Through my hobby of bird photography, I have become adept at a very specific visual distinction: tree, or not tree.

I suspect we all have an evolutionary ability to spot dangerous, edible, or interesting anomalies in the mostly benign, inedible landscape, and boring landscape.

I just happen to have a pastime that increases my awareness of it, and thus I took notice when something on a high branch of the Norway spruce in our backyard set off my “not tree” detector recently.

A squirrel’s nest, perhaps? Or maybe some strange tree-dwelling fungus?

The Swarm

Closer inspection via the long lens on my camera revealed something much more interesting: a swarm of honeybees, clinging to the branch like a drooping, basketball-sized raindrop about to splash to the ground, their glittering wings and striped abdomens blurred into a single shimmering mass.

A beehive contains more life lessons than bees.

Yet, for now, I will attempt to limit myself to just one: the swarm’s ability to make decisions, in this case, deciding where to establish their new hive.

So, what led them to this decision point in the first place? How did these thousands of bees end up clumped together on a branch outside their hive?

House Hunting

Honeybees swarm when the hive gets too crowded. As the population increases, the queen’s pheromones become more diluted. When they reach a threshold known only to the bees, the infertile female workers begin raising a new queen by feeding a special “royal jelly” to some of the larvae.

Once the new queen completes her metamorphosis and emerges, it’s time for much of the hive to pack their bags. She will take over the existing hive, as the older queen departs with about two-thirds of the workers.

This begins the swarm. The bees leave the hive and form themselves into a living, buzzing mass somewhere close by, high in a Norway spruce behind my house, for example.

The swarm is a staging area. The vast majority of the bees chill out and wait, while the most experienced scouts reconnoiter.

Decisions, Decisions

This is when the hive magic happens. With potentially many options to choose from, the bees have devised a highly optimized and efficient decision-making process.

It’s a high-stakes choice, possibly life or death, so they need to get it right.

(I desperately want to write about how this hive-level decision process is a beautiful example of emergent phenomena in complex systems, but I promised to limit myself to just one lesson!)

Scouts explore the surrounding territory, finding and evaluating potential locations for the new hive. It must meet many criteria:

• It has to be large enough–too small and the hive will not be able to store enough honey to survive the winter;
• It has to provide shelter and protection from intruders;
• It has to be in a good school district (just seeing if you're still paying attention);
• And, of course, it has to provide easy access to food and water.

The scouts are house-hunting.

Market Research

When a scout finds a candidate property, she returns to the swarm and tells them about it. Until the middle of the last century, how she did this was a mystery.

Thanks to the painstaking work of German-Austrian ethologist, Karl von Frisch, we now understand the “waggle dance.”

When a scout bee returns with her real-estate market research, she shares it by dancing. Here are the steps:

1. Half-circle clockwise, turn to your right
2. Return to the starting point while wagging your rear-end (a “waggle run”)
3. Half-circle counterclockwise, turn to your left
4. Back to the start and do it again.

Now you know the waggle dance!

She continues this figure-eight pattern while other scouts watch her performance with rapt attention.

Decrypting the Dance

Von Frisch realized that the dancing bee was sharing the address of the home she had found.

The angle of the waggle run from vertical gives the direction relative to the sun. The duration of the waggle indicates distance, with one second equal to about one kilometer.

For his efforts, von Frisch was initially mocked, until we realized he was right. Then he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973, for precisely the reason alluded to earlier: the implications go well beyond bees.

Now we have a new hive location under consideration, but people typically do not buy a new home after looking at only one option, and neither do bees.

Hundreds of scouts are simultaneously scouring the local real-estate market and returning to the swarm with their findings.

Bees Are Decisive

Presented with all these options, humans are vulnerable to analysis paralysis, but the bees are not. Wild creatures cannot afford indecision any more than they can afford bad decisions.

To move the process along, another scout will follow the waggle dance directions and return with a second opinion. If she likes it, she will repeat the waggle dance. If not, she keeps scouting. Assuming she is aligned, perhaps two scouts head out to take a look.

By repeating this process, the swarm will quickly converge on a good decision.

Over the course of a few hours to a few days, the number of scouts waggle-dancing for the perfect home will naturally increase, and waggle-dancing for the money-pit fixer-uppers will die off.

(Again, I REALLY want to write about how the time the bees take to decide follows Hick’s Law and looks very much like the pattern of neural connections firing in our own brains, but…)

When a critical mass of scouts converge on the same location, a consensus is reached. The swarm dissolves and all the bees follow the scouts to their new home.

Consensus is how bees make critical decisions.

Consensus

Consensus: a word that strikes fear in the hearts of decision makers everywhere.

Consensus: that alluring, yet impossible ideal, the search for which will inevitably send an organization into a death spiral of indecision.

Consensus: the sign of a weak leader doomed to failure.

We are taught that achieving consensus is neither reasonable nor advisable. Yet, it seems to work pretty well for the bees.

In contrast, major organizational changes, the corporate equivalent of relocating the hive, are the stuff or business horror stories. Failure rates for major change initiatives are shocking (and expensive).

Could it be that consensus is what is missing?

Feeling Together

Consensus means "general agreement." It comes from the Latin prefix con-, meaning “together, or with,” and sentire, “to sense, perceive, or feel.”

Consensus means we feel together.

Although it is sometimes used interchangeably with unanimity, it is not the same. Unanimity means complete agreement, something even the bees do not require.

Leaders must build consensus.

Without general agreement, major changes are doomed to failure. You will have the hive equivalent of bees going along for the ride.

Then, when the weather inevitably gets rough and the honey supply gets low, rather than finding ways to make the new hive work, the worker bees will do a waggle dance that some future von Frisch will translate as saying, “I told them this hollow tree was a bad idea.”

You will fail, because too many people were not on board in the first place.

I can hear the objections already.

• “We’ll never get anything done!”
• “We don’t have time to get a consensus on every big decision!”
• “We can’t let everyone weigh in on every decision because they don’t have the experience or expertise!”

You don’t have to. And neither do the bees.

Remember, the scouts who find a new hive account for just a few hundred of the tens of thousands of bees who count on them.

Not all the bees, or even all the scouts, have to reach consensus on what they decide, because they have broad consensus on how they decide.

The bees don't have to establish consensus on any given choice of hive location, because they already have consensus on how that choice gets made.

The Queen’s Advantage

For Apis mellifera, the western honey bees swarming in my spruce tree, consensus on how big decisions get made is instinctive. The queen gets off easy. She doesn't have to talk anyone into it.

For Homo sapiens, the leaders have to earn it. They have to build it over time, through trust and transparency, because if you don’t have consensus, the swarm is not going anywhere.

Building and maintaining consensus is not easy, and there is no formula. It requires learning through trial and error. It requires a deep understanding of complex systems (like groups of humans).

It also requires well-developed emotional intelligence. After all, consensus is feeling together, not thinking together.

That's where Retexo can help. To begin developing the emotional intelligence necessary for consensus building, check out our online course, Emotional Intelligence Essentials, before you decide to move the hive.

Until next time,

Greg