Learn from Fish: Shoaling, Schooling and being part of a team

When a set of individuals is working together, no matter if in a specific project, a company, or a simple activity, the team members need to behave in a way that will help getting closer to the overall goal or result, still with an autonomous approach to work.

A good example of this are swarming fish groups. You probably have seen the picture of divers surrounded by thousands of fishes. When Shoaling, each and every fish is approaching the diver, but, by some kind of magic, no fish is really touching the diver in anyway. If the diver moves, the swarm moves.

How is it possible?

Actually each fish is taking care of himself. Each fish is paying focused attention to the stranger (the driver), to other fish, to the environment. The simple idea of the existence of a swarm is that the individuals gain more by being part of it than by being on their own. Still, in order for the swarm to be efficient, and also in order to continue being part of the swarm, each individual needs to take care of himself, plus needs to be in sync with the idea the swarm was established for.

I like this analogy of an efficient group of "individual individuals" working for a common goal. I believe that this is one of the keys of success in teams: members taking responsibility for the activities they decided to undertake.

But there are many other lessons we can learn from shoaling and schooling and try to adapt them to team work:

• Speed and focus, still able to react quickly to change.
• Increased efficiency: Schooling groups of fish seem to gain in hydro-dynamism. Teams need to find the way to gain from the combined effort.
• Consensus decision-making: use information from multiple sources to work towards the correct result.
• Swarm Leaders?: Actually the goal and strategy is so clear that leaders are not necessary. Swarm continue to move towards the same goal even if fish leaders are switching all the time. Be careful: the goal is NOT changing in this environment. Probably that is good strategy for an ideal manager: stating and transmitting a clear goal to the team members, motivating team members to work for that goal.