Swarm Intelligence: What Nature Teaches Us About Shaping Creative Leadership

by James Haywood Rolling Jr.

Companies and organizations everywhere cite creativity as the most desirable – and elusive – leadership quality of the future. Yet scores measuring creativity among American children have been on the wane for decades. A specialist in creative leadership, professor James Haywood Rolling, Jr. knows firsthand that the classroom is a key to either unlocking or blocking the critical imagination. He argues that today’s schools, with their focus on rote learning and test-taking, work to stymie creativity, leaving children cut off from their natural impulses and boxed in by low expectations. Drawing on cutting-edge research in the realms of biological swarm theory, systems theory, and complexity theory, Rolling shows why group collaboration and adaptive social networking make us both smarter and more creative, and how we can design education and workplace practices around these natural principles, instead of pushing a limited focus on individual achievement that serves neither children nor their future colleagues, managers and mentors. The surprising truth is that the future will be pioneered by the collective problem-solvers, making this a must-read for business leaders, educators, and anyone else concerned with nurturing creative intelligence and innovative habits in today’s youth.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 26, 2013

Reviews

[Hunter Radecki · Rating 3 out of 5]

The final third soiled it for me.

Had he removed the subtitle regarding nature, I’m sure more would enjoy this book, as the beginning is the only portion that incorporates the living world outside of us.

Creativity may feel deeply personal at times, but it’s an iterative process that involves plenty of input, conscious or not, that’s born from others. Like any engineering problem to be solved, the best solutions contain the most diverse input. Variety is beneficial to the product.

The book discusses this in connection to natural systems and draws upon technological examples to further elaborate.

It’s great (I love systems thinking), but the detachment from the natural world while shifting focus to personal education implementation is what lost me. As in, he stopping talking about what the book was supposed to be about (via the title), and spoke about his own experience as a teacher instead. I didn’t want to hear that.

One of the best applications of this idea on creativity is how it relates to personal pursuits. Like your career or hobbies. If you want to excel and be the best at whatever it is you’re pursuing, you need exterior input. You need knowledge of other topics. You can’t be too tunnel visioned.

Variety is the spice of life ah ha ha…

[Richard Subber · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's not often I pick up a book as puzzling as this one. I confess I didn't read much of it. Here's why:
The subtitle of this book is "What Nature Teaches Us About Shaping Creative Leadership." I did very carefully read the introduction. I think it's fair to say there's no credible mention of any kind of leadership in the introduction. There's a lot of talk about "creativity" -- Rolling repeatedly says "creativity" can't be defined, and then finally permits himself to say "Creativity is a collective force that reinforces the success of the human species." Just so, perhaps...but hardly a useful definition.
The author riffs repeatedly about social behavior, collective action, the inadequacies of the American public education system, his own status as a "gifted and talented" elementary school student, the birth of American jazz, and "mercantile economic systems," and he warns the reader that the book is written with a "decidedly autobiographic lens." He mentions several off-topic personal anecdotes in the introduction, so I believe that warning is realistic. He is certainly multi-syllabic, as in "mutually beneficial coevolutionary advantages."
In the introduction he mentions "swarm theory research" and "swarm intelligence" with some frame of reference commentary....however, dadburn it, I'm no expert on "swarm theory" or "swarm intelligence," but I think it has something to do with the contingent, self-organizing action of, for example, social insects (e.g. ants) whose genetic programming permits them to collectively do things like "find" food through the agency of repeated, random individual contacts and signals that mindlessly generate directional group behavior, or something like that. I don't get the connection to "creativity."
This book seems like a collection of anecdotal research. There is a four-page section labeled "renewed creative leadership," but in that section the text doesn't actually mention "creative leadership" and the phrase "creative leader" appears once. Take your own guess about the meaning of "creative leadership."
One last note: Rolling provides copious endnotes. Among them are almost 90 references to page numbers in books, and of those, about half cite content in the first 50 pages of the book, and of those, about half cite content in the first 15 pages of the book. Just seemed curious to me.
More at
http://richardsubber.com/

[Carrie Kilgore · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a book that I read slowly, giving myself time to pause and think about the concepts as they were presented, and it's a book I'm sure I'll read again. The author draws on cutting-edge research to demonstrate how humans collaborate adaptively, just as swarms of other animals do. If anything, the human capacity for swarming behavior is much larger and more complex due to our ability to imagine. The question is: how do we facilitate the processes that lead to greater creativity in our endeavors? At a time when it has become clear that the most vibrant future for the human population worldwide rests upon people's ability to collaborate creatively with others, American children continue to decline in creative ability (as determined by testing). The author outlines ways in which the arts (sometimes called the humanities) can be used to rectify the problems engendered by rote learning and endless test-taking...and to jumpstart greater creativity and cooperation, traits that our working world has come to prize. (The section on how Finland has done this, with breathtaking results, is fascinating.)

But this is not just a book about how to restructure the way we teach our children...it is a book that explains how swarming works in other animals and in us, with clear illustrations and examples of the principles involved. It shows how these swarming principles foster not only individual creativity, but the creativity of groups, along the road to the building of superorganisms. It presents a list of habits we can all begin practicing to build our creativity...even as it debunks the myth that only a few of us are creative.

This is a book I would recommend to anyone and everyone, no matter what interests or goals that person might have. The subtitle may give the impression that this is a book about building leadership qualities--and it is--but it also builds an understanding that will facilitate changing our minds about what effective leadership really is.

I received this book for free through LibraryThings. Thanks!

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book progresses thought and action around how to live and lead more creatively. While acknowledging the challenge of the task, Rolling begins the book by talking about definitions of creativity and how it may be measured. I feel like this gives body of the writing a good grounding and Rolling takes the reader through the connections between swarm behavior and collective development of creativity. Rollings outlines the reasons why creative leadership solutions to problems and leadership are sorely needed, but does not get bogged down with outlining our challenges. The pace of the book keeps moving and inspires further thought and action. A worthwhile read for educators, business people, and anyone who feels that they want to know how their creative expression might serve the world.