I live on a horse farm, and at lunchtime I walked down the hill to get the mail. When I opened the mailbox I found that ants had decided it seemed like a good home.
I'm not keen on ant-covered mail, nor having them crawl onto me while I carry the mail back to the house, so I pondered what to do about them. I removed my mail and left the door open, idly watching them while I considered my options. And as I watched, the ants became alarmed and started picking up eggs and moving them. Since the mailbox was no longer closed and dark, it must have triggered a reaction to look for another place.
Suddenly the ants' activity looked really familiar, and I recalled the ant farm I had as a kid, with the glass walls so you could see how endlessly busy the ants were.
And then I made the connection: no one was telling the ants what to do, yet their separate activities were nonetheless self-coordinating and effective... just like what happens in our internal online community. This may not seem like a compliment (although I would argue it is), but internal communities are actually like ant farms.
The insect world is full of examples of amazing collective intelligence that we superior, intellectual humans struggle to understand and explain. With our social media software, we're helping organizations become as smart as ants are. In our internal online community, our employees are self-organizing, responding individually and rapidly to the stimuli that affects them, efficiently coordinating with others as needed, and busily going about getting the "farm's" business done.
In some ways it really is as simple as that.
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