What design teams & honey bees have in common
Did you know?
A single honey bee will make one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its entire lifetime, so to fill a 500g jar of honey is the equivalent to the life’s work of 1428 bees. To put that into perspective, global honey production is about two million tons per year. Think about that next time you have honey on toast!
Why am I writing this article?
Before studying HCI and starting a career in UX, I did a degree in Biology. One of the most memorable parts of the degree was a module in social insects, where we studied the fascinating and complex world of bee, wasp and ant societies.
When I joined the design team at Just Eat, I began to notice curious similarities between the structure and function of the design team here and the structure and function of perhaps the most interesting and complex type of social insect society — the honey bee colony — let me explain…
Flat, agile self-organisation and worker autonomy
When most people think about bees, they think of a totalitarian and rigid society, but in reality they are highly efficient and flexible. A honey bee colony can consist of up to 80,000 bees and, remarkably, efficiency does not decrease as the colony gets bigger as you might expect, but increases. How is this possible? The key is the colony’s organisational set up.
The Queen bee is the focal point of the colony and every bee knows their role, but work in the colony is almost entirely self-organised by the worker bees. While the queen is inside the hive laying eggs, groups of workers around her focus on building new cells for the brood and outside the hive other groups focus on foraging and communications, or clearing away debris.
Groups of bees work together on different and evolving jobs, and there is a constant flow of information and feedback. In essence, the honey bee colony has a workflow structure curiously similar to a 21st century method of driving efficiency in human organisations; that is, by structuring teams to be flat and ‘agile’.
In the design team at Just Eat, we too are set up in a flat agile structure (we don’t in fact practice pure agile, but instead a flavour of agile that works for us). There are four design teams centered around the four pillars of Customer, Restaurant, Courier & Ops. We work in sprints, and each designer will have a particular focus for one or a few consecutive sprints before moving on to the next problem.
Outside of team meetings and ceremonies, a designer will usually form a temporary cross-disciplinary team of stakeholders who will work together on that particular design problem. During the project, the team will work with a user researcher to fill in knowledge gaps and highlight problems and successes in any new design. Progress and updates are reported back to the central design team in ceremonies.
As an Associate in my first year of a career in UX, while being offered ample support and guidance from my line managers and senior team members, I was right away given the freedom to own my own projects and operate as a fully-functional unit within the team. As a junior UXer, I’ve been setting up and leading meetings and workshops — often with experienced stakeholders — and running my own small and medium-sized research and design projects. Although I have had thorough guidance, processes have not been rigidly prescribed and I right away had the freedom to do things my own way.
As well as ample support, we also have cycles of reflection about our work processes; surveys are sent out and retrospective meetings are held, where everyone has a say on the future setup of our workflow. This creates an atmosphere where everyone feels they have the power to contribute to changing and improving the structure of our work.
For both the bee colony and the design team, this setup of distributed decision making, self organisation and worker autonomy, facilitated by persistent information sharing is a key feature of success. The human design team adds conscious reflection into the mix, to make up for not taking millions of years to evolve the efficiency of our processes by natural selection.
Cross functional teams & division of labour
Task Allocation
The bee colony contains three main types of bee: a Queen, Workers, and Drones. Each is physiologically specialised to do a particular set of jobs, which vary throughout a bee’s lifespan; for example a worker is specialised to do house jobs for the first two weeks of her life, then foraging for the remainder of it. Amongst the many jobs needed to upkeep the bee colony are building, nursing, cleaning, guarding, waste removal, foraging, and egg laying; all of which are going on simultaneously most of the time. In essence, the honey bee colony is a great example of a successful cross-functional team, allocating tasks according to expertise.
As Just Eat UXers we work within similarly diverse cross-functional teams to solve problems. Typically, teams consist of a UX Designer, UI Designer, Product Manager, Business Analyst, Developer(s) and often one or more senior stakeholders. During a project, the team will often also work with a user researcher and have input from data and market research.
Like bees, we will ‘divide and conquer’ — divvying up a collection of tasks between team members, with each member taking those tasks most suited to their unique skills. Among the many jobs needed to upkeep a successful design project are collecting quantitative data, workshopping, prototyping, user research and ensuring project alignment with business goals. This combination of division of labour plus collaboration is crucial for the agility and success of a project, allowing a team to work together efficiently and make the most of the varying skill sets within it.
Task partitioning
Group-level coordination of action is essential for the success of the honey bee colony. Tasks are self-allocated by groups of honey bees, dividing themselves in numbers proportional to the size of the jobs. In addition to this, unique tasks are broken down into subtasks assigned to different individuals. This division of labour is also flexible, so that in case of unpredicted events — storm-damage to the hive, say — priorities of work are immediately updated, and tasks accordingly re-partitioned or re-allocated.
Similarly in the design team, we partition work and react to change swiftly and appropriately. Priorities are constantly changed and updated. For example, after the recent merger with Takeaway.com our global brand strategy changed to reflect us as one global business, and for a while product & design teams were intensely focused on changing the look and feel of our products across markets, with orange being the new key colour to reflect the new unified brand identity.
Just as when a bee colony reacts to an overnight storm, new teams and work streams were set up to reflect the evolving requirements and priorities. Working in such a fast growing business, in a competitive market, it is paramount that we are quick on our feet, repartitioning and reallocating in response to new priorities. Just like bees.
Communication, sharing & feedback
To successfully carry out all the necessary jobs in a colony, bees communicate in various and complex ways. One famous example is the waggle dance — amazingly the only known example of a symbolic language in a non-primate species. When a forager bee returns from an expedition having found an abundant source of nectar, they will perform a waggle dance to their fellow worker bees, specially choreographed to communicate the precise location, direction, and quality of the nectar source.
Such open sharing of information is a trait I recognised immediately when I joined the design team at Just Eat. Frequent sharing of insights and feedback on work at all stages of a project is key to the operation of the team. Colleagues listening to a playback in a work in progress meeting will engage in critical discussion about the work, offer advice, or send each other decks of past work that might help to progress the project at hand.
In traditional teams, communication flows downward through hierarchy in a cascade, and follows the ‘spider’ communication model, where individuals don’t have much insight into what other individuals are doing at any given moment. The problem with this is that information flow is linear and much slower, and potentially useful insight an individual might hold stays with them and doesn’t benefit other workstreams.
When communication follows more of a diamond structure, flowing in all directions, everyone within the team has the best possible chance of getting the right information at the right time, as well as enhancing the learning of everyone. In such a big design team with individuals with different levels of experience in UX and within the organisation, this bee-like open communication, sharing & feedback is essential for our work.
What can we learn from bees?
It seems clear then, that when human teams and organisations succeed in organising themselves efficiently, they end up with systems which share some core features with natural world processes. This similarity is likely not by design, but what if we go the other way, and intentionally use nature as a source for inspiration?
An innovative movement in design called ‘biomimetic design’, does precisely this, using biology as inspiration for human products, processes & systems. A famous example of this in practice is the design of the Japanese bullet train, who’s shape was modelled on the Kingfisher bird’s beak in order to address the problem of the train making loud sonic booms in tunnels.
As well as mimicking biological forms, biomimetic design looks to nature to inspire processes and systems. This makes sense when we try to see ourselves in context. We are not the only species that innovates systems; Mother Nature has been innovating for billions of years (albeit a little slower than humans), and has “designed” some of the most complex, successful & harmonious systems in existence.
Here are two ideas for how, as UXers in design teams, we can learn from nature:
Systems thinking in tackling design problems
As well as being cyclical, another characteristic of natural systems is that they are in a state of ecological balance, and this quality is key to their success and longevity. Complex systems like honey bee colonies exist in harmony with their environment, playing a role in pollination and as a food source to other creatures. Shifting one cog can disrupt the wheel.
Similarly, as UXers, if we think about how our design problems and specific pieces of design might affect the system in which they sit, and consider this at all stages of the design process, we are more likely to build longer lasting and more successful systems. This idea is in essence service design.
While as UXers we can’t work across the entire service on every project, we should be more aware of how our changes will impact the wider service, and the socio-technical ‘ecosystem’ they might affect.
Designing circular systems
Successful, long lasting ecosystems in nature have a cyclical flow, meaning bi-products from one process are used as fuel for other processes. If we were to try to model this as UXers, it would mean consistently designing for waste reduction in our products and services by finding something useful to do with the byproducts of our work: turning waste into resource.
An example is systematising a process to ensure failed ideas or dead end pieces of work don’t get thrown away and we learn and build from them. This could simply be an easily accessible team drive where people can log failed ideas.
Another example is in designing circular services. There is an ongoing stream of work at Just Eat on sustainability. The overall goal is to reduce the carbon footprint of Just Eat as a business, by doing things like reducing food waste and reducing or reusing the plastic waste produced as a byproduct of our service. Initiatives like these will make the ‘Just Eat experience’ more circular in nature.
To conclude
The honey bee colony has evolved, over hundreds of millions of years, to become such a high functioning system that biologists often use the term ‘superorganism’ to describe it. By means of an agile organisational structure, clever distribution of work and constant communication the colony maintains the attributes of a superorganism: high degrees of efficiency, internal regulation and resilience. It should be unsurprising therefore, that when human teams and organisations desire to maximise these same attributes, the resulting set up shares some core features with social insect societies. By consciously taking inspiration from nature, we can positively influence products and processes. Who knows how much we can learn from bees!
If you bee-lieve you would make a good fit in our team — click here!
