Flocking Leadership
In Poznan, we tried an experiment during the Alpha Leadership workshop.
Alpha Leadership is something created by Robert Dilts who is famous for creating practical models of talents such as Disney's creativity strategy. Robert Dilts interviewed many modern leaders across the world to distill the Alpha Leadership model which is the opposite of a more traditional, authoritarian management style.
One of the principles of Alpha Leadership is to do with the idea that we don't need complicated rules to organise people's behaviour in an organisation. Complicated rules work when the elements of the system are unable to make their own decisions.
In a system comprising autonomous elements, like the Internet, or a Motorway network, or a company, complex rules put too much decision making load onto the elements, therefore the most efficient way of organising a system made up of autonomous elements, like people, is to have very simple rules.
A lot of authoritarian managers think they have to control people's behaviour, when in fact this greatly increases the number of rules and slows the system down to the point where it can no longer function. I guess you can imagine the kind of culture that this creates.
So, back to our experiment in Poznan. We took a group of people, gave them five simple rules and then left them to make their own decisions. We videoed the result and it was very interesting!
The rules were: Follow the group, don't bump into anyone, keep the group together, keep moving, no talking.
When the boundaries of the system were very wide, it gave people almost too much freedom and the group merged very quickly as you can see in the first video. When we made the boundaries smaller, just big enough to give the group freedom to move, we saw a beautiful pattern of behaviour emerge, like watching a shoal of fish. Complex behaviour arising from simple rules in an autonomous system.
In between, we kept the boundaries large but split the group. As you will see, in each video there is at least one person who tries to break the rules. You'll see a point where two sub-groups pass by and neither wants to follow the other, then later this happens again and you see one person is unable to resist following the rules!
One person in particular tried, in each experiment, to break the rules. The first three times, everyone ignored him. Then in the final experiement, you will see that other people start to follow him.
This is a really important observation for leadership. It's not about getting it right first time, it's about pursuing an idea and being persistent until that idea comes of its time. When the idea and the time are right, people will follow you.
So here are the videos in Windows Media format (.wmv):
Wide boundaries, one group #1
Wide boundaries, one group #2
Wide boundaries, split group
Small boundaries, one group
Alpha Leadership is something created by Robert Dilts who is famous for creating practical models of talents such as Disney's creativity strategy. Robert Dilts interviewed many modern leaders across the world to distill the Alpha Leadership model which is the opposite of a more traditional, authoritarian management style.
One of the principles of Alpha Leadership is to do with the idea that we don't need complicated rules to organise people's behaviour in an organisation. Complicated rules work when the elements of the system are unable to make their own decisions.
In a system comprising autonomous elements, like the Internet, or a Motorway network, or a company, complex rules put too much decision making load onto the elements, therefore the most efficient way of organising a system made up of autonomous elements, like people, is to have very simple rules.
A lot of authoritarian managers think they have to control people's behaviour, when in fact this greatly increases the number of rules and slows the system down to the point where it can no longer function. I guess you can imagine the kind of culture that this creates.
So, back to our experiment in Poznan. We took a group of people, gave them five simple rules and then left them to make their own decisions. We videoed the result and it was very interesting!
The rules were: Follow the group, don't bump into anyone, keep the group together, keep moving, no talking.
When the boundaries of the system were very wide, it gave people almost too much freedom and the group merged very quickly as you can see in the first video. When we made the boundaries smaller, just big enough to give the group freedom to move, we saw a beautiful pattern of behaviour emerge, like watching a shoal of fish. Complex behaviour arising from simple rules in an autonomous system.
In between, we kept the boundaries large but split the group. As you will see, in each video there is at least one person who tries to break the rules. You'll see a point where two sub-groups pass by and neither wants to follow the other, then later this happens again and you see one person is unable to resist following the rules!
One person in particular tried, in each experiment, to break the rules. The first three times, everyone ignored him. Then in the final experiement, you will see that other people start to follow him.
This is a really important observation for leadership. It's not about getting it right first time, it's about pursuing an idea and being persistent until that idea comes of its time. When the idea and the time are right, people will follow you.
So here are the videos in Windows Media format (.wmv):
Wide boundaries, one group #1
Wide boundaries, one group #2
Wide boundaries, split group
Small boundaries, one group
3 Comments:
The experiment may show one more thing, I suppose. The fact is that one individual was persistant enough to persuade other people to follow him. We can interpretate it as folllowing: the system of given rules was not flexible enough to provide participants with satisfaction so they follwed new rules of "authoritarian manager". Sheer criosity of participants, boredom? Does the system have to be dynamic?
Pete this amazing and very powerful , it should be on the website as an example of personal development. I'm sure lots of conclusions could be drawn from the experiment - the system only moves at the pace of its slowest moving part - the more rules the narrower the thinking....
Nice to see COmplex Adaptive Systems at work. This is a great idea based on some computer models to test out CAS ideas. Well done!
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