Organizing Complexity: How Ant Colonies Self-Manage

I’ve spent my career to-date building operations teams at early-stage companies, and have always been fascinated by the question: how do groups get things done? Organizing Complexity is a series of articles where I’ll be unpacking the structures and systems developed in various contexts, from software engineering to foraging ants, that enable groups of individuals to solve collective problems. The goal of this series is not to reach a forgone conclusion about what is the best system, but instead to shed some light on the process of work.

You don’t have to go far to see complex organization in action — it might be happening right beneath your feet. Ant colonies have been perfecting their methods of organizing for millions of years, achieving success through specialized roles and sets of simple rules. To me, the most fascinating part about ant behavior is the fact that they manage it all without a leader — something that would seem complete unheard of in the human business world.

Even though ant society has no central control, ants can manage to do extraordinarily complex tasks. Fire ants can make a living raft to drift down flooded rivers, trapping air around their bodies so they can still breathe. Wood ants “farm” another species of insect called aphids, collecting honeydew the same way humans might milk a cow. And all species of…