TL;DR: The article explores how the concept of stigmergy—a self-organizing principle observed in ants—can be applied to enable large-scale human collaboration. By leaving visible traces of work and inviting others to build upon them, a 25-person group project was successfully completed without centralized control. This decentralized, trace-based approach led to a more creative and inclusive outcome than traditional top-down methods.

What do ants and successful group projects have in common? More than you think.

“Ok folks, for the next assignment all of you need to collaborate to develop a roadmap of where you’ve been and where you’re going. You’ll need to deliver two artefacts, one static and one dynamic. Deadline is in 6 weeks.”

I’m sure that all 25 of us online, dialing in from our corner of the world, silently asked how the hell were we to do that. I sure did. To date the largest group assignment was 8 people and most of those assignments were tough requiring a lot of legwork to just get alignment on how to even get started. The complexity now just blew up by a power of three!

In my experience such projects could go either one of two ways: either a small sub-group within the larger group do all the work, or nothing happens. However, was there a third way where everybody, or close to everybody, can contribute in a meaningful way? I now believe there is.

Follow the bread crumbs

Why can ants achieve great feats without a top-down hierarchy? How can ants build intricate nests that architects are still learning from on how to control temperature and ventilation¹, or form ant highways between its nest and food sources without a leader? The answer to these questions is Stigmergy.

When ants forage for food they seemingly do so at random, increasing the distance from their nest until they find food or they call it quits and head back to the nest. However, when an ant finds food it leaves a trail of pheromones on its way back to the nest. This trail of pheromones is picked up by another ant, and as it knows its way home so it heads off on the trail in the opposite direction. It finds the food source and returns to its nest leaving another layer of pheromones. By this way the trail becomes stronger and stronger until the food source is exhausted, the pheromones dissipate and ants continue to look for other food. Similarly, for an ant to build nests they need to know where to dig and where to deposit soil. An ant picks up a grain of soil, marks it with pheromones, and drops it where there is a concentration of pheromones², as each ant follows these rules intricate structures form.

The act of leaving a trace of the ant’s actions in the environment for other ants to pick up on leads to a form of self-organization termed ‘Stigmergy’.

Applying Stigmergy to Collaborative Projects

Stigmergy applied to ants is one thing, but how does that help me in my collaborative assignment? Before the first group meeting (organizing that first meeting was an assignment all on its own) I did something unexpected: I created a canvas, drew a frame, inserted one before picture and one after picture of our roadmap. I then communicated to the rest of the group ahead of the meeting my idea to use the canvas to build a narrative on our collective roadmap, whilst communicating several assumptions:

• We (the cohort) each have the same starting point;
• We may have different end points; and
• The roadmap between the start and end is not linear.

During the meeting I brought the attention of the group to the canvas, clarifying that it was open for anybody to contribute to. To my pleasant surprise several members took up the suggestion and started to drop text and images, somebody even added captions to an image that I had inserted! From that point more people got involved co-creating our collective roadmap, each adding their personal flavor to the assignment. I sensed that some members were uncomfortable with the lack of direction, either expecting more guidance or expecting to impose more constraints but I voiced my opinion that each member should have the freedom to add their own perspective, even if that perspective is not aligned with others. Though it is a collective roadmap, it is however composed by the experiences of individuals, each with their own viewpoints and biases which I felt important to bring to bear. In a later session, to my surprise somebody decided to remove the frame that I had started with which was completely the right call – talk about out of the box thinking, just remove the box altogether.

For most assignments the hardest part is getting started which is only amplified in collaborative assignments. People are cautious to make the first move as it may been seen as too imposing or the idea just may get shunned. However, by creating a simple starting point that is open ended and is readily available to everybody, and broadcasting this initial effort to the community for them to take advantage of I was mirroring the stigmergic approach to collaboration: I had intentionally left a trace in our virtual environment and broadcasted to the group of the fact.

Final Thoughts

Taking a stigmergic approach to mass collaboration by a) leaving traces of your work in the team’s operational environment, b) broadcasting to the team that a trace has been made and then c) having the courage that now nobody is directing progress, led to a finished product far more creative and far more effective than something that would have resulted from a directive approach.

Have you used a similar approach to engage others in collaboration? What collaborative projects could you apply a stigmergic approach to?

1. Knowledge Voyager. (2024, May 11). The unique architecture of ant colonies and their implications for human design. Knowledge Voyager. https://knowledgevoyager.com/the-unique-architecture-of-ant-colonies-and-their-implications-for-human-design/ ↩︎
2. Singer, E. (2014, April 9). The remarkable self-organization of ants. Quanta Magazine. https://www.quantamagazine.org/ants-build-complex-structures-with-a-few-simple-rules-20140409/ ↩︎