Collective decisions are essential to the survival of a honeybee colony because no individual bee succeeds unless the whole colony survives and reproduces. When house hunting, worker honeybees, show us solutions to the dilemma of how to make effective decisions as a group.
Lesson No 1: DECISION-MAKING GROUPS OF INDIVIDUALS NEED TO HAVE SHARED INTERESTS AND MUTUAL RESPECT
To fairly evaluate all possibilities and to eliminate all but the best ones we need alignment and mutual respect, without which we risk offending the big egos in a group when evaluating one another’s ideas. Ego driven leaders are a serious threat because they fail to support a diverse set of possible solutions to a problem and fail to fairly evaluate all possibilities.
Bees have a decided advantage over humans. The queen bee is not a leader, she does not participate in any decision-making, she is significant because she is the only bee in the colony that lays eggs. All decisions, including choosing a new home when a colony has swarmed is left to the worker bees. The worker bees isolate the queen bee from their deliberations. By operating without a leader, the swarm avoids the greatest threat to good decision-making by groups – an ego-driven leader.
Lesson No. 2: MINIMISE THE LEADER’S INFLUENCE ON THE GROUP THINKING
Our human groups always operate with a leader. Group leaders should promote sound thinking, act impartially and minimise their own influence on the outcome of the decision-making process to allow the group to fully explore the power of collective choice. Thus, not an overbearing boss but an impartial information seeker who creates an atmosphere of open inquiry.
When a bee swarm faces decision-making, the power is evenly diffused among all the scout bees, no single leader integrates information from different sources or tells other bees what to do.
Lesson no. 3: SEEK DIVERSE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM
A group’s power to explore options goes beyond that of a lone individual. When multiple individuals bring unique experiences to a problem and search independently for possible solutions, chances are that someone will come up with a brilliant new option. Groups need to be sufficiently large for the challenge being faced and consist of people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Group leaders need to support independent exploration by members and create an environment in which the group’s members feel comfortable about proposing solutions. Understanding the group’s deliberations adds to the collective knowledge of its members.
House-hunting bees provide a demonstration of the effectiveness of large and diverse groups whose members work independently. A swarm sends out hundreds of scout bees to looks for potential nesting sites over areas stretching for more than five kilometres from the site where the swarm is temporarily camped. Each scout bee works independently to scrutinise sites and reports her discoveries (with the waggle dance) thus putting her options on the table for consideration. The reconnaissance process can go on for hours or days and a swarm typically can discover 10 to 20 or even more possible nesting sites. This approach gives the bees a strong start in selecting the best living quarters.
Lesson No. 4: AGGREGATE THE GROUPS KNOWLEDGE BY DEBATE
How do you transform the knowledge and opinions of group members into a single choice for the whole group? We, humans, have devised a variety of voting procedures to single out one option from a list of possible choices. However, the problem of choice remains, how can group members reach a decision when they strongly disagree with each other?
When house hunting, worker bees engage in tumultuous, enthusiastic debate as they propose and support varying options for a new nesting site. Turbulent groups of scouts compete to gain support from uncommitted scouts and the group that first attracts a quorum of supporters wins the competition. The winning group then goes on to build a consensus among the scouts so when it comes to flying off to their new home the swarm is in agreement about the flight plan.
Bees can distinguish the good options from the bad ones because no scout bee blindly follows another scout’s opinion by dancing for a site, she has not herself inspected. By evaluating sites independently, the bees invest their attention wisely. The balance between independence and interdependence among the debating scout bees is ingenious.
We too can use the power of frank and open and fair debate, integrate the information that is dispersed and enable good communication knowing that this is how valuable information is revealed. Group members need to listen critically to each individual member’s opinion and register their own views independently. The advantage of this is that when there is an optimal solution likely to serve the common interest, and obviously large quorum response can emerge and ensure accurate, swift, cohesive decision-making.
Lesson 5: USE QUORUM RESPONSES FOR ACCURACY, SPEED, AND COHESION
We humans can let group debate continue unhindered until the opinions of the participants have naturally coalesced around a unified choice. If a problem has an underlying correct solution, it might be worth arguing things through until everyone accepts the solution as this assures accurate decisions made with broad acceptance.
House hunting honeybees show us a clever way for the decision-making group to make accurate consensus decisions. Scout bees make changes in their behaviour when a sufficient threshold number (quorum) of individuals supporting a preferred site has been reached. They begin to perform ‘piping’ signals which (probably) tell the scouts supporting non-chosen sites that they should stop advertising their sites. This speeds up consensus-building among the scout bees so that when the scout bees fly back to the swarm, the piping signals induce the many thousands of non-scout bees to warm their flight muscles in preparation for the swarm to fly off to the chosen nesting site.
Honed by natural selection for around 30 million years honeybee decision-making is a time-tested method for achieving collective wisdom. We humans rarely share a singularity of purpose and are less inclined to be highly cooperative. How quickly could we learn from the 5 main behaviours of honeybees?
