Ants Are Dumb, But Ant Colonies Are Smart

No individual ant is a genius. They have tiny brains (about 0.0003% of the human brain in size), most are blind and all have a poor sense of smell. And yet they are able to work in coordinated groups, hunt for food, even do some amount of farming (of fungi) and herding (of aphids).

ChatGPT generated cartoon of ants herding aphids. Ants “milk” aphids for a sugary substance called honeydew.

How do the ants do all this? Welcome to the power of networks. The big lesson that we can learn from ants is that the network is greater than the sum of its parts.

The idea of networks is not new. Mathematicians, physicists, biologists and social scientists have been developing the idea for around three hundred years. But in the last 75 years that it has really taken off.

You may have heard of the phrase “six degrees of separation” which is the conclusion of a study done by Stanley Milgram in the USA. The study itself was weak and hence one can argue about the number, but it is true that you can connect any two human beings on earth with just a few handshakes.

The bigger finding is that networks are made up of smaller networks and these are connected to each other by weak links. Each small network tends to be quite dense. Which means that your friends are probably friends with each other. But then your network is connected by a weak link to another network. Your school friends group may be connected to your office group mainly through you. However, these so-called weak links are really crucial in transmitting ideas, information and connections. Here is a cartoon by ChatGPT on the idea of weak links.

Dr Nicholas Christakis is a medical doctor as well as a PhD in sociology who has studied networks. He did a study that showed how obesity spreads through networks. He showed that one person’s obesity not only led to obesity among his close friends, but also among friend’s friends and friend’s friend’s friends. He found this “movement” in the way people gave up smoking over decades. He even traced the impact of networks in tastes in music and movies.

The idea of networks is at the heart of the microfinance revolution. Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank found that it was risky to lend to one person who had poor credit rating, but it was quite safe to give to groups of women who formed a self help group. The women in the group put pressure on each other to regularly make payments and also helped each other in times of need. Moreover the idea of taking micro loans spread from one group to another through weak links.

Another network that seems to be thriving is the one built by the BJP. They have thousands of “Panna Pramukhs” across the country. These are people who are responsible for one page of the voter list in their constituency. This gives these young men (they seem to be mostly men) a sense of importance and social status. This creates loyalty to the party and they influence the people around them in their voting as well as on other issues important to the party. Political scientists have pointed to this network as being the key to the strength of the BJP.

The key strength of Social Purpose Organisations (SPOs) is their connect with the community that they serve. Thus SPOs and their volunteers are parts of strong networks. This enables them to create a great deal of social change. However, they can do more by studying the properties of human networks and how information flows through these networks.

Bharat Anand is a Professor at Harvard Business School and the person who started the school’s online version. He wrote a book called “The Content Trap” where he argues that most organisations spend most of their time in perfecting their content and don’t think about the network that will disseminate this content. He argues that the emphasis needs to be the other way around. He credits this new thinking to the success of HBS Online which has over 85% completion rates when most online courses have a rate of less than 3%.

There is a lot to learn here. Here is a list of books that I have found interesting.