Ask yourself how free you or your team really are in decision-making. Are you at risk of groupthink or herd instinct? Especially in projects that are supposed to lead to radical innovations, goal-oriented intelligent decision making is very relevant. This is where you can take advantage of the swarm intelligence model.
In the animal kingdom, there is a special form of collective behavior: swarm intelligence – such as in an ant colony. What at first glance looks like chaotic running around turns out to be a pattern: the swarm finds the shortest way to the food source, distributes tasks and defends territories. Professor Marco Dorigo applied these observations to truck route planning, slot distribution at airports, and military robot control. However, it is controversial whether such ant-algorhythmic self-organization is applicable to human groups.
In the human reality of swarm intelligence, we more often find a simpler group thinking: In homogeneously composed groups, opinions or thinking ideas intensify particularly easily. When many are too sure of the same thing, attitudes can become radical and actions rash.
Consider Paul J.H. Schoemaker’s graphic: He offers three forms of consensus building. In each case, starting from a problem, the group in the “debating society” does not find any action at all; in the “group thinking” it comes, shortened, almost directly to an action; only in the “ideal group process” information is collected and divergent thinking is possible – a phase of debate follows, followed by convergent thinking, and from the decision the action follows.
