Re: Insect and human organizations

[David Sumpter]

"Tony Bigbee" writes:
>Hi - If you saw my question on the Swarm modeling list and were deliberately 
>not answering then I apologize for
>contacting you.
> 
>I'm interested in your intuition about why insect organizations can't help us 
>with designing self-organizing
>manufacturing processes.  Would you mind elaborating?  How do you see this as 
>different from social insect
>dynamics informing human organization design?
 
>Your ref to Seeley's Wisdom of the Hive will definitely come in handy.  I 
>appreciate you posting it.
 
Sorry, I don't remeber getting your email to swarm-modelling. So I'll try and 
answer the question now.

Its not that I think the study of self-organisation in social insects is 
completely useless when thinking about how to design a good human organization. 
I just feel that direct analogies don't apply. i.e. when thinking about a 
particular organisational problem, it is unlikely that it would be useful to 
see 
how the bees or ants handle something similar and apply this technique. 

People in the social insect community try to get funding from industry on the 
basis that they will be able to advise them on better work practices. I'm not 
sure if these collaborations work out but I doubt that there are any direct 
benefits. I know in my case I'm sponsored by the Defence Research Agency and I 
doubt they will be getting any direct advice about how to organise troop 
movements! Alot is made of Brittish Telecom's virtual ants which search for the 
best route round a telephone network but this is an example of someone at BT 
knowing about self-organisation as a principle rather than relying on any real 
biology.

I do believe that there are benefits of taking a self-organisation type 
approach 
to organising (or not organising!) humans. The general study of organisations 
and the maths and computer models of them should provide insights into both 
human and insect societies. It is creating the techniques to discuss abstract 
properties of a society which both social insect people and manufacturing 
people 
have an interest in. And yes, if someone who studies bees comes up with an 
abstract technique for investigating links between individuals in the hive then 
manufacturing people would do well to look at it. But this isn't generally what 
happens. To this end I think that the joint reserch between biologists and 
engineers should be into tools such as Swarm and mathematical techniques.

These points may be obvious but I am sometimes frustrated by people taking 
analogies too far when I think there could be real benefits if researchers on 
both sides stepped back from the problems a bit more and thought about what 
tools and techniques they both need. But then I am a mathematician and a 
computer scientist so I would say all this!

David.

---------------------------------------------------------------
David J.T. Sumpter
Mathematics Department, UMIST, P.O. Box 88, Manchester, M60 1QD

http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/dsumpter/beesim/index.html
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