applications to use the knowledge gleaned from these ingenious creatures in global businesses. The other chapters are also very good and this has plenty of intriguing and interesting information, put across in a very clear and lucid way.

If you enjoy popular science books or popular sociology/psychology then this will be right up your street. It is `sciency' enough to satisfy the inner geek in us all and, as it's not too heavy or jargon laden, accessible enough to be enjoyed as bedtime/commuting or general reading material.

I enjoyed this book immensely and recommend it if the premise of this even mildly grabs your interest.

Feel free to check out my blog which can be found on my profile page.

This book is a highly accessible book describing the behavior of groups in solving complex problems. My 70 year old mom read it and recommended it to me, and I found it thoroughly enjoyable.

At its heart, this book provides a variety of examples and analyses showing the complexity of behaviors a group can exhibit, even when the individuals are not terribly intelligent.

The author digs into some of the collective behaviors of animals and insects, including ants, bees, birds, and even people. There are remarkable examples of how a few simple rules result in complex flocking behaviors, and brilliant analytical results ranging from finding the right place to gather food to winning Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

As a computer scientist specializing in distributed systems, I found an extra level of insights from this book. I'm comfortable saying that many of the examples provided are remeniscent of best practices for creating a system of hundreds of computers working together to provide a service or solve a problem.

This book is well worth the time and money to read. You don't need to be scientifically minded to read and enjoy it, but those who are will doubtless enjoy it twice as much!

Many of us are just beginning to come to terms with the reality that we have suddenly found ourselves in a completely different world with a completely different set of rules. The rapid emergence of the Digital Age is challenging all our assumptions about the ways we work together as the Internet transforms the world into an interconnected network that was inconceivable a mere 20 years ago. And while the technology revolution continues to expand the power of our possibilities, it also brings with it an unprecedented combination of accelerating change and escalating complexity that is severely testing the limits of established ways of thinking and acting. Most of us are learning the hard way that a new world requires the acceptance of new rules.

The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done by Peter Miller is an important contribution for those who are serious about mastering the unfamiliar challenges of accelerating change and escalating complexity. Miller cogently describes how the power of collective intelligence, as practiced by ants and birds and bees, may very well hold the secret for how we navigate the new rules of our new world.

The need for thinking differently, according to Miller, stems from the fact that the human brain isn't designed to tackle problems collectively. Thus, there are numerous mental traps that leaders fall into as they attempt to manage everyday challenges. For example, Miller describes the trap of "anchoring," where we give in to the tendency to overvalue the first thing we hear. The trap of the "status quo," which permeates hierarchical organizations, keeps us from bringing forward innovative ideas for fear of rocking the boat. Another mental foible of human nature is the "sunk cost" trap, in which we persist in pursuing questionable courses of action to justify our earlier decisions.

While these traps have been troublesome in the relatively slower and simpler world of the last decades of the 20th century, we have somehow been able to successfully move forward because there has been time to correct our mistakes. Unfortunately, when the pace of change and the degree of complexity suddenly accelerates, there is no time for hubris and these traps can prove fatal. Thus, notwithstanding its past achievements, the continued use of top-down hierarchies, which are designed to leverage the individual knowledge of the supposedly smartest among us, is fast becoming a fatally flawed strategy for organizing the work of large numbers of people.

As we struggle to adapt to the new rules of a new age, Miller points to the smart swarm and its leveraging of collective intelligence as a viable solution. Miller defines a smart swarm as "a group of individuals who respond to one another and to their environment in ways that give them the power, as a group, to cope with uncertainty, complexity, and change." Smart swarms follow four principles that bear no resemblance to the workings of top-down hierarchies: self-organization, diversity of knowledge, indirect collaboration, and adaptive mimicking.

In addition to detailing how these principles enable insects and birds to solve their relatively complex tasks of building hives or journeying thousands of miles, Miller describes how innovative human organizations, such as Wikipedia, are using these principles to create extraordinary performance. By abandoning its original hierarchical expert-driven model and embracing self-organization, Wikipedia has been able to harness the incredible power of the wisdom of the crowd and redefine an industry. Wikipedia's innovative business model is proof that there are often times when diversity trumps ability by creating a space where the masses can indirectly collaborate as they build upon each other's work in preparing and updating articles. And finally, Wikipedians are a community of individuals who adaptively mimic each other to create a cohesive product that has become the world's most widely used reference source.

As we continue to learn how to cope with the twin challenges of accelerating change and escalating complexity, Miller points to two lessons that we can learn from smart swarms. First, by embracing the organizational architecture of smart swarms, we can lesson the impact of uncertainty, complexity and change. And second, because diversity is the fuel that makes smart swarms so powerful, leveraging our collective wisdom does not require us to surrender our individuality. As Miller astutely observes, "the best way to serve the group, it turns out, is to be true to ourselves."

If you are a leader who is serious about mastering the challenges of accelerating change and escalating complexity, this book is an excellent place to start.

Rod Collins
Author, Leadership in a Wiki World: Leveraging Collective Knowledge to Make the Leap to Extraordinary Performance, winner of the 2011 EVVY book award for Business/Finance

For being at the top of the food chain, humans aren't terribly evolved. Give us a complex situation like, say, a credit meltdown with a zero accountability, and we drape a TARP and hope it will just go away. Individual humans just aren't good at making hard decisions in complicated situations.

That said, a smart, carefully tuned group of us could be. Ants, which aren't too smart as individuals, do it. Bees do it. Even educated humans do it, given the right circumstances.

A smart swarm is "a group of individuals who respond to one another and to their environment in ways that give them power, as a group, to cope with uncertainty, complexity and change," according to the National Geographic senior editor Peter Miller, whose book dives into the dynamics of how large groups function in nature. Miller uses the relatively new science of understanding flocks, schools, and colonies to make his points about how smart swarms operate.

This "science of collaboration" is relevant to business, especially considering how much the Internet has boosted human collaboration. Ants in a colony assign just the right number of workers to each job every day--can you imagine the competitive advantages of having similar flexibility in your own company? Miller explains how businesses use the mechanics of the smart swarm to optimize manufacturing, routing trucks, networking phones, and more.

*Content*

Each of The Smart Swarm's well-written chapters features an example from nature--insects, fish, birds--to illustrate principles, or defining features, of a smart swarm. Miller peppers in knowledge from a span of other fields, too, including economics, political science, government, computer science, mathematics, robotics, physics, and even The Lord of the Rings. Each chapter also includes a case study; subjects include Boeing, the Iraqi municipal government, and the CIA.

Between the introduction and conclusion, the book has five story- and example-rich chapters:

* Chapter 1 explores how ants optimize changing conditions, followed by a case study on how gas supplier American Air Liquide uses a computer system with an ant-based algorithm to save it an estimated $20 million per year.

* Chapter 2 demonstrates the necessity of diversity of knowledge and friendly competition in a smart swarm using honeybees, Best Buy, Boeing, and a small town in Vermont.

* Chapter 3 uses the electric grid, termites, national intelligence, and Hurricane Katrina to illustrate how smart, adaptable networks work.

* Chapter 4 uses flocks of sparrows, caribou and animation in Lord of the Rings to explore how individuals each play a subtle part in keeping their entire group on course.

* Chapter 5 explores what triggers peaceful swarms of locusts to go into mass destruction mode and create a plague; it applies examples to crowd disasters in Saudi Arabia and the Philippines as well as market bubbles.

What do you get out of all this research, case studies, and examples? A handful of principles that define a smart swarm, including:

* Individuals aren't smart, but the colony is. A smart swarm self-organizes "from the bottom up, as the result of interactions among many parts."

* A smart swarm distributes group problem solving through individual interactions. Miller uses the beach as a way to illustrate this. If you go to beach, you find a space for your towel that's a comfortable distance from everyone else; if you look at crowded beach from aerial view, it's a mosaic of evenly-spaced towels. Also, if a couple of people stand up and stare into the water, then a couple more do it, pretty soon everyone will be staring into the water in a collective state of alarm.

* The more choices a smart swarm has, the better it performs. A smart swarm made up of individuals with a diverse skill set leads to more choices. Assuming the group is structured right and given an appropriate task--necessary for it to be a smart, not dumb, group--friendly competition of ideas will let the best strategy percolate upwards. The smart swarm will then execute that strategy.

* Smart swarms are self-healing: "In an ant colony or a beehive, many individuals can fail to perform their jobs and the system still functions just fine, because many other individuals, sensing something different in their surroundings, adjust their behavior accordingly," writes Miller.

*Thoughts*

Thanks to increased global interdependence and lightning-speed communication, business and government are itching for a model to replace the old hierarchical one. The Smart Swarm points us in the right direction.

This wasn't clear to me at first, because each chapter in the book is so rich with examples and diverse stories that I had could only ruminate the book's deeper implications after stepping away from it for a while. It's a challenge to pick through and grasp everything. I can't help but think there must be a better way to make each of Miller's principles more accessible on the first read, eg. listing the principles in bold before the beginning of each chapter.

That said, The Smart Swarm was effective in that it introduced me to a whole new vocabulary and idea set around collaboration. I started reading the book with a preconceived notion that individual experts are the smartest problem solvers; <em>the Smart Swarm</em> cured me of that.

It's also very well written. Miller includes reams of quotes, references to books, research, and case studies to make his points. He clearly did his homework; his writing integrates everything smoothly.

The Smart Swarm provides relevant, quality information that everyone in the Information Age should know about. For that reason, I recommend it to everyone, with a caveat--it helps if you're a close reader.

(Book review by Drea Knufken)

This is an interesting topic to cover, and I liked the fascinating details on how the ants, fish, termites, and birds communicate with each other. More importantly how this knowledge can be applied to solve real life problems.

Also I thought that the book was very verbose. It could probably be condensed to half as many pages.

Ants, bees, termites, schools of fish, flocks of birds and locusts. It's really fascinating to see the connections the author is able to make between these animal's behavior and the working of human groups, computer programs, robots and mobs. The only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars is that most of information isn't really applicable to me. Managers of large corporations and those in more technical fields may draw more usable tidbits than the average reader. However, the writing is very good and quite interesting, and I'm sure almost all readers will very much enjoy it!