Influencing Change Like a Rock Ant

The gambit

I’m a sucker for a story.

Life has a way of being really complicated. Really messy.
It’s inconsistent, ambiguous and incomprehensible at times.
In life it’s easy to get mired in the mud, lost in nuance, tangled up in the day-to-day.

Stories, on the other hand, have predictable structure.
They pare down the complexity, the incongruous aspects, and provide a neat simplicity of something that’s comprehensible, that’s digestible. They make sense.

So let me tell you a story.

Setting the scene

I work at a tech company. It’s both boring and absolutely fascinating.

“Boring” in that it’s something we actively embrace: Choose boring technology
“Boring” in that it’s pretty professional and sometimes a bit stuffy.
“Boring” in that it’s accounting software at the end of the day. ¹

But absolutely fascinating at the same time.

“Fascinating” in that we are incredibly modern.²
“Fascinating” in that we are incredibly productive.³
“Fascinating” in that I could spend a decade there and still be endlessly curious and engaged.

Recently, I’ve been talking to a lot of different people, across different departments.
People I’ve never worked with before.
People I’ve never met before.
People I’ve maybe only ever seen an avatar of, on Slack, but I wouldn’t recognise “in the real world”.

And the conversations have been really interesting. Really engaging. Really easygoing, actually.
What’s been the most interesting is the commonality, the shared experience, regardless of where we work within the organisation. Shared themes across the board.

Shared pain points and challenges.
Shared friction and frustrations.
Shared desire to make improvements and make things better for everyone.

But just for a minute, I want to pause and talk about ants.
Rock ants in particular.

The interlude

Over the weekend I found myself engrossed by more ant documentaries than anyone should spend their weekends watching. I’ll cop to two, but honestly … there was a third I partly watched. Anyway, during this fascinating ant-fest, there was a section that really stuck out and I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Rock ants have pretty simple heuristics and strategies they employ when migrating nests:

Timestamp: 1h 3min 30s - 1h 9mins 45s

BBC – Planet Ant: Life Inside the Colony (2013)

The short TL;DW version is: swarm intelligence, but there’s so much more going on.

When an existing nest is compromised, individual ants venture out, exploring for a new potential nest.
There’s no hierarchy, no leader making the dictate or the decisions, just some simple rules and behaviours that any ant can follow:

• they map out a new nest to see if it’s a viable option
• they then recruit another ant via a strategy of “tandem running”: “Hey, come check out what I just found!”
• each recruited ant in turn becomes a recruiter, a force multiplier, and goes to recruit another ant of their own
• 1 ant becomes 2 ants, becomes 4, becomes 8 (exponential adoption)
• as soon as a critical number is reached – and “this can be as few as 10” – they proceed to the next phase
• the Moving phase: bodily lifting others to the new nest

In a really short space of time the migration is complete, and the colony has fully adopted the new nest.

Bringing it back to the point

So why did this affect me so much?
So much that I’ve already spoken to different people about it?
So much that I’ve decided to sit for an evening and write a post about it?

It’s a simple map of adoption, a strategy for migration, a blueprint to effect change that can be applied to any ecosystem.

The question we’ve been wrestling with lately, during these chats with people across the organisation, is:
“How do you influence culture in a large, complicated, interconnected organisation?”
Since we all recognise that there is change we’d like to effect, how can we go about actually doing it?

The same way rock ants migrate their nests.

Start by seeing if you can convince one person that your idea is worth exploring.
Discuss it, get some buy-in at the personal level, one on one.
If it’s compelling, that person will pick it up and do the same, they’ll recruit another.
Bit by bit adoption starts, as you continue to build up confidence that this new idea or insight is worthwhile.
Sooner or later the shift takes hold and it’s encouraged from within (as opposed to a top-down decision).
People understand the “why”, rather than the “what”, and it’s much more compelling at the level of the individual.⁴

What I really appreciate about this view is that it recognises that anyone can be the instigator of change.
It’s rooted in collectivism and the wisdom of “the tribe”.
It recognises that good and compelling ideas can be adopted without being enforced.
It directly flies in the face of the self-aggrandising myth of the “Self-Made Man”.⁵
It recognises that success isn’t down to one single person, but is the result of the collective.

The outro

If you’ve ever spent time with me in person, at some stage I’ve likely started my spiel:
“Everything is a massive interconnected system, no man’s an island, you see these patterns in nature, look at mushrooms and mycelium, systems thinking, watch Mindwalk (1990), etc.”

I think once you start noticing these patterns, it’s impossible to “put the genie back in the bottle”.
Life is still complicated, it’s still messy, it still doesn’t “make sense”, but there is structure. There are understandable patterns, if you can get past the noise. For all of our complexity there are patterns of simple behaviour akin to those of the rock ants and countless other examples in nature.

If you want to make large-scale change, think small, ant small.

I’ll leave you with the full copy of John Donne’s very well known poem on interconnectedness, circa 1624:

No man is an island, entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

John Donne - No man is an island (1624)

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Footnotes

1. I’m not for a second knocking double-entry bookkeeping, it’s just far too complicated for me. ↩︎

2. Calling the company “progressive” would be putting it lightly. In terms of tech, we want for very little. All of the buzzwords the big players boast: CI/CD, AWS, cloud infra, Terraform, an in-house design system, machine learning, Macs for everyone … you get the picture. ↩︎

3. We ship changes on average 100+ times per week for our main application. Every change is built, subjected to static analysis, 65k+ automated tests, and a variety of other automated procedures, all the while only taking around 10 minutes (13 minutes when factoring in deployment to production). ↩︎

4. Nietzsche spoke of this in terms of: “If you have your ‘why’ for life, you can get by with almost any ‘how’.” ↩︎

5. This is a bugbear of mine that’s so prevalent these days that I’ll likely write about it another day. ↩︎