Efficiency vs Resilience in business: Lessons from ants.

What can ant colonies teach us about resilience? And how does this translate into sustainable business practices?

Ants comprise 15-25 percent of the earth's animal biomass. For every human, there are one million ants. They can be found everywhere except Antarctica.

Many businesses aim to increase efficiency to maximize profits. Business activities were moved to cost-effective locations, sourcing the cheapest/not necessarily sustainable materials. In our pursuit of efficiency, we streamline our processes yet jeopardize our diversity and sustainability, two key components contributing to our resilience. Figure 1 shows the optimal balance for a real-life sustainable ecosystem.

Over the past two years, we experienced significant disruptions to the supply chain, such as a lack of personal protective equipment, PPEs for front-line workers, critical medical devices, and even toilet paper. Keeping in mind the cost of carrying an inventory eats into profits, one can argue that the societal benefit of maintaining an inventory of supplies needed to respond to emergencies outweighs the profit loss. Governments can play a pivotal role in ensuring appropriate reserves are readily available. The question is, how much reserve should we have to respond to emergencies? Ants may give us some insights.

Within an ant colony, task allocation falls into four categories: Patrollers define the path for foragers who in turn collect and store food, nest maintenance workers, and midden workers. At any given time, about 50% of ants are reserve ants. This reserve seems to be doing nothing.

Ants are agile in changing tasks as disturbances occur through arbitrary contact with other ants and without central control. This agility is more pronounced in older colonies (>5 years old), and it is not due to older, wiser ants, as ants live for one year on average. Older colonies have a more significant number of ants, and the frequency of these random contacts is higher than in younger ones. Higher contacts within the colony network can explain ants' ability to switch tasks in a decentralized manner. Ant colonies are built for resilience rather than efficiency, allowing them to exist for millions of years and cover the earth except Antarctica. Find out more about this in The emergent genius of ant colonies (Deborah Gordon TED talk)

How is this relevant to humans?

Social integration (defined as how many people you interact with as you move through your day) was the strongest predictor of human longevity. Check this TED talk by Susan Pinker (Figure 2)

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Are we better off building businesses for resilience rather than efficiency?

What do you think?

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About me: Dr. Nadia Boutaoui, Ph.D., MBA (Healthcare)

I am a scientist, entrepreneur, mom in chief & business coach. I have a Ph.D. in Genetics, an Executive MBA in healthcare, and I am certified in Tech Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Tie).

I know firsthand what women entrepreneurs face, and I am building a community to support women entrepreneurs grow their businesses.