Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science gave ants mazes of varying difficulty. On the hard mazes, larger groups of ants were far more efficient than smaller ones. Human teams usually do the opposite as they scale.

In this episode, Soren Kaplan breaks down why coordination, not headcount, explains the gap: ants operate on shared rules with information flowing freely through the colony, while human teams add competing scorecards and priorities with every new person. He connects it to AchieveIt's finding that 79 percent of failed strategic initiatives trace back to poor collaboration.

Leaders will walk away with three moves: align scorecards around one shared metric, create a single live source of truth for every team involved, and shrink thick process manuals down to a few usable principles.

Further reading: Popular Science, https://www.popsci.com/environment/ants-efficiency-group/

View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/ant-colonies-get-better-as-groups-grow-business-teams-can-too-with-3-changes/91407468

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Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.