Teams in motion

Eighty teams share one organization. Each team watches the teams around it and adjusts its direction a little at a time. A few teams, drawn in orange, also know where the organization is trying to go. The purpose lies to the right, where the orange label points.

The organization starts out circling. Teams look busy, and almost none of their movement goes toward the purpose. Drag shared context up to wide and give it a minute. Then raise the share of informed teams.

What the sliders change

Shared context sets how far a team looks to match the direction of the teams around it.

Working style trades two things against each other. Solo teams keep more room to work and feel little pull from the rest of the organization. Teams that work together crowd closer and feel the pull from further away.

Noise adds the daily distractions that knock a team off course. Informed teams steer toward the purpose and blend that pull with what their neighbors do.

Circling is sticky

Set shared context to wide and working style to the middle, and most fresh starts move together. An organization that is already circling can keep circling at those same settings. Shared context won’t open the ring on its own. Once a quarter of the teams know the purpose, the ring breaks and the organization heads somewhere.

Biologists call this hysteresis: the state a group is in shapes where it can go next. You can’t read an organization’s future from its settings. You also need to know where it has been.

Credits

The rules come from Iain Couzin and colleagues. They modeled fish schools and bird flocks with three zones around each animal (Couzin et al. 2002, “Collective memory and spatial sorting in animal groups”, Journal of Theoretical Biology), and later showed that a few informed individuals can lead a whole group (Couzin et al. 2005, “Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move”, Nature).

Dirk Brockmann’s Flock’n Roll explorable made the zone model playable and inspired this page.

Teams aren’t fish. Use this to think about organizations. It won’t predict how yours behaves.