What Organizations Can Learn From Zimbabwe's Fantastically Ingenious Termite Community: A Story In Personal Analytics for Enterprise Agility & Performance
Aligned by shared objectives in an ever-changing landscape.
Adapted to market force changes.
No, it's not some big corporation or government entity. Not even close. It's African termites. As a unit they're the prototypical smarter enterprise. To illustrate why let's take a closer look at this special termite community located in the African nation, Zimbabwe.
What makes them so special, you ask?
Well, these little creatures are able to band together to inexplicably do the impossible with relative ease and natural fluidity even in the face of constantly changing environmental conditions over what appears to be insurmountable odds.
The Strategy: Grow an essential fungus within their mud-and-dirt tower structures to sustain themselves.
The Goal: Keep the entire mound's internal temperature at a constant 87 degrees required to grow this essential fungus.
The Execution: When you take into account that temperatures on the African plains can reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and drop to 40 degrees at night, any believer in this goal is seemingly dreaming the impossible dream. Still, these termites somehow manage to do it.
Indeed, they manage to keep this constant temperature going by ingeniously directing breezes at the base of the mound into chambers with cool, wet mud and then redirecting this cooled air to the peak. By constantly building new tunnels and closing old ones, they're able to regulate mound temperature very precisely. These mud-and-dirt towers are a fascinating world of termites in constant working motion responding to the outside (and inside!) forces that impact the structure's overall temperature. In this environment the only constant is change. Day turns to night and night turns to day which brings growing challenges to adapt to the slight inconsistencies day to day. That's a fact.
But somehow the termite community is able to pull it off in the face of these weather, wind and soil changes. Against all logic, they've figured out a way by working together across the tower to collectively ensure that that ever-important fungus grows.
I still scratch my head at this but it's most certainly true.
If these little termite insects can keep a mud-and-dirt tower at a constant temperature despite 60-degree temperature swings throughout each day why can't businesses or governmental entities keep their organizations aligned to march towards a common set of enterprise goals while staying adaptable enough to the changing business conditions and ever-evolving organizational strategy?
This agility and alignment eludes the best of them.
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If termites can so effectively and expeditiously adapt and respond to ever-changing conditions your organization certainly can. To help you accomplish this, take a look at IBM Cognos Insight, the user-friendly, flexible, anal
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