By Nilesh Bhagat

Have you ever been fascinated by the way groups come together and coordinate movements?

I’m reading a chapter in Peter Miller’s The Smart Swarm, where the author speaks about the incredible coordination of starlings as they emerge from the ground as a unit and move through the air in a spectacular show of aerial acrobatics. This all happens organically. No leader or orchestrator to pull strings or shout orders to tell them what to do. No explicit set of rules from a command source that they must follow in order to execute so beautifully. They just take cues from their local neighbourhoods and behave. It’s just a flock of birds behaving as a coordinated collective, driven by a fundamental need to belong and connect with like others. Miller says these ‘nightly displays are expressions at their joy at being birds’. And this behavior happens over and over again with amazing consistency and accuracy.

The same thing happened when I watched this short clip from Ted.com on how movements begin. A lone nut evolves into a mass of people united by a common interest: fun – something we all fundamentally want and which is a strong force in our behavior. The same set of principles which guide the starlings’ actions emerges here, too: individuals influence each other until a collective moving in unison emerges; and everyone is doing what they’re doing because they WANT to, not because they HAVE to. In HR-speak, there is a collective sense of commitment, but of the kind which we and organizations should seek – affective commitment. That is, as a collective, we do the things we do because we want to. There is an emotional tie to what drives us to do it. The result is a social gravity that pulls us together to achieve remarkable collective goals.

So, wouldn’t ‘work’ be more fun if we were doing the things we WANTED to do, rather than the things we HAD to do?

I know what you’re thinking. Work is work because it includes stuff that HAS to be done which is fundamental to economic survival. We have little choice but to HAVE to do some things. It’s just the way it is. But what if we were given a common vision and the environment and support to achieve these goals the way we WANT to? What if we were given the ability to start our own movements, created organically through a sense of belonging toward a common goal? What if we could create our own worlds with their unique pulls of social gravity in the context and direction of an organization’s economic and social vision?

Some very successful organizations are taking this very approach of letting its stakeholders find solutions to everyday challenges the way they WANT to. I’ll give you a few examples:

• Zappos.com uses its unconventional set of core values to create an empowered culture and encourage its human capital to come up with novel ways of creating the very best in customer service – the organization’s core competency. For example, employees are encouraged to ‘Create Fun and a Little Weirdness’ when approaching work. The result is innovative and fun work, as well as remarkable productivity
• Boeing works with its suppliers as partners by outlining general flight craft engineering plans and giving them the flexibility to design, develop and execute parts of an aircraft to their strengths. The old model was to design and develop in-house, and then impose these specific designs to suppliers for manufacturing – the ‘you HAVE to do it this way’ approach. The new model’s result is a synergistic aircraft unlike any other, complete with design, innovation and economic benefits. It’s the ‘here’s where we want to go; get us there the way you WANT to’ approach.

Having the ability to do things with others, as you want, has its clear benefits. The question then becomes: How will you start your movement and create your gravity?

Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP, is the membership and CHRP administrator at BC HRMA. After several grueling years in school, Nilesh graduated in October 2010 from Simon Fraser University with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, First Class Honors. He majored in Human Resources Management and tacked on an extended minor in Psychology. He’s a self-confessed nerd (the first step is admitting), likes to read, loves hockey and is struggling with the complexities of learning the game of golf.