In August 2010, early in my career, I wrote a long essay to myself called “Self-Organization in Biology, in Life, and Business.” I was frustrated. Everyone around me knew what needed to be done. The goals weren’t the problem. But getting there took far more time and energy than it should have. So I did what an engineer does with a frustration. I went looking for the system underneath it.
As I often did, I looked to nature. Nature doesn’t tolerate imbalances for long, and living things tend to be very good at conserving energy and spending it where it counts. My workday felt like the opposite. This time, the idea I landed on came from ants.
I’ve reread that essay many times since. Some of it holds up better than I expected. Some of it makes me wince. That’s how this blog will work: an old idea, an honest look at it with what I know now, and what you might do with it today.
What I wrote then
The core idea came from biology. Ant colonies and termite mounds build complex structures, and no one is in charge. There’s no foreman checking deliveries. Each individual follows a few simple rules, like “if you see another ant digging, start digging,” and the shape of the whole nest emerges from those rules plus feedback.
Then I turned the idea on myself. Here’s what I wrote (spelling lightly fixed):
“If the guiding principles or rules in your life all have positive feedback associated with them, then you are happy as a clam in your pursuit. However, upon evaluation, if you see that there is mostly negative feedback for action, or inaction, life can be a pretty miserable ride… try to see the underlying and relatively simple guiding principles in your life and if there aren’t enough with positive feedback associated with them, well you got some work to do.”
Next, I wrote out a typical day at my job, line by line. Nearly every line looked like this:
A co-worker asks me for information. Add it to my task list.
I ask a vendor for information. Wait.
My boss asks me for something. Add it to my task list.
A customer asks me for something. Ask a co-worker. Ask a vendor. Send it. Cross it off.
That was the whole day. Four groups of people, and a task list in the middle.
I also described a company that required field technicians to follow a rigid checklist on every customer visit. They couldn’t skip steps or do anything not on the list. Customers didn’t write the list, so when they asked for something else, there was friction. Worse, filling it out crowded out the most valuable thing the technician could collect: what the customer actually wanted.
My proposed fix was a set of simple rules, ant-style. If a customer asks for something we don’t provide, tell your manager. If you’re unhappy, tell your manager. If someone on your team is unhappy, keep asking why until you find the real cause.
And I ended with a line from a friend that stuck with me: “My job isn’t that interesting, it could probably be done by a monkey, but it’s well paid and they have free coffee, so I’ll probably stick around.”
What I got right
Small interactions matter more than the mission statement. What shapes your work isn’t the values on the wall. It’s the dozens of small requests, handoffs, and replies that fill your day. I still believe that’s where most energy is won or lost.
Feedback once a year isn’t feedback. I was skeptical of annual engagement surveys then, and I still am. A survey captures what people say on one day. It doesn’t show how they work.
Rigid processes crowd out judgment. The checklist story is still one of the most common patterns I see. A process built to create control ends up blocking the information that matters most.
Energy follows emotion. I wrote that people aren’t mainly driven by money, they’re driven by emotion, and money is one of the things people feel strongly about. I’d still defend that.
Where I was naive
I thought senior leaders just didn’t know. I wrote that upper managers “have no clue” what happens on the ground. Having led teams myself, I see it differently. Most leaders sense that something is off. The problem is that the signal arrives late and softened, filtered through every layer between them and the work. It isn’t cluelessness. It’s distance.
I thought the fix was “tell your manager.” That rule assumes it’s safe to speak up and that your manager can do something about it. Often neither is true. In a lot of organizations, the loudest signal is the silence of people who stopped raising problems because nothing happened the last time.
I thought a bonus would make good behavior spread. My original rule was that if a customer request got satisfied, the person who raised it got a bonus. Incentives like that tend to get gamed. What actually spreads good behavior is simpler: people see that when they raise something, it gets fixed, and someone notices.
I put all the responsibility on the company. This is the big one. Reading the essay now, the 2010 version of me is waiting for someone above to redesign the system. But the whole point of the ants is that nobody redesigns the system for them. Each one follows its own rules. I had more control over my own rules than I gave myself credit for, and so do most people.
What it means now
That line about the monkey was a joke in 2010. It isn’t anymore. A lot of the work in my old daily list, requesting, receiving, copying, summarizing, crossing off, can now genuinely be done by software. That’s unsettling. It’s also an opening. The parts of work that drain energy without creating value are exactly the parts that are easiest to hand off. What’s left is judgment, relationships, and the problems that need a person. For most of us, that’s the work that gives energy back.
Nature has a simple rule here too: living things that waste energy don’t last. Early in my career I worked on energy efficiency in buildings, and the first lesson was the same. You don’t start by buying better equipment. You start by finding the waste, like the system running full blast in an empty building at 2 AM. People work the same way. Before looking for more energy, find where it’s leaking.
What you can do about it
If you work inside a company:
Map your real day, not your job description. Pick one ordinary day and write down every interaction, the way I did in 2010.
Mark each line. Does it give you energy, cost you energy, or neither?
Find the rules underneath. “If my boss emails, I drop everything.” “If a meeting invite arrives, I accept it.” Those are your if-then rules, and you chose more of them than you think.
Change one rule. Not the org chart. One rule. For example: “If a request has no clear owner, I ask who owns it before I start.”
Raise problems in a form people can act on. What’s happening, what it costs, and what you’d suggest. That gets through the layers far better than frustration does.
And if you map it honestly and nearly every line drains you, with no room to change it, that’s useful information too. Sometimes the path out really is out.
If you run your own business:
Do the same map for yourself, then for one key person on your team.
Sort every draining line: eliminate it, automate it, delegate it, or keep it on purpose.
Look for your own checklists. The processes you created to feel in control may be blocking your people from noticing what customers want.
Pick the thing that annoyed you most this week and ask why five times. The fix is rarely where the annoyance shows up.
Why I’m writing this
This isn’t a blog about hating your job, or quitting to start something. It’s about reaching the goals you already know matter with less wasted time and energy, so you have more left for your work, your family, and the things that make the world a little better.
I’ll keep pulling ideas from that old notebook, being honest about where I was wrong, and trying to turn each one into something you can use on Monday.
Ants don’t have managers. They have simple rules and good feedback. Most of us could use better versions of both.