A Shift in the Wind...

Social Green Values and Swarm Intelligence

(Who would have thought those two things would end up in the same column?)

By: Greg Neil
Source: Gregory Neil Associates (www.gregoryneilassociates.com)

Ednote: As follow up to the June 2009 article by Greg Neil on the effects of the Triple bottom Line, we offer the following:

The intention of this column is to speak about, share new ideas and technologies to enhance the quality of life at work. But let me first ask you the question why? Why is this becoming so important to so many of us? Why is this becoming so talked about? Searches on Google for “the triple bottom line” have increased from 15,600 in 2002 to 292,000 in 2008.

So why is this happening? Why now and never before? I for one, don’t have a clue - only that it is, and in a very big way. Maybe were waking up, maybe it’s the advent of the coming 2012? All I can say is its about time, and I am thankful to be alive at a time of such exciting and great change - I hope we all have a front row seat for the main event.

I don’t think that anyone of us is singularly aware of what’s driving this phenomena in the same way that a swarm of bees may not have a clue what the next one is up to – yet like the bee’s, human swarm intelligence is pointing at some very amazing facts. As we can see from companies running lean practices like Toyota, The single individual is significantly more important than ever before, ….but wait, so is the group. We have a phenomenon of the group and the individual maintaining equal ground in the gathering of information and making decisions like never before.

This is a huge reversal from the traditional role of a single leader steering the ship to the choices of may, sometimes thousands designing the future for all of us. We can see this in the demonstrated internet trends towards facebook, linkedin, youtube, etc.

We are yet to see this practiced widespread in the business domain – but we do have the foundational language for it - the triple bottom line, people; planet; profit, democracy at work, freedom based management, barely managed chaos, Enterprise 2.0. No matter how you say it, the fact is people are starting to speak in a whole new way about a shift in our conditions at work. We will take this apart and explore these in depth in future articles, but for now…

Here are three simple principles that honor both the whole and the individual taken from swarm intelligence and applicable to business:

The diversity of independent information sources is critical to making the best decisions. (Go get a lot of information and bring it back to share with all of us)
Aggregation and independent evaluation of the information leads to a core set of choices. ( no longer is there control about what information is being communicated – this is now being managed by consensus of the whole)
Collection and distribution of independent decisions enables a quorum asap.

(Contextualized information gathered from all is available to the individual for rapid and more accurate decision making)

The concepts and practices of sharing, collaboration, and networking offer an extraordinary new way of managing people and controlling outcomes in a shared vision and purpose environment. While the complexity of life is increasing, our methodologies for maintaining our sanity return to the simplicity of nature – there is a certain peaceful reassurance in that.

So what are the next steps? How do you get started in your own companies? What does it look like when employees are given more autonomy?

Gregory Neil Associates offers tools to empower employees to be the driving force of the business and unleash the human spirit to give you the most productive and profitable environment possible.

For more information visit our site at www.gregoryneilassociates.com