Arkaro Insights
Arkaro Insights is a podcast series produced by Arkaro, where we help B2B executives deliver better results with the latest ideas in change and innovation for your organisation.
About Arkaro
Arkaro is a B2B consultancy specialising in Strategy, Innovation Process, Product Management, Commercial Excellence & Business Development, and Integrated Business Management. With industry expertise across Agriculture, Food, and Chemicals, Arkaro's team combines practical business experience with formal consultancy training to deliver impactful solutions.
You may have the ability to lead these transformations with your team, but time constraints can often be a challenge. Arkaro takes a collaborative 'do it with you' approach, working closely with clients to leave behind sustainable, value-generating solutions—not just a slide deck.
"We don't just coach - we get on the pitch with you"
Connect With Us
💬 We'd love to hear from you! What topics would you like us to explore in future podcast episodes? Drop us a message or connect with us to learn more about Arkaro's approach.
🔗 Visit us at www.arkaro.com
👥 Follow our updates: Arkaro on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/arkaro/
📧 Email us at: mark@arkaro.com
Arkaro Insights
What can starlings teach us about business strategy?
Welcome to the Arkaro Insights podcast. This episode is based on original content developed by Arkaro. At Arkaro, we're committed to innovation in everything we do—including how we share our insights. We've utilised advanced AI technology to transform our written expertise into this conversational format, making our content more accessible and convenient for our busy B2B audience. What you'll hear is a two-person discussion generated through AI voice technology, designed to deliver our insights in a more engaging way than traditional reading. As we continue to evolve this approach, we genuinely value your feedback. Thank you for listening to Arkaro Insights, where professional expertise meets innovative delivery.
Read the original article: What can starlings teach us about business strategy?
The mesmerizing dance of starling murmurations offers a powerful lens for rethinking business strategy. As thousands of birds create complex, fluid patterns without any central coordination, we discover a revolutionary approach to organizational leadership hiding in plain sight.
Every starling follows just three remarkably simple rules while watching only seven neighbors: maintain separation, match direction and speed, and stay with the group. There's no leader, no hierarchy, and no bird understands the breathtaking patterns they collectively create. Yet this approach delivers extraordinary results – helping starlings find food and confuse predators through constant, unpredictable movement.
Translating this natural phenomenon to business strategy reveals why top-down planning often fails. Intel's transformation from memory chip manufacturer to microprocessor giant wasn't driven by visionary leadership predicting the future. Instead, their breakthrough emerged from consistently following a simple profitability rule that kept highlighting where real value existed, eventually forcing a complete strategic pivot. This challenges our assumptions about innovation and strategic planning, suggesting revolutionary change often emerges from disciplined execution of smart operational policies rather than detailed master plans.
The most powerful question for organizations today isn't about five-year visions. Instead, ask: what three simple, profitability-driven rules could your teams execute consistently right now? Effective strategy requires fewer detailed predictions and more smart, executable principles that respond to current market signals. By embracing this emergent approach, organizations can achieve the same fluid adaptability and coordination that makes starling murmurations so captivating and effective. What simple rules might transform your organization if everyone followed them with discipline?
Connect with Arkaro:
🔗 Follow us on LinkedIn:
Arkaro Company Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/arkaro
Mark Blackwell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrblackwell/
Newsletter - Arkaro Insights: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/arkaro-insights-6924308904973631488/
🌐 Visit our website: www.arkaro.com
📺 Subscribe to our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@arkaro
Audio Podcast: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com
📧 For business enquiries: mark@arkaro.com
Have you ever, you know, just stopped and watched a starling murmuration? It's that incredible swirling mass of thousands of birds in the sky. It really does make you feel kind of small and just well, it looks like pure chaos, right, but beautiful chaos. And yet it's so precise, so fluid. Somehow, as you watch them sort of pulse and expand and make these really sharp turns, you can't help but wonder I mean, how is that actually organized? Is there like a lead bird calling the shots, a CEO starling, or is it something else entirely, something maybe more decentralized it's definitely something else and, yeah, absolutely decentralized.
Speaker 2:That's really what we're diving into today, this whole idea of emergent strategy. We're using those starlings, their coordination, as a model to rethink and hopefully improve how businesses approach strategy. Our mission here is to figure out why ditching that old top-down command and control model which, let's face it, most companies still use, why letting that go and embracing simple rules instead can actually spark way more innovation that kind leaders often can't even plan for. Yeah, and the thinking we're drawing on it builds on some really foundational strategy ideas from people like Ruhmelt and Compo and it's being applied now by consultants like Mark Blackwell. The core idea is stop trying to plan every complex detail. Instead, get really good at designing simple, effective rules that people follow locally.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, let's unpack that, the mechanism behind the magic, as you put it. So the fundamental thing is no leader at all.
Speaker 2:Zero leader. No hierarchy, it's completely distributed. Every single bird is part of the decision making, if you want to call it that.
Speaker 1:Wow, and the specifics are just wild. Researchers found that even in a huge flock, each starling, it only pays attention to maybe what seven neighbors that's right Up to seven, just the ones immediately around it, not the whole flock. Just seven and based on that tiny bit of local info, they follow simultaneously just three incredibly simple rules.
Speaker 2:Exactly Three simple local rules. That's the engine and, like you said, brilliantly simple First move apart if you get too close, avoid collisions.
Speaker 1:Basically, Separation Okay Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Second, try to match the speed and direction of those neighbors. That's alignment. Keep flowing together.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And third, if you drift too far away, move closer, that's cohesion, stick together and that's it. That's the entire playbook happening constantly, moment by moment.
Speaker 1:Seven neighbors, though why seven? Is that just like a random average, or is there something specific about that?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's very specific and really important. Actually, studies show that if they react to fewer neighbors the flock just kind of falls apart, loses cohesion, but if they react to too many it gets too rigid like a solid block. It can't react quickly or flexibly. So seven seems to be that sweet spot. It balances stability with the ability to change shape rapidly.
Speaker 1:Okay, that makes sense. So these simple local actions, they lead to this huge, complex pattern.
Speaker 2:Precisely, and that phenomenon where these low-level individual interactions, just following those three rules based on seven neighbors, create this higher level outcome. That's what scientists call emergence. It's this idea that simple actions, if everyone follows them consistently, can create complexity that nobody planned or intended. The flock itself, the swirling cloud it has properties like its shape and movement that no single bird possesses or is even aware of.
Speaker 1:And that's the mind bending part for us humans thinking about leadership, isn't it? The individual bird has zero clue about the overall pattern it's helping create. It just follows its simple rules.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And then you add in external factors, things they can't control, like a gust of wind or maybe a thermal updraft, plus the fact that no bird can follow the rules perfectly all the time. That combination of simple rules, discipline and a bit of real-world imperfection, that's what creates those incredibly complex, almost unpredictable patterns. We see, it's a system constantly adapting, under stress.
Speaker 1:Okay, so connecting it back to survival, why do they bother?
Speaker 2:Why this complex dance? It seems like there are two big reasons tied to those rules. That's right. Two critical life or death goals.
Speaker 1:First is finding food. If you're in a big group, you're more likely to stumble across a food source, especially if it's scarce. Safety in numbers for finding resources.
Speaker 2:Yep Cooperation helps foraging, but being in a huge, dense flock also makes you a giant flashing sign for predators right Like a falcon Right Easy target which brings us to the second goal. Defense. That's where the unpredictable movement comes in, that constant shifting, swirling, contracting. It confuses predators. A falcon, for example, struggles to lock onto one single bird when the whole target is constantly changing shape and density. It's a brilliant defensive maneuver.
Speaker 1:So you get this incredibly effective, life-saving result just from everyone following those three simple rules down at the individual level Amazing.
Speaker 2:Now let's take that defense idea and drop it into, say, a modern boardroom. Contrast it with how we usually do strategy. Did you imagine trying to achieve that kind of agile defense if one dominant Starling was trying to issue commands? You know, sending out memos.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like the source material jokes about. Imagine a Starling leader squawking team. We shall achieve synergistic flight excellence by Q3.
Speaker 2:Exactly, or our Q4 objective is to be world class at defending ourselves from predator attack.
Speaker 1:It sounds completely absurd when you put it like that it does.
Speaker 2:But sadly isn't that kind of what a lot of corporate strategy sounds like, these big, lofty aspirational statements?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Pages and pages focusing on the desired outcome be world class, but not the simple, measurable local actions that people need to actually do to get there.
Speaker 2:And you know there's a human reason this persists. Centralized planning feels good, right, it appeals to the ego. Leaders like to feel they're in command, that they can predict and control the future. But this emergent approach, it requires a bit more well intellectual humility. It's saying look, we don't know exactly what the market will look like in five years or what precise shape our company will take. We can figure out the few core rules that determine success day to day in our current environment and we can execute those relentlessly.
Speaker 1:OK, I get the Starling analogy for defense, but translating, move closer. If you're too far into like market innovation or business strategy, that feels like a bigger leap. How do we build that bridge practically from bird rules to, you know, billion dollar decisions?
Speaker 2:Right. That's the key question. The bridge is the insistence that major changes, even revolutionary innovation, don't usually come from some grand, detailed master plan. Instead, they emerge from disciplined, widespread execution of core operational policies or rules, rules that dictate what happens on the ground every day.
Speaker 1:And this is where the classic Intel story comes in right. That's the go-to example.
Speaker 2:It's the perfect example. So early Intel back in the day, their main focus, their whole mission was making DRAM memory chips. That's what they were, but crucially they had this core low-level operational policy. It was applied everywhere very consistently. Review production plans every month and always prioritize the orders that bring in the most profit.
Speaker 1:Okay, simple rule Focus on profit Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Very simple, very local, focused entirely on execution metrics, not on grand strategy. Now they were mostly making DRAM, but sometimes they'd also produce these things called microprocessors, and the monthly profitability review, it kept showing the same thing those microprocessors, even though they were a smaller part of the business, then they consistently had higher profit margins than the DRAM chips.
Speaker 1:Ah, okay, so the rule started highlighting something unexpected.
Speaker 2:Exactly, the rule was generating data.
Speaker 1:But hang on, if the rule was just make the most profitable stuff, isn't that just good management? Was it really emergent? Or are they just eventually making an obvious choice based on the numbers?
Speaker 2:That is such a great question because looking back now, yeah, it seems totally obvious. Switch to the profitable thing yeah, but at the time it was not obvious. In fact, leadership resisted it for a long time. They saw themselves as a memory company. That was their identity, their strategy, that profitability role. It was just seen as a way to optimize production, you know, make the current DRAM plan run a bit better. It wasn't intended as a tool to change the entire company's direction.
Speaker 1:Okay, context matters.
Speaker 2:Hugely. You have to remember the industry back then, Microprocessors. They were seen as these low-volume kind of niche custom parts. The whole industry structure was different, very vertical. The company that designed the computer often made its own chips, its own software, everything.
Speaker 1:Right, not like today.
Speaker 2:Not at all. Nobody back then really foresaw the massive shift coming to move to a horizontal industry structure where standardized components, especially CPUs, would become the dominant power players across the whole PC ecosystem.
Speaker 1:So Intel's leadership didn't have some master plan to take over the CPU market?
Speaker 2:No, not initially. The shift wasn't driven by a top-down strategic vision saying CPUs are the future. It was driven by the relentless low-level execution of that simple profitability rule. The data from that rule kept pushing them almost against their stated strategy.
Speaker 1:Wow. So they were kind of forced by their own operational discipline to see where the real value was.
Speaker 2:Precisely. They eventually had to listen to the numbers generated by the rule, not just the strategic plan on the wall. Sticking to that simple policy ultimately led them to get out of DRAN completely and pivot to become the microprocessor giant. That simple, low-level rule drove massive, game-changing innovation that leadership absolutely did not see coming initially. It emerged from disciplined execution.
Speaker 1:That really drives it home. Successful strategy might be less about perfectly predicting the future five years out and more about designing a few really smart core rules that help you execute, adapt and well follow the money the market is already showing you.
Speaker 2:And that brings up a really practical question for everyone. Listening, doesn't it Thinking about your own organization? Does your strategy process, whatever it looks like, actually drive execution? Or do the fancy charts and the slide decks kind of live in one place while the real day-to-day work happens somewhere else, disconnected?
Speaker 2:Yeah, good question Are your teams focused on executing a few clear, simple policies, or are they spending more time debating those big, aspirational goals that are hard to connect to their daily tasks? Bridging that gap is really the whole point of this emergent approach. You know we mentioned folks like Dr Pete Campo, who really developed a lot of this, and practitioners like Mark Blackwell who apply it. Their whole goal is to help companies cut through the complexity, get to strategy methods that actually make sense to people quickly, that give straightforward, practical guidance. Think the three simple rules, not the 300-page strategic plan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, bringing harmony and efficiency just like the Starlings manage, but in a business context.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And achieving that harmony, not because someone at the top mandated it with a complex plan, but because everyone locally is disciplined about following the simple rules that actually produce the results you need.
Speaker 2:Exactly Disciplined execution of simple rules.
Speaker 1:So that kind of wraps up our journey for today, doesn't it? From watching Starlings wheel over a field somewhere all the way to understanding how Intel fundamentally shifted the tech landscape, driven by microprocessors, it shows that really complex, successful organizational behavior doesn't always need complicated planning.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it emerges from keeping it simple, local and executing with discipline. It does. And maybe we can leave you, the listener, with a final thought to chew on related to these evolutionary ideas. Think about how evolution works. The winning formula, whether for a species or business, often gets determined by stressors, pressure, the pressure to find food or avoid that falcon, or, in business, the relentless economic pressure to generate profit, to find better margins. So if you really wanted a strategy that drives execution, starting right now, forget the five-year plan for a moment what would be the, say, three simple core, maybe profitability-driven policies you could put in place today, rules that your teams could actually execute consistently, regardless of what the long-term vision looks like right now. What would those be?
Podcasts we love
Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.
