SwarmCompass

A lower cost, lower risk, speedier approach

• For a long time we have been trying to dethrone the exclusivity of the classic report informing management of a new strategic direction
  • It's static, costly, slow, and it doesn't get to enough people
• Offers a hybrid approach to decision-making, scenario planning and strategy formation for organisations
• Can, and does, utilise AI, while also respecting human engagement and reasoning
• Reflecting the way a bee swarm optimises search, it provides a new way to navigate uncertainty in near real-time

Learning from Nature

• SwarmCompass is a bee swarming system to search for a new location
  • Bees leave the hive and each individual bee comes back to the swarm
  • Returning bees dance to indicate the potential new source
  • Bees disrupt other bees, and they go backwards and forwards
  • And after two days, the whole swarm goes to the ideal location
• SwarmCompass instead responds with representation of data at scale, identifying risks and anomalies, acceptance and rejection of new ideas
• This truly uses large parts of the organisation as a group of sensors and takes advantage of its internal sense to target strategic problems
• Outreach can be anonymous or targeted, or somewhere in between (targeted through demographics)
• At the moment it's manual but fast - eventually more aspects of it will be automated, and the capacity to reach targeted groups without compromising anonymity is another

What SwarmCompass process does

• Allows you to present a situation to the whole of your workforce and/or to a third party network (eg. big consulting firm, academic association)
• Ask them all to interpret the situation and identify scenarios about what they would do next
• Overcome inattentional blindness
  • If an outlier group emerges, take the outlier opinion, and represent it to people who present a dominant view
  • You take a worker's perspective, and you represent to management
  • Go through a series of iterations to see if we can achieve a consensus or whether we have understanding on our differences
    • What sort of organization are we (3I’s)
    • What’s our current substrate (work environment)

• A different type of employee engagement
  • Multiple workshops with limited numbers of employees are costly, require energy to conduct, and slow in making sense of data collected
  • Alternatively, leverage the whole of the workforce in one or two hours to achieve a mass consultation and perspective exercise
  • Engage external sources in a different way
    • Use AI to gather inductive strategy intelligence (eg. SWOT, SOAR, Porter 5 Forces, PESTLE, CSR)
    • Invite consulting firm who probably would have been contracted to produce the classic report to participate in the mass exercise