Teeming: How Nature’s Oldest Teams Adapt and Thrive

by Tamsin Woolley-Barker

Our world is increasingly volatile and unpredictable––organizations need to be on their toes. Over evolutionary time, the most successful species are those that adapt to change. The same is true in business, yet we design for efficient scale-up, standardizing production to match the predictions of a few. Biologists know diversity is the raw feedstock of evolution, yet we systematically suppress it.

We need a new way to organize and work. Earth’s oldest and most successful societies can show us how.

Superorganisms like ants and honeybees have perfected the art of collaboration over tens of millions of years, compounding their wealth from one generation to the next––without bosses, administration, targets, regulations, or paychecks. With twelve simple principles and five simple patterns—Collective Intelligence, Swarm Creativity, Distributed Leadership, Trust, and Regenerative Value—Teeming shows how unique and independent members of superorganisms share work and wealth to create adaptive hotspots of resilience, opportunity, and abundance. Our organizations can do the same.

327 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 23, 2021

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping for strategies, implementation, case studies, and instead found that it would be a fine resource if I needed to do research on any organisms mentioned. I found it hard to follow the connections the author thought she was making.

There were many mistakes that a second reader or editor should have caught. That’s just a pet-peeve.