Swarming is the process by which a body of honeybees moves together with the queen bee, in order to form a new colony. So it’s not farfetched to say that brainswarming is the process by which a group of people put their minds together in order to improve the effectiveness of group work.
Participatory culture
Proceeding with the insects analogy, there’s more than one best practice that we can learn from them, like leaving messages that influence the behavior of others. For finding food, for example. Why do they do that? Because they understood that you’re as good as the team around you.
Swiping back to humans and to the business environment, all these actions that involve collaboration translates into a participatory culture. We talk a lot about organizational culture and almost weekly feature articles about it in our weekly digest. And we do that because we believe it to be quite relevant when it comes to the future of work, the social influence in business and the workforce in general.
Moving from a ME space to a WE space is essential for a culture that promotes collaboration and all companies need to encourage this type of connections between employees. Why, do you ask? Because sharing ideas, contributing with your expertise and know-how makes all employees become part of the solution. This generates better results, so a higher feeling of happiness – and employees’ happiness is the engine of employees’ engagement.
Skills enhancement
But having a great culture is not the whole magic behind brainswarming. There’s a more pragmatic side to it as well. And that’s better professional development.
Way too often we get caught up in the job we do, which makes many managers view us as one-dimensionally, simplistically. This turns us off and inhibits innovation.
That’s why effective collaboration is not just necessary, it’s a game changer. By producing more ideas, sharing them and turning them into actions, we speed the decision-making process, while all the while help each other gain more skills.
This can be easily achieved by knowledge sharing activities or peer-to-peer learning. As Mark Lukens underlines in this article, employees that are taught by other within their department find it easier to grow than by being trained by outside groups. And that’s because the dynamic feels more natural as it build on existing relationships, so it’s more inline with their natural rhythm of work.
So? How does your company do when it comes to the science behind brainswarming? If you’d like to share your organization’s best practices with us, drop us an email at contact@quandora.com or tweet to @QuandoraQA – we’d be happy to connect.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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