Can leaderless societies get stuff done? Ask the honeybees
A new honeybee-inspired analysis suggests that decentralized groups may have an edge when times get tough
University of Colorado at Boulder
Do organizations do better when they have a central leader who calls the shots or a decentralized group of individuals who sort out their own division of labor?
The question has intrigued philosophers, biologists, political scientists and business leaders for centuries. More recently, computer scientsits have explored it as they work to develop sythetic multi-agents systems, like drone swarms working toward a common goal.
A new honeybee-inspired study, published in the journal PNAS, offers answers. It suggests that while both kinds of organizations can survive and thrive, leaderless groups may have an edge— as long as communication is good and there’s just the right mix of risk-takers and cautious followers.
“We found that decentralized strategies of decision making are at least as good as centrally coordinated ones and, in many ways, may be more robust and resilient,” said corresponding author Zachary Kilpatrick, a professor of applied mathematics who studies how animals, including insects and humans, make decisions.
Using math to understand decision making
Peek at a bee colony and you’ll find tens of thousands of individuals toiling away, each with their own unique role in supporting the hive. Some explore surrounding meadows, foraging and scouting for information. Others hang back, cleaning the hive. While the queen lays eggs and chemically signals her presence, she doesn’t determine who does what.
Ants and termites operate similarly, without a central authority.
Other animals are more hierarchical.
In a herd of elephants, the oldest female makes the call on where to find water and when to flee, when survival is at stake. Wolf breeding pairs direct where the group hunts and rests.
To get at which system works best under what circumstances, and how leaderless societies manage to accomplish so much, Kilpatrick and his colleagues—Hyunjoong Kim of the University of Cincinnati and Krešimir Josić of the University of Houston—developed a mathematical model informed by research on real animals in the wild.
The model simulated life in a bee colony under different scenarios with varying numbers of bees; good and bad environmental conditions; and a central coordinator vs no central coordinator.
Surprisingly, the study found no difference in outcome between scenarios where a central coordinator determined who does what and scenarios where individuals acted based on their own risk tolerance.
“Turns out those models behave identically,” said Kilpatrick.
And in some ways, the leaderless group was more resilient, the model suggested.
“If one individual is making the decisions for an entire group, and that individual dies, gets removed or can’t communicate with the group it leaves it really vulnerable,” Kilpatrick said. “In a decentralized group if you knock out one communication pathway, there are others.”
Another question at the core of the experiment: How many risk-takers, or scouts, should be sent out to forage and how many should cautiously wait?
The study found that the larger the group, the smaller the proportion of risk-takers it required. That’s because each brave bee that puts its life on the line to leave the hive adds proportionally less new information to the colony upon return.
“If you send too many foragers out, you’re going to waste a bunch of energy for little additional benefit,” he said. “The same scaling logic may hold for human groups, where a small team may need half its members exploring while a large field needs only a handful.”
Lessons for humans
Kilpatrick said the findings could help inform development of artificial neural networks, multi-agent systems and other technologies.
“One of the best ways to design efficient systems and technologies is to look at what nature has done.”
Yhe study also yields other lessons for humans.
Research has shown that our ancestral default, from living in small hunter-gatherer bands, is to make decisions collectively. Some small organizations, like kibbutzim, still do this. But as organizations grow larger, humans tend to build centralized hierarchies and install powerful leaders to control them.
“That flexibility is one of our most distinctive traits as a species,” Kilpatrick said.
Much human advancement can be attributed to moments when, without direction from above, risk-taking individuals break out to make scientific discoveries, launch startups or explore new territories —nudging the more cautious to follow them when the time is right.
As new, more complex challenges arise, humans might want to take a cue from the bees, said Kilpatrick.
“Our research suggests that there can be a real benefit to having decentralized, individuated exploration that ultimately gets shared back with the community.”
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Animals
Article Title
Daring few, patient many: Division of labor in decentralized foraging collectives
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