Happy February, everyone. I recently had the pleasure of discussing drone swarms with my daughter for a university project she’s working on. Drone swarms (groups of unmanned autonomous vehicles that coordinate with each other) are coming of age. In 2016, the US military conducted a number of successful tests, and there were some notable commercial applications too, like Intel’s light show with hundreds of drones. I have to admit I felt a few sharp pangs of fear as I imagined 100 self-directed pilotless mini-planes off on a mission, or a swarm of 10,000 insect-size drones with poison payloads coming after me. Part of my fear came from imagining what would happen if there was a bug in their machine intelligence software. (There is always a bug hiding somewhere!) But most of my fear came from envisaging just how effective and unstoppable a drone swarm could be.
The drone swarm model leads to modular, decentralized business design, and the willingness to run experiments that may fail.
When we envisage our companies and our IT organizations, I think we instinctively see them as an org chart – a hierarchy of business units, teams and individuals. Same for our assets – individual servers in server farms, individual functions in programmes, then in services, all forming part of our architecture. Like a conventional army. Hierarchies have strengths and weaknesses: strengths come from ability to coordinate and scale, weaknesses come from bottlenecks and single points of failure. We all know this, and we find tactical ways to get around the weaknesses. What’s much tougher is changing our mental model.
If we look at the state of the art in drone swarms as a mental model, we see lots of interesting features that we can apply to our organizations:
Using drone swarms as a metaphor may give you some powerful ideas.
Platform business models, cloud/everything-as-a-service, big data, and internet-of-things sense and control capabilities all raise similar issues, in terms of risk management, the law, and even sometimes ethics. (What happens to the insurance industry if we know exactly how much of a risk everybody and everything is?)
We suggest that you and your leadership teams read about drone swarms, watch some cool videos of them, and then think about the implications of modelling your business along their lines. Using drone swarms as a metaphor may give you some powerful ideas, but more significantly, as we have more real-time sensing, big data and machine intelligence, our businesses might more literally resemble drone swarms.
You will see this swarm thinking, and particularly the notion of an anti-fragile organization, appear frequently in LEF research and advisory offerings this year.
PDF (110.9 KB)
LEADING EDGE FORUM |
---|
Contact Us |
About us |
Researchers |
Join |
DXC Employee |
Privacy Policy
|
Please enter your username OR email address below and we will send you a link to reset your account.
An email has been sent to: {{ email }}
With further instruction to complete the password reset process
For any other issue, please contact us Didn't receive an email? Click here to send again.
{{ alertMsg }}