7. Principle

Roles and responsibilities clearly documented

For a company to operate as an intelligent swarm, it must be clear who does what, who is responsible for what.

This also includes who does not do what because it is outside the scope of their duties and responsibilities. And all of this must be transparent for everyone involved.

Developer, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Business Analyst, Release Engineer, Solution Architect - to name just a few roles with specific responsibilities in a modern company. What the people in each role do and what they are responsible for is very different. And at the same time, they work closely with each other, as an intelligent swarm, that is.

To ensure that swarm intelligence is as high as possible, it is necessary to keep social entropy as low as possible. This applies to meetings, communication between teams and exchanges within teams.

What is social entropy?

A kind of noise that arises from a mixture of ambition, the need to communicate and the need to be seen. No one is free of this mixture. Because ambition and the need to communicate and thus become visible are quite simply human. People want to talk to each other, to hold speeches, to be heard and to be taken seriously. Verbal exchange is a basic need. But there is a difference between purposeful communication in a swarm, talking and chatter.

Talk distracts the swarm, hinders the common focus. Talking is entertaining, for example at the coffee machine, serves to relax and is therefore valuable. Without goal-oriented communication, however, no progress can be made. Only goal-oriented communication gets the swarm moving in a meaningful way and thus further, because it serves the common navigation.

Swarms of starlings (as well as some schools of fish) can thus move in a self-organized and coordinated manner as a swarm because they have minimized entropy in swarming. Roles, and therefore responsibilities, are clearly defined for all individuals in the swarm.

Don’t worry: This is not a call to make your company an animal swarm.

But understanding the principle is elementary. A swarm is capable of operations that a bunch of individuals cannot do. A bunch of individuals can be transformed into an army that moves in a reasonably coordinated manner in one direction by means of rules, orders to follow the rules, and the execution of orders. But this movement is two-dimensional. The swarm moves based on principles. These principles are validated with each movement and optimized by micro-adjustments as needed.

The movement as a swarm is three-dimensional.

In the digital age of multidimensional dependencies, only multidimensional movement as an intelligent swarm leads to sustainable success. Those who do not understand this can expect crash landings.

The central tool for coordinating the multidimensional movement is targeted communication, corresponding to the respective roles and responsibilities. The core of goal-oriented communication is that competence speaks to competence and does so competently via asynchronous channels. The exchange at the coffee machine is also asynchronous, because it is probably not scheduled as a meeting, but it falls into the category of talking. Talking can be competent, but it primarily serves individual well-being, which is valuable, but does not serve swarm navigation. Talk is best kept to a minimum, because talk is per se incompetent. Gossip and slander are subsumed under talk, i.e. pure entropy.

Clear roles and responsibilities plus goal-oriented communication reduces entropy and enables efficient self-organization for multi-dimensional agility. This agility is of central importance in the digital era.