Honeybee Democracy

Lesson 4: Aggregate the Group’s Knowledge through Debate

The house-hunting honeybees show us a clever way for a decision-making group to make an accurate consensus decision and also save some time. Their trick is to have the scout bees make quorum responses, that is, to have these bees make sharp changes in their behavior when a threshold number (quorum) of individuals support one of the alternatives.

Lesson 2: Minimize the Leader’s Influence on the Group’s Thinking

In addition to conducting meetings in a nondirective way, the leader should encourage the airing of doubts and disagreements, even ones that are critical of the leader. This fosters the free discussion and careful debate that the group will need to thoroughly evaluate its options.

Lesson 3: Seek Diverse Solutions to the Problem

there is no all-knowing central planner supervising the thousands and thousands of worker bees in a colony. The work of a hive is instead governed collectively by the workers themselves, each one an alert individual making tours of inspection looking for things to do and acting on her own to serve the community.

a nifty rule that helps ensure that every participant at the town meeting gets to express his or her thoughts on each issue; no one may speak more than twice on a particular issue until everyone who wants to speak on the issue has had an opportunity to do so once.

the logical first step toward solving the problem is to uncover a profusion of possible solutions in the hope that one will prove excellent.

First, make sure the group is sufficiently large for the challenge it faces. Second, make sure the group consists of people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Third, foster independent exploratory work by the group’s members. And fourth, create a social environment in which the group’s members feel comfortable about proposing solutions.