Anyone who has worked on a large cross-functional initiative knows the problem. Add more people and, instead of getting more done faster, the work gets harder.
I’ve seen this over and over with my clients. Everyone knows collaboration is critical for success. Yet different functions have different metrics that are often in conflict.
For example, Sales teams are often incentivized through commissions and bonuses to sell high margin, proven products. Innovation teams, on the other hand, need to get the same customers to buy and try one-off new products to test and validate new features. Sales often protects its customer relationships by limiting direct access to product teams, since new products can be risky. As a result, the innovation and time to market slows.
A new study of how ant colonies operate reveals some surprising strategies that can be applied to business collaboration. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, led by behavioral ecologist Ofer Feinerman, gave longhorn crazy ants mazes of varying difficulty and 3D-printed loads to carry home.
As Popular Science reported, almost every group handled the easy mazes. On the difficult ones, however, larger groups were much more efficient than smaller groups.
The question is why ants become more effective as the group grows while human teams and organizations often become slower.
More people require more coordination
The difference between ants and humans comes down to coordination.
Ants follow common rules and keep information moving through the colony. In companies, different priorities and scorecards can send people in competing directions.
Adding someone to a project gives you another person who can contribute. It also adds another set of assumptions and priorities that need to be aligned. As a team grows, the number of relationships that need to be managed grows with it.
According to AchieveIt, 79% of failed strategic initiatives trace back to poor collaboration.
Ant colonies, however, handle this complexity because members inherently operate from the same basic rules. They’re fully aligned. They know their roles. And new members merge right in.
Three ways to improve your next cross-team initiative
If an important strategy depends on several functions collaborating together, focus on three things:
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- Align scorecards. Before launching a cross-team effort, define one shared metric that every function is measured and rewarded on.
- Create information freeflow. Use digital dashboards and communication so every team has the same live view of the “single source of truth” of the work.
- Shrink the rulebook. Replace thick process manuals with a few simple guiding principles people can use to guide aligned action.
This week, pick one priority project that keeps stalling and study the scorecards behind it. Ask whether the teams involved are measured on the same outcome or on numbers that compete with each other.
A bigger team becomes an advantage only when everyone is solving the same maze.
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