“Simple rules, patterns and formulae can often help us steer our way through, but in the end it is the complexity that rules. OK?”
The world is pretty complicated these days. How, you might wonder, should you best navigate in a world that seems overwhelming? Perfect Swarm argues that we can use simple rules to defeat and exploit complexity. Locusts, for example, have tremendously large swarms – the largest can be 513,000 km2 and contain 12.5 million insects – but their wings are delicate, and if they collide in midair they might die. Fortunately, no ESP is needed to guide the swarm: instead, they individually follow simple rules of avoidance, alignment, and attraction to create a seemingly chaotic mass out of order. Fish, bees, birds, and many other animals do the same.
What does this mean for humans? One fascinating implication for leadership is that if most people are just swarming, even if only a very few members of the group have a clear direction, the entire group will move that way. Charisma, dignity, etc., might all help, but in the end as long as you have a goal and other members of the group don’t, everyone will follow you there. This has even been rather charmingly demonstrated in a room of students asked to wander randomly but not get too far from other students: adding a couple students with a destination to the mix means all the students end up at that destination!
To achieve clarity, the book trades a lot of elegance and detail, and it can sometimes feel oversimplified. The later chapters of the book focus on heuristics (simple rules for decision-making), and perhaps it’s because it is my field, but for me the section felt so simplified as to be hard to extrapolate from. If you’re looking for a fairly simple introduction to chaos theory and how different disciplines have attempted to resolve the problem, though, as well as some personally applicable insights on how to move through a crowd or decide between multiple options, Perfect Swarm can certainly provide.