 I think I will get started, it is almost there. So good afternoon and welcome to this session here. My name is Tathagat and I work for a company by the name Nerd Wallet, we are in personal finance space, so I am setting up the Indian operations for us, we are a San Francisco based company and basically a startup there. So today afternoon I am going to talk about super organism mindset, is a term familiar to anyone? Super organism, okay, okay so we will discover that. I mean even if you just come across this term, you may not know the meaning, what does it mean to you? Just some random shots at it, powerful, like a superman, superhuman, not normal, no restriction, okay, anyone else? Which can transform, okay that is a good perspective, so kind of shape shifting, it can shape shift itself or something, right, okay, so that is a pretty close to what, maybe I am sure you would have seen a picture like this, Tom and Jerry are one of the cartoons, right, you have a big fish and then it is chasing the small fish but then the small fish decide to do something totally different here, they actually organize into what looks like a big fish and then it scares the hell out of the big fish, you remember watching any of the video cartoons there, right, so as you said this is probably the closest to there, of course the other things are right, I think it is a powerful something, no restriction in some sense, so what tends to happen is this is not an idea limited only in animation cartoons, it actually happens in nature and we call it as a superorganism, so in this talk I want to discuss with you what is a superorganism, what does it mean, what are the characteristics of a superorganism and then come back to the human groups and teams, what does it even mean for us, what does it mean to the team, what does it mean to the organizations, what can we learn from there and can we apply some of these ideas at the workplace, right, so these are some of the things there, so it is meant to be a, it is meant to be an open ended talk, I am not talking about something that I have done, I am only talking about some of the ideas that I keep learning about myself and how we can really, that is why it is really, so even though the track is agile mindset, in some sense we are actually talking about a much bigger agile mindset and that is the whole idea here to really do a very open ended conversation about what does it mean and what can it do for you, right, alright, so I will get started and I want to show you some of the stuff, forget about the text here, it is not meant to be read and sorry about that, the other slides have only pictures, most of them, so you will see a much more eye friendly slide, all of us remember watching ants when we were small, right, you drop a, drop a little bit of sugar and they are all over the place and they will just wipe off everything from the, from the kitchen, right, slab there, people have been studying ants for a long period of time and some of the very interesting things they have found is that ants are a very resilient creature, by themselves they are very weak, if you leave a few ants or a couple of ants or even few hundred ants, they will all probably circle and circle eventually they will die, but you bring a million of these and they will wipe off probably a horse or they will wipe off a human being of the table, they are so aggressive really, so they actually get very strong as a group when they are in large numbers, but they are very weak when they are in small numbers, remember that thing, because that is an important perspective to do that, so they are very resilient in the sense, if the ants are going and if you, if they actually find a crack in between, like let us say they are, they are crawling on the table and they see a crack there in the table, on the table surface, they will actually form a bridge here and the interesting part is nobody tells them that hey now is the time, let us have a, let us have a kickoff meeting, let us, let us make a burn down chart, let us do something or let us have a project management workshop or something, they just do that, it seems to be a very natural kind of a thing there, there are tons of videos on YouTube, so if you feel interested do watch some of them, because it is a very, very interesting thing, within a matter of seconds literally the bridge will auto form, they will start crawling on the top of it, it is a very altruistic nature, some of the ants are happy to just be the bridge and let other ants walk on them, how many human beings would be willing to do that, right, we actually have a other name for the, for the situation where human beings walk all over you, we call it as office politics, right, so it is a very different context here, there is, there are species of ants which actually are very resilient when it comes to being in water, now again an isolated ant might drown, but if you have, if you take a million ants, they actually become a raft by itself and they can float and they can go anywhere else there without drowning any of the ants in the process, the ants have been known to make very complex architectures, this is actually the scientists what they do is because they don't know how the structure inside is, little okay, if you are an animal lover you may not like to hear what I am about to say that, but what they have done is, what they do is, they actually pour malted aluminium or a malted metal inside in an ant hill and then when it cools down they actually remove it and then they find that actually the ant thing, like you can see this, this guy is probably six feet and this is extending one and half times actually, so they make these complex structures and these are not just random structures, people who have studied ant colonies for years they say it actually is a very, very well architectured place, there are places where the young eggs will be hatched, there are places where the young pupa will be there, there are places where even the dead ants will be, because in nature there is no concept of technical debt, technical debt exists only in IT industry, in nature there is no concept of waste, the waste from one living organism is actually the input for another organism and have you ever seen any kind of a waste, it just tends to, it is a very transient condition and it just goes and becomes, it disappears because it integrates into another food chain there and even the ants actually do not like to see dead bodies of other ants there, so they actually have places in the ant colonies or in the ant forms, where these are kept separately there and they get disintegrated over time there, so ants are actually a very, very interesting, very, very smart set of what we call as social animals or social insects in this case, let us take little more examples of that, some of these things also show very interesting characteristics of what we call as a self-organizing kind of a thing, that means there is nobody really kind of externally saying do it this way, do it that way, but then magically we see some of these kind of a thing, so this is a kind of a green plants here, they all seem to create these fractal kind of shapes which all are alike, who is really doing this kind of a molding, nobody is doing that, maybe it is genetically encoded, but then they have this kind of a thing where it is self-organizing in nature there, we have lot of examples of some of this kind of stuff, I am sure you would have seen this swarm of birds very common during the summertime evenings right, you have these millions of birds that are going there and they actually move like this, have you watched this right, if you just look it up in the, typically this is the best time in Bangalore, if you just look it up, if you have free sky available still in a part of Bangalore where we live, I am sure you can enjoy that. Now one of the beautiful things that you may not have noticed, but let me mention and hopefully when I mention it might become little more prominent to you is, if you see these million birds flying together, do you think there is a project manager or a CEO bird here, is there somebody who is telling let's go this way or let's go that way, question number one. Number two, have you ever seen two birds colliding with each other, these are birds flying at random, there is no project plan, there is no Gantt chart, there is no product road map, there is no burn down chart that is telling them that this is the direction we are going to do, they seem to have to be what, what we might even call what Edward De Bono might call as a water logic right, it is just going very fluidly and yet these million birds don't seem to bang into each other, very interesting thing there and it, I think it's worth asking what is it that these guys do, I mean Bangalore you put three people on an empty road, they will end up banging into each other, but then you have a million birds who are flying without any master plan and they don't seem to have this kind of a problem, so what is so unique about a bird swarm here right, this may or may not have seen, I'm sure all of us remember seeing fireflies at least when we were kids right and one of the biggest, one of the very interesting thing about fireflies is that fireflies by themselves are just emitting light at a certain frequency interval right, maybe every second they are flashing the lights, but if you take a large colony of fireflies a very interesting phenomena happens which is known as synchronization, so what tends to happen is that when people are, when you started they are flashing as synchronously randomly, but within a few moments they are all flashing at the same time, now one question why do the fireflies flash, anyone knows that, communicating what, right direction incomplete answer anyone else wants to build on what he said, I mean he said they are communicating, they are basically communicating something, okay they won't obviously call the predator they might be look, so there are multiple theories, one of the theories is they are just trying to mate, that's a simple biological fact of life actually they are just looking for the female fireflies to mate and people say that by flashing enough number of lights, now the question again we have to see the dichotomy in nature, why would all the fireflies participate if that was the nature, the reason being if I am a single firefly I am doing I can attract the mates for me, but if I am a part of it, it is the density per unit firefly is getting diluted a lot, so why will I cooperate there, I should be competing right, a firefly should be competing for a mate, but here a firefly is actually collaborating for a mate, so it's a very different kind of a biological phenomena happening there, there is another thing another theory that says they actually flashed together so that there is enough light for them to be able to see the point you said termites which are their prey, so they can eat the termites there, nobody knows it for sure what is the thing, but these are some of the plausible theories here, but important point to remember is we believe that in biological world we compete with each other right, I mean Darwin's world was really all about survival of the fittest, so we are competing with each other, we are all fellow competitors, but here you will see one after other examples, instead of competing they are collaborating, they are working together, they are keeping their self interest on the back burner, but they are willing to pursue a common self interest of the larger group there right, this is a very unique kind of a thing happening there, we will investigate what does it really mean, fish vortex have you seen this kind of a phenomena, a lot of species of fish when they are trying to protect themselves they create this very high speed kind of a vortex and they actually confuse the predator fish and the whole idea there is that one the probability of a one single fish becoming a prey is very small, because there are now millions of them and they basically move so fast that they actually in some sense tell the predator that if you want to catch me it's not so easy for you to catch me, you will have to really you will also probably have to move at the same speed as it is there and it's a safety number is there right, so these are some of the things how they do that thing, we might think animals are the only one have you heard of something known as a wood vibe web, like a worldwide web www this is something how plants communicate with each other and this is a theory that has been around only for last 20-25 years, until last 20-25 years we didn't even know how plants communicate with each other, but there is a very sophisticated fungi based mechanism it's known as a mycelium based network and what they do is that the trees actually communicate with each other, now again you have to understand the thing a plant's basic the core purpose of the roots of a plant is to provide enough nutrition here so that the plant survive, but what scientists have found out is that plants actually so if this plant sees that this plant does not have enough nutrition, guess what this plant will actually signal a very sophisticated way to send more carbon it's way, there are proven scientific experiments where they have found that if there is a mother tree with child tree right, so these are really the one that have come out of that mother tree and the mother tree is able to see that one of the child trees in distress it is able to send more carbon their way through the mycelium network so that that child tree can survive, again there is a high unusually high level of collaboration happening between the living beings which normally we would not even be aware of right so these are some of the things so what's happening here let's just take a step back and see why are these individual members of species collaborating instead of competing for resources how do they manage to orchestrate their individual behaviors in favor of a single collective behavior and is it limited to some social insects animals and birds or might also apply to humans what do you guys think I'll just take a pause here for a moment what do you guys think any thoughts on that yes as we get more autonomous and drones and other kind of a thing that's that knowledge is going to become very important for us right yeah so but why do they even decide to collaborate with each other why not simply take the food whatever is there because that's what ultimately every human every organism wants to survive okay so okay so that's a thought process let's see that yeah anyone else any other thought okay so let's see let's examine some of these last question do you think this can apply to human beings are we too selfish we are too selfish then we do that okay let's examine some of these yeah so some intelligence is actually one of the behaviors that we are now beginning to understand and see that but the AI is obviously our program that we can program and expect them to do something but as human beings do you think like this room full of people can ever get to any level of cooperation like that is that a reasonable thing or are we too selfish yeah so I think what she said for example if there is a common threat that probably unites us let's see that right let's see some examples so obviously Darwin favored competition right Darwin said survival of the fittest right so how do you be the fittest because obviously you are competing for food mates and resources so obviously you have to basically adapt to the change and there could be a fight for it right because you are trying to protect your own turf there but so how do we explain intra species cooperation right because a lot of these examples that we saw are intra species not inter species but intra species within the same species they are cooperating so how do they do that and if you look at Dawkins he talked about the selfish gene right some people might be familiar with this the seminal book the selfish gene where the point Richard Dawkins said was that it is the gene which really wants to protect itself and it finds out a way in which the gene will get passed down to the offsprings right so the whole thinking was that it is it is if there are enough number of what they call as phenotypes who are really protecting the genes then it will get passed down to the next generation there right it still doesn't fully explain the altruistic nature really on why people or why species should work together it still gives a feeling that I should be very selfish and how really I am doing it because end of the day what matters is me right so that's the kind of a thing now a lot of this has been a subject matter of study for a long period of time and the whole perspective is I'll just read this one despite the principle of survival of the fittest the ultimate criteria which determines whether a gene is will spread or not whether the behavior is to the benefit of the behavior but whether it is the benefit of the gene itself with altruism this will happen only if the affected individual is a relative of the altruism therefore having an increased chance of carrying the gene so altruism is happening there but as long as I see that maybe you and I we have the same gene then maybe there is going to be an altruism there so there is some kind of a theory that seems to bring bring that perspective there I'll skip that one because I think this is too much of detail on that but let's let's jump into this whole thing of whatever we are seeing let's try to create a language around that we have been calling it as super organism the term itself is not very new actually the term is at least 200 year old it was actually created by a guy named James Hutton he was the father of geology and he coined the term back in 1789 but very famous entomologist the guy who studies ants wheeler he actually created it and the whole idea of super organism is something that is a combination of a lot of individual elements but behaves like a full element by itself right so when organisms of same species come together for a common purpose and behave as if they were a single organism they accomplish the same task as the individual organism but with far less processing power it's a very important thing and I'll explain you what that means which means that if per unit the power consumption or the calorie consumption of one living organism was x if hundred of them come there it is not 100x it is less than 100 we believe that this could be a reason that explains why they come together because it's a more energy efficient way for the species to operate there right so we'll see that thing and it was initially applied to what is some known as a you social element insects you social you means good right so these are the these are the good good social like ants and termites and honey bees these are what is known as you social insects for example they are able to scale this is one of the interesting part of it the biomass of ants in the world is probably the same as human beings and the biomass of termites is 27 times more than the human beings but have you ever seen carbon dioxide poisoning killing termites have you ever seen traffic jams happening in the world of ants and termites and honey bees we don't see that but we human beings with the same biomass as ants are not able to build a sustainable planet we are clearly getting something wrong most of the time the scale up we talk of scaling up in agile we have to slap a lot of frameworks on the top of it otherwise we cannot even seem to scale up right and yet these ants and termites and honey bees can scale up to millions and millions of them without needing any layer of infrastructure around them so what is it that we can learn from them and that is the whole subject of super organism now how do the super organism what are their characteristics one of the interesting characteristics the first and foremost is something that we call as division of labor in fact a lot of us believe that agile and scrum in particular is a very egalitarian organization right there is no hierarchy there is no senior junior all that thing right let me also make it a little more provocative we also believe that there is no cast inside a scrum team well guess what nature actually has something that biologists call as cast it may not please a lot of us sitting here but nature actually has this concept and if you for example look at ants there are primarily three kinds of ants there is there is the the queen which queen is not the boss of it incidentally as some of you know queen is only known as queen because she lays the eggs and the only reason why a female ant will become queen is because she is fed more no other reason so they just have an infinite capacity literally because they can lay eggs for like 20 years actually in some cases then you have you have the infertile workers these are typically the female workers and the male as you can imagine from the human species they don't do much here I mean in most of the cases their only job is procreation and nothing else and in many species they are actually eaten up by the female as soon as the copulation happens was that they bite their head off and they are like protein that's it nothing more than that but then there is a division of labor clearly along the reproductive and non-reproductive lines which actually gives them the social status inside a beehive or inside an ant colony or inside a termite mound so nature actually doesn't think everybody is equal nature doesn't say that there has to be egalitarian in everything there there are clearly roles which are genetically pre-adapted we come hardwired with some of these roles there and nature doesn't make a big deal of that but that's exactly how the how it is seen there the second big idea there is what is known as U-Sociality the U-Sociality essentially means good social these are the and if you if you read about sociology this is the highest form of sociality and what it means it is very simple three things one is cooperative brute care essentially what it means is they take care of their young simple simple English second is overlapping generations they can have a grand grandparents and a parent and a child generation all living together there and thirdly they have a reproductive division of labor now biologists called any of them insects having this kind of a thing as a U social behavior there again the key the key thing is why do they have why do they do this kind of a thing out of the entire animal kingdom only about one only about two dozen insects and animals actually show this kind of a behavior not everyone shows that but those who show they show some these common traits in in each of them they show another thing something known as a collective intelligence you talked about the swarm intelligence something like that we are beginning to see where we are talking about how instead of one single one single brain being the source of insights there is there is this whole thinking of collectivism and how do we really work together there to do this kind of a thing they are a more consensus driven decision making I talked about energy efficient this is a very interesting graph actually known as Kleber's law I'm sure none of you studied biology I actually flunged in my biology in 12th class whatever biology I'm talking about is my own self interest otherwise I'm not even qualified to speak on that so this is something which actually was in 1930s a biologist by name Kleber and what Kleber discovered was a very interesting thing actually what he found was that as the body weight of animals keeps increasing the power consumption that is the amount of calories they need actually is its scales three fourth to the power of animals mass so if you start here you will basically see there is a mouse there is a rat here there is a rabbit there is a dog there is an elephant and there is a whale in biological terms you can almost predict if you are given an animal and if you are given the mass of that animal you can almost predict what kind of a calorific requirement it would have there so it's a very interesting thing that as the animal size grows bigger it does not need linearly same amount of energy per unit size it needs lesser energy it is more efficient actually that is why some of the longer some of the bigger animals live longer the blue sperm whale is supposed to live for 90 years or 100 years elephants are supposed to have lived to 80 to 100 years because their calorific requirements are not the same as their body mass linearly would be compared to the smaller animals for example a mouse might live only a few years or a couple of years for example a rat or a guinea pig or a rabbit or a dog might go to 20 years but an elephant or a sperm whale would go up to 80 to 100 years there why is it important in this point here well what they have found is that the this so-called super organism also shows the same behavior which means that if there was one single insect if that insect required energy x and if there are million of them they would not require 1 million x they would require three fourth of a million x it has a huge implication because that tells that coming together makes you more energy efficient so there is a reason why they come together because a lot of and i'll give you little little more graphic examples to explain what i mean with that but the whole idea there is that it takes a lot of sense for them to be together rather than being alone there their survival chances are much better there and and then they show this whole idea of self-organization where where the key thing in agile terms we always call of self-organization i personally believe we agile is don't even understand what is self-organization we all need to go to a bio biology class or or or read bio mimicry or or listen to some of the stuff there from complex adaptive systems to even begin begin to appreciate what is really self-organization there i'll not have time to really go into details on that but this is there but the key idea is i think what we all get intuitively the system without any external impetus is internally able to realign and readjust itself and reorganize itself somebody talked of shape shifting it's in a physical sense but it essentially is what we are saying is it is able to realign its energies or actions to restore the balance or go back and kind of go back to the old status quo if not if not i mean it it doesn't really just become a sitting duck that kind of a thing there swamp creativity is something which is beginning to happen there we i think the closest example that we can see is wikipedia and open source is a great example of some creativity nobody is really creating a master plan in some sense but then it is basically the participants who are guiding the whole thing there so that's the kind of a characteristic we are seeing here also so how do we decode super organisms one reference that i want to give us this lovely book theming written by doctor tamson woolly barker and she has actually over the years of her research she has found these 12 patterns of what really super organisms are all about and how can we really do that what i'm trying to do in the next few slides is just take a reference for them in the human context and see how they can how we can really do some of them so the question is is there a possibility of a human super organism can we apply a lot of these ideas to really make more productive teams more resilient organizations more effective and high performing human groups right these are some of the questions that i want to do and the in the perspective that we want to do is something that that is known as in latin is e pluribus you know has anyone heard of this phrase so what it means is from many one and it's exactly like for example a bouquet of flowers you could have a lot of flowers there that are basically individual there but the value is much much different they still are made of many but but the bouquet itself still looks like the flower bunch there and it was actually adopted as the as so if you have a if you have a dollar or a quarter dollar coin every US dollar coin or a bill actually has this written on them us was founded by the founding fathers on this paradigm that we want to become a become a country where everybody comes together as one and not really kind of have running in different direction so just to just to give a perspective on that one so let's look at some of the some of the examples where probably we might be a human super organism i don't know i want to have a dialogue with all of you here do you think a human pyramid is a is a super organism it it i mean it right it it's all coming together it's behaving like one single thing there is probably no central controller it is evolving there is a self-organizing behavior there because if it is tilting you cannot predict the wind at that point in time maybe the wind is swaying the whole thing there and the team probably has to do something else to kind of do a self-correction there right so some of that stuff might be happening for all we know as as the human pyramid is getting formed there yes they might have practiced they might have done that kind of a stuff but at that point in time it is a new deal right they they are they are probably kind of trying to do that thing then the whole thing falls there right yeah yeah yeah and you know that my favorite thing of north and south is i'm a north indian who has been living in south now i consider myself as a banglorean but when you are in north indian anything below mumbai is a madrasi and if you're a south indian anything above mumbai is a panjabi right so we we are very simple people we have we have divided the world in just two simple things right so human pyramid okay what about the pedestrian crossing is anyone familiar with this shibuya crossing shibuya crossing is the world's busiest crossing in tokyo it is it's it's like it is it's taken as a case study maybe i i think we need to learn from it in banglore right do you think this is this could be a superorganism i don't know it does behave like a very different kind of a thing it does seem to have some kind of a like if it was as a one one single mass of people was kind of like doing it or people had their own kind of a thing there the queue seems to form people just people intuitive nobody tells them to go like this people just seem to automatically form lanes people just seem to have there is there nobody who's really setting the order for the whole group there but inside people just form those chains and they just kind of follow the whole thing there right so it could be it could be an example of what a what a superorganism could be what about an emergency room everybody is a specialist in that every doctor anesthetist nurse everybody is there but i hope none of you have ever been to an emergency being treated by the doctors but if you have had a chance to watch some of the movies or something they work like a swiss clockwork right they there's like tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk as if they have probably rehearsed the whole script millions of times and yet they cannot predict what the next patient will come with they work like a single unit they work like so again now you might some of you might argue and say that it doesn't seem to cut a lot of ice right because so for example not everybody is because in scum we are we love the whole phrase of self-organizing and right and we go into this whole fungibility fungibility i mean if you are if you are a leader you are a vp or a director you love this term fungible right and then the second term you love is resources nothing gives you more pleasure than calling human beings as resources and then when you add it together you say fungible resources that means oh today you are doing front end tomorrow you can do back end what is the big deal about it there's no difference a programming is a programming right so you can do that kind of a thing there now you might think that hey in in scum i know that the whole idea is a cross functional team where everybody's a generalizing specialist so anybody can because we have something known as open allocation that means i can bid for it and say okay i want to do database work in this or next time i want to do back and work on that one and and in theory people should be fungible so they are able to do the whole stuff there well in reality even biologically we are not like that whatever your leg can do your hand cannot do whatever your hand can do your eyes cannot do that is how the nature has created us that's exactly it doesn't mean that simply that we should consider ourselves as my hand and my eyes are irreplaceable my hands can see and my eyes can feed me and that doesn't that's crazy right so same way even if this is a self-contained self-organizing fully autonomous team it does not mean that the job of anesthetist can be done by the radiologist and the job of radiologist can be done by the head nurse everybody has a place to play they might be self-organizing but that does not mean that they will genetically change what they are pre-adapted to do they are already hardwired to do some of that kind of stuff so remember that thing but that constraints aside they still work together as a cohesive unit as if you would not be able to say right any change come anything comes the whole unit responds as a single unit not like a very fragmented kind of group of human beings there what about a cycle cycling peloton have you heard of this term peloton I'm sure if you have watched Lam's Armstrong on steroids going going through the French mountains you would have seen that there is there is this group of cyclists that actually comes together and there might be an Armstrong here somewhere actually and this formation is known as a peloton and it's a very interesting thing so what peloton does is that most of these people are not even competing with a Lam's Armstrong they are they are only helping Lam's Armstrong how are they doing it the guy who is here is actually taking the maximum draft on himself because he will get exhausted if he so he's a pace-setter and he will get exhausted and he will drop off his he's not even in the race he's what is a pace-setter and Lam's Armstrong is preserving energy the fact that he is a part of this peloton gives him the ability to go because there is no wind resistance that is against him these guys are taking it but he is able to actually enjoy it and later on when when the right time comes there the peloton goes away and this guy just zooms in he takes one more steroids and goes there right that kind of stuff there is that a super organism it's behaving in a very different manner but it's behaving like a very cohesive unit it is is it competing with each other it's collaborating most of the people are showing unusually altruistic behavior of helping a Lam's Armstrong win the race there they themselves are not worried about fame or glory or money right they might get some money but definitely not fame or glory you will not even know who they were but that's how a peloton works what about a Mexican wave would you call a Mexican wave as a super organism who decides okay now you guys will do now you guys will do now you guys will do it just starts there you watch people one set of people decides to do that and then the whole stadia transforms into a Mexican a giant circular Mexican wave there right so it's a behavior which is spontaneous random it is what we call as in complex systems we cannot predict the next state we cannot predict the past state there is no centralized controller it's an emergent behavior in this particular case it's a kind of a repetitive thing but a swarm is also something like that it's just that the swarm decides at that point sir in time to kind of go there what about a flash mob now it's possible that a lot of times flash mobs are pre-rehearsed in reality that's fine that's perfectly okay but despite that they may not always been the case I mean nowadays if you are really creating it as a performing event then it might be pre-rehearsed but conceptually when it came the whole idea was that you have a group of people who are just basically coming together and they just start spontaneously coordinating and synchronizing their dance moments there right what about mosh pit anyone has been in a mosh pit anyone is familiar with the idea okay so this is not an Indian phenomena I learned it from my son actually because he's in college in US so I learned it from him so what happens is this these are the heavy rock stuff there and if you watch it on YouTube you should watch some of this stuff this is crazy all of us will go wild actually so what happens is that guy is singing heavy rock and all that thing and there is two group of people they come and bang against each other it's like the Ramanan Sagar Mahabharat kind of a thing there right it's like people just come it's like thousands of people just come and bang into each other there they are behaving they are all going thousand people like that I don't know if it causes injuries or even deaths but people do it actually so mosh pit is something like that which you have to see to believe it you have been inside so you probably have more idea than rest of us here but this is like you have so you have thousand people nobody's telling anything nobody's centrally guiding it people are just waiting in anticipation and actually if you think of it there is no real difference between how these people in the mosh pit are behaving then the birds a million birds flying with each other so there is a guy by name Craig Reynolds in 78 he created this algorithm known as Boyd's so he started saying that hey how do I really simulate the birds flying there and he created a very simple algorithm he created a program Boyd's with three simple rules and that three simple rule is actually able to explain exactly how birds fly without colliding with each other the first one was maintain the same distance as the bird in front of you very logical right you don't need to have a nuclear physics phd to do that second is I mean like you maintain equidistance with your neighbors second is maintain the same speed and that's a guidance that you give to people driving on a highway right your highway limit is 55 miles but if the other guy is traveling at 80 miles you don't want to be at 55 and get become a roadkill right even DMV like in US if you're driving DMV will say hey even though there is a speed limit but it says that you follow the lane speed what people are doing otherwise you will create a traffic there so the birds follow exactly same thing actually right so these are two or three simple principles with which they have been able to do if you look at mosh pit that's probably the same thing happening there all people are doing is they are just following the guy or the girl in front of them and they are doing at the same pace and they are just following the whole thing and this is kind of happening there what about a skydiving formation the skydiving found formation could be for example they might I mean there's only so much you can practice this was the world record 200 people in a single formation there but then they might have a high level kind of an idea what they want to do but that at that point in time how they are self-organizing how do they are coming together we cannot predict it it's a complex adaptive system we cannot predict what is the next state right there is this kind of a thing there I would even anyone has heard of burning man burning man is a great example of how impromptu human groups come together so every year in the month of july august sometime about 100,000 people come together it's nowhere in the middle of a desert in nevada where they come there and they start creating this kind of a township where they live there there is no economy at that point in time it is what is an exchange economy that means you can you only can barter stuff there you cannot buy I think I believe the only thing you can buy is water and ice cream everything else is a barter stuff there so and people live there for a week like that in the middle of it and then they burn a big big thing they call as the burning man and the height of that keeps going up all the time who organizes it who creates the whole thing there who tells people how to really do this kind of a thing it's all it's all and they are behaving as one single organism which might be doing the same kind of a thing there right so I would even argue that this this is a great example of a group which is doing I would even argue kum mela is like that I had a chance to go to kum mela this year and I saw like literally literally crores of people there and it was an exceptionally well organized event there I mean I did study at alava long back but that was a long back I went after almost 30 years and I saw amazing stuff nothing I mean whatever I had conceptions about what it was and what it used to be it is like people are behaving themselves so the system is actually being respected by the individuals there you have you literally have millions and millions of people there but they are behaving as a one single organism might be actually doing it in the right way rather than unruly groups here and there which is kind of becoming it so I think these are to me these are some great examples of how it could be so how do we bring some of that into this I just want to take a leaf from project Aristotle project Aristotle was the project that Google did to really say how do we make great teams if you look at what they found basically was that great teams have five things they have this whole thing of psychological safety so they basically see the team members fe feel safe to take the risk there they feel that there is this whole sense of mutual altruism nobody's going to stab me if I do something out there that kind of a thing there so second is dependability they can get things done on time because they are depending on each other there imagine a beehive in which there are some or any kind of an you social insect species where some are working outside getting the food they are foraging the food and some are working inside cleaning up the whole thing unless that kind of a trust is there it's probably not going to work out structure and clarity team members have clear goals plans and and and roles everybody has a clear role there they know exactly what is to be done there again biology has made it that there is a natural division of labor and that is exactly how then then the these animals and insects decide to do meaning work is personally important to the team members now I don't know who does the all hands in a beehive to basically say hey guys now we are going to go for the there is a new sunflower form that has come up there in the west of the of Rajaji Nagar let's go and attack there I don't know who does that kind of a thing but then they still have a basic survival thing in terms of protecting the queen because that is the way their progenies will will live for for a long period of time so that's very clear biologically they are done that and finally the impact they know exactly what they are doing it so I think to a large extent I can see that there are commonalities with some of these ideas of super organism in how the human groups can be made which are into effective and high performing kind of a groups there let me just wrap it up here I find the whole idea of superorganism very intriguing very interesting kind of a thing there while it's very easy for us to to look at a framework and say oh that is how things should be but I think we are forgetting one single thing that that is how nature has already built us out actually and if we can learn from some of these ideas and we can bring it to the workplace it would be a great opportunity for us to leverage because like biomimicry someone talked about biomimicry 3.8 is actually a great site and the reason why Benin Jenny Benius calls it as 3.8 is because mother nature has already perfected it for 3.8 billion years that life has been around on earth so these are some of the design patterns that we have already seen in earth on earth because of which we have survived this long there and like like the fungal network for the plants that I talked about they came before the plants happened on on earth they have been around for half a billion years so these are some of the patterns that have evolved they have like if you look at the the the ants they have been around for about 150 million years termites have been around for about 250 million years so they have survived a lot of geographical extinctions and these kind of things and still they keep going strong these ants have spread all over the place there right all over the earth so obviously there is a lot of value in us being able to understand on some of these things and I think if we bring and distill some of them these ideas it would be great opportunity for us to build resilient teams that can actually behave like a superorganism and not just pieces of fungible resources over there right. Thank you I think we have run out of time but I'm happy to chat later thank you.