Can organizations learn anything from the simple ant? Hundreds of thousands of army ants use altruistic teamwork to help the colony survive, despite the fact that they are completely blind. However, even the best can fall prey to organizational inertia. These army ants use pheromones to send messages and follow each other. What happens when the lead ant runs into the end of the train of ants? Ants will run in a circle called a “death spiral.”
The best safety cultures also use altruistic teamwork to achieve world-class results through programs like Behavior-Based Safety (BBS). However, like the army ants, even the best BBS processes can lose momentum and get stuck in a death spiral I call the “venomous cycle.”