The Wisdom of the Beehive: Teamthink and Strategic Thinking!

In strategic planning processes, we usually find a team of experts and specialists around the advisors’ table. Strategic planning needs to be accompanied by strategic thinking. Thinking strategically means not only focusing on the long term, but also linking your future vision and dreams with factors of reality and analyzing the surrounding environment from strengths. Weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and linking them to the way that enables you to overcome challenges and obstacles in order to achieve future goals. The less certainty, the greater the need for strategic thinking and planning.

The strategic decision is not the future decision, the strategic decision is the decision you take today and it will have a great impact in the future!
Strategic thinking does not necessarily mean group thinking. When Irving Janis of the prestigious Yale University was asked about team thinking, he said: Group thinking = inauthentic thinking!

Collective thinking is usually very homogeneous, coherent, harmonious, and creates immunity from external or different ideas! Thus, original and different thinking is isolated, which makes it lose the standards of balanced judgments that accept difference, and therefore collective thinking may be dangerous if we want to think strategically.

Thomas Seeley of Harvard University looks at "The Wisdom of the Beehive" to answer how many thousands of bees work together as an integrated unit to collect the nectar, pollen and water that sustains the life of the hive. Seeley highlights colonies, which are perfectly organized social structures in which each individual performs a different task and all tasks are synchronized in order to produce the best and finest honey. In our human world, we all depend on each other and belong to social circles that become part of our identity. However, what distinguishes beehive behavior from human behavior is that a person may become a working duplicate of another individual, or one of us may depend on the other to the point that he loses his responsibility Individualism in being part of the change, especially if it drowns in promoting the concepts of team work and collective thinking, which in fact depends on the minds of some of the leading individuals in the groups and not others. Collective consciousness is reflected in the hive mentality, as it is similar to the behavior of social insects, where a group of people realize their common denominators and think as one community, so the person has a strong tendency for the collective decision-making process just like the beehive mentality, where the individual feels that he is in the circle of safety as he is with the group.

The term hive mind was coined by science fiction writer James H. Schmitz in his short story, Second Night of Summer. His idea of the hive mind relates to the way a colony of bees behaves, as if directed by the intelligence of a single individual.

Strategic thinking refers to the availability of the capabilities and skills necessary to make future predictions with the possibility of formulating strategies and making decisions adapted to the environment to win most competitive positions in light of limited resources.

The strategic leader must have the following skills: foreseeing the future, challenging preconceived assumptions, the ability to analyze, the ability to make appropriate decisions in difficult times, the participation of others and the willingness to learn continuously.

Specialists in a specific field usually think in a similar way, which does not guarantee the existence of space for different points of view, i.e. "knowledge diversity" resulting from a multidisciplinary brainstorming process that develops critical thinking and creativity.

In order for strategic thinking to be achieved, groups must enjoy social intelligence, as knowledge varies among group members, participation and options vary, and differences are respected in the light of independence and impartiality in evaluating the opinions of group members. The scientific result of the research of Scott Page from the University of Michigan states that the meeting of experts from different fields achieves results that are superior to the production of a team of specialists in a specific field only!

- Dalal Erekat: Professor of Diplomacy and Strategic Planning, Faculty of Graduate Studies, Arab American University.