Have you seen this viral video of a starling “murmuration?”
Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.
Filmed on the River Shannon in my home country of Ireland, two independent filmmakers captured thousands – yes, thousands – of starlings moving in unison across the sky. Creating beautiful abstract images as they twist and turn, never once do individual birds bump into each other, even when patterns flow and merge together.
How is this possible? The science tells us:
“Starling flocks, it turns out, are best described with equations of “critical transitions” — systems that are poised to tip, to be almost instantly and completely transformed, like metals becoming magnetized or liquid turning to gas. Each starling in a flock is connected to every other. When a flock turns in unison, it’s a phase transition.
“At the individual level, the rules guiding this are relatively simple. When a neighbor moves, so do you. Depending on the flock’s size and speed and its members’ flight physiologies, the large-scale pattern changes.”
Think about that. Each starling is so in tune with its immediate neighbors, the entire flock – of thousands – moves in unison. How in tune are you with your teammates – your neighbors – at work? How in tune do you think teams and departments are organization wide? Do you know intimately what your colleague is doing so you can move in unison with him or her?
How does this apply to the workplace?
That kind of synchronized movement in the workplace requires us to lift our heads out of our own work to notice and appreciate the important contributions and efforts of those around us. It requires deep relationships of trust and accountability between team members.
Building those kinds of relationships has become more difficult as teams have become far more distributed in today’s global workplace. Employee recognition can play a powerful role in helping to build those relationships, but only if we abandon the traditional form of manager-to-employee recognition given infrequently to the elite employees only.
Instead we should encourage all employees to notice and appreciate the efforts of their colleagues through true peer-to-peer recognition – laterally as well as up and down the chain of management. Such recognition from peers, frequently given in a timely way, lets colleagues know you their efforts are valuable to the team as whole. In the most positive way possible, you’ve powerfully communicated what is important to you personally as well as to the group as a whole (the flock, if you will).
Can you picture your team or organization moving as one as this starling murmuration does? What do you think makes it possible?
As Globoforce’s Head of Strategic Consulting, Derek Irvine is an internationally minded management professional with over 20 years of experience helping global companies set a higher ambition for global strategic employee recognition, leading workshops, strategy meetings and industry sessions around the world. His articles on fostering and managing a culture of appreciation through strategic recognition have been published in Businessweek, Workspan and HR Management. Derek splits his time between Dublin, Montreal and Boston. Follow Derek on Twitter at @globoforce.
A few months ago, I witnessed the same phenomenon among terns or other some such seabird, while salmon fishing along rocky cliffs of the BC Inward Passage. Beautiful, fascinating and impressive demonstration of the immense power of instant feedback coupled with unbelievably fast psysiological reflexes permitting what appears to be simultanteous semi-telepathic unity of movement. To the birds, our second may seem an hour of their subjective time. All is relative. With such super-fast perceptions and reaction times, cues (once noticed) result in immediate appropriate action.
I couldn't spot any leader, either. Who, I wonder, sets the path, direction and course for the flock? The answer is part of the mystery, too.
Posted by: E. James (Jim) Brennan | 11/15/2011 at 01:24 PM