How Termites Reveal The Rules Behind Radical Innovation

The East African savanna features harsh daily and seasonal temperature fluctuations. Here we discover extraordinarily sophisticated structures that use the convection principle to provide advanced functions, such as ventilation and temperature control, throughout the year. They contain storage chambers for food and ventilation systems to expel waste gases and bring in fresh oxygen. They draw water from sources two hundred feet below ground.

How Termites Thrive

These are not descriptions of an ancient African civilization but of termite colonies!

The constant 86˚F is optimal for growing fungi inside the mound, which they use as food. The water they draw from deep underground helps keep the queen’s chamber at almost 100% humidity, optimal for egg laying. There is something synergistic that emerges when individual termites do their job, even though they are unaware of how their individual efforts contribute to the intricate whole. And the colony supports many other species that graze on it symbiotically. The result is a marvelously vibrant, densely populated colony that is better than any one of them can produce alone, and unrecognizable from the sum of their individual efforts.

Emergence

But what is this holistic synergy? How do simple termites achieve these extraordinary feats?

Termites self-organize and self-heal when there is a breach in the system. If a group gets separated, they produce supplementary reproductives to start a new colony. They communicate the shortest routes to the colony and food sources by using pheromone trails. They build their mounds in the direction that minimizes the heat from the scorching sun in the afternoon. They do all these tasks without being directed.

Termites communicate with simple rules, such as “the shorter the route to food, the thicker the pheromone trail,” and “when you see danger, alert others by banging your head.” Self-organizing agents following simple rules can give rise to an extraordinarily complex global structure. These simple rules provide a loose structure to coordinate their activities to reach the common goal and also accelerate the speed of interaction among them.

These termites make incremental improvements through profuse trial and error. They constantly try to find faster routes to find food, more effective heat-protection strategies, and better ways to survive when they leave their colony to form a new one (the swarming termites fly through a mud tube to protect themselves from dehydration and predators). It took many, many trials and errors over millions of years to figure out the optimal solution. Perfection is not nearly as important as the incremental snowball effect of frequent, iterative feedback.

They connect and collaborate with each other and the environment. Termites live and work as a group (but they never sleep—too bad for Sanofi that they don’t get to sell Ambien to termites!). They communicate with, take cues from, and adapt to the environment and each other. Their communication is frictionless because there is no hoarding of information, no political jockeying, and no fear of getting backstabbed. There is complete transparency for the good of the colony.

Each termite is symbiotically part of a larger whole. The colony does not exist without individual termites, and the individuals cannot survive without being part of the colony. They are interdependent and united under the common purpose of the colony: to protect the members and make more of them. All of them have distributed or limited intelligence, but when they pool resources, they achieve something far greater than what each can do as individuals.

Secrets To Radical Innovation

This is how they produce, in the language of complexity theory, emergence. All living things are complex adaptive systems, including cells, neurons, termites, plants, humans, cities, and organizations, and share a signature pattern that produces the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Living these patterns has enabled termites to be one of the most successful groups of insects on earth, having survived 250 million years including the Great Dying at the end of the Permian period, in which some 70 to 96% of earth’s species went extinct.

The consistent patterns of complex adaptive systems have massive business implications, because they reveal the key to radical innovations that redefine the rules of the game. Organizations are akin to living organisms in many ways. After all, those two words share the same etymology. By understanding and applying the principles and patterns behind complex adaptive systems, we can greatly enhance our ability to lead organizations, and improve our chances of inducing radical innovation.

A New Era

The mechanistic leadership style that focused on command and control was artificially devised to standardize and reduce variances but we are in a whole different era of much higher complexity, one that requires firms to implement self-organization, profuse experiments using simple rules, and to create a culture of interdependence within the firm and in an ecosystem with the environment. In this fast changing VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) era, innovation is the only way to survive. The implication is clear: transform your organization to harness complexity or face the fate of extinction.