Swarm intelligence in action

One of my coachees was struggling with a complex problem. A new team member is going to be introduced in two weeks time and an old one took another job. As the new team member needed to be seated close to his newly assigned mentor, this meant that the whole team (they are working in one big room) had to change desks. He was puzzled about how he could make everybody happy. He knew that some of them had preferences: some wanted to be seated close to the desk because they liked the direct contact with clients, others had other preferences... And he knew that the last time they changed desks generated a lot of tension.

He asked me how he could figure it out in a time and energy efficient way and so that everybody was happy. Luckily he just had an good experience in which he used the group's intelligence to come up with new ways of attracting a new colleague. (They posted pictures of each of them on their website and added positive comments about one another underneath these pictures). (This led of course to a very positive atmosphere in the group.)The only thing I had to do was to suggest to continue to do what works. I told him that the intelligence of a group is better suited to solve complex problems than this...

So today he asked everybody to help out with the issue they were facing and asked them where they would like to sit if the new employee was to sit close to x... and in no more than 5 minutes (he just told me in an email) they found their new preferred place. "5' and everybody happy! We are definitely going to do more of this!"

Moral of the story: engage the solution building capacities of groups to resolve complex problems.